Yesterday, it was finally announced from that stage that come January our message will be the same at each campus every week. I was relieved because now I can finally talk about one of the other big projects that’s been occupying my brain for the last few months.

First a bit of history. Our multi-campus model since Buckhead opened has been we capture the message one week at one campus and playback the following week at our other campuses. Most of the time capture has taken place at North Point, but over the last couple years we have also equipped Buckhead and Browns Bridge to handle this, and they’ve captured one or two series a year at their campuses. On January 4th, we will most likely move away from that model for most of the year and capture the message at one campus while delivering it the same day to our other campuses. Capture will probably rotate throughout our campuses throughout the series.

So as I said, the word live gets tossed around quite a bit, but we’re not exactly going to be live across our campuses. Since I’m just the audio guy, I don’t know the gear specifics for a lot of this outside of the audio side, but basically we have a TIVO-esque type setup at the campuses so that they can be on a tape-delay. We will have the ability to be as live as any latency in the signal path allows, but I think our initial mode of operating will have campuses delayed a couple minutes.

It has been very cool to be a part of the project coming together, and I’m very excited to talk about the audio side of things. However, our Christmas service is next Sunday so I’m going to try and get past that first.

When I last left off, Jayce, Michael, and I had gotten together to discuss the loss of the 700 MHz band for wireless use. Out of our discussion we came up with an idea that we were all pretty excited about. The plan was to upgrade the main auditoriums, the Attic, and the Theatre to a consistent wireless system while relocating our existing safe RF mics to our other environments currently using 700 MHz microphones.

With wireless purchases in the past, the tendency has been to equip an environment with a bodypack and a handheld for each receiver to allow for maximum flexibility in programming. This has been great to have, but the reality is that none of our main environments really need that much flexibility. We decided it would be better stewardship in today’s present reality to reduce flexibility within one environment while increasing flexibility across our environments by unifying the receivers in each room. Basically we want to move towards more gear sharing than creating production islands. Here’s an example of how this could go play out. KidStuf uses a lot of bodypacks while the Attic doesn’t. Should the Attic get in a pinch for bodypacks, they can head over to the Theatre and borrow some. If the theatre needs more handhelds, we’ve probably got a couple in our auditorium that we can spare.

Some of you are probably wondering what we’d like to get for our unified system, and that would be Shure UHF-R’s. There are a lot of great systems out there these days, but the UHF-R’s make the most sense for us. We’re currently a large Shure user so we’re all very familiar with their products. My system that will be replaced is the Shure UHF system which is the UHF-R’s predecessor and some of our existing components are compatible with the new stuff. Plus I know that they sound great after doing our little mic shootout earlier this year.

However, even with a plan for what we wanted, there was still a lot to be done. The first thing I needed to do was organize the relocation of our existing RF mics. This would serve two purposes. For starters it would be part of the solution we proposed to the decision makers above us. Secondly, we needed an organized list of what we were going to continue to use so that we re-coordinate frequencies for the entire campus.

Given the scope of the RF situation in our room, I knew I should get some outside help on this from an expert. I contacted Clark ProMedia who have been helping me with my audio needs for somewhere around 4 years now, and they brought in Luis Guerra from Shure to help navigate the crowded frequency spectrum and make sure we would get the right gear we needed. Luis filled in some of the gaps in my knowledge about what was happening while also assuring me that there would be enough room for everything we wanted to do. This is thanks in part to the analog TV stations that will disappear in February of 2009.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks nailing down our final equipment list. We were originally hoping to get all of our UHF-R’s within the same band to allow for maximum flexibility on our campus, but unfortunately we have had to split things up into two bands, G1 & H4. The G1 is the favored band for us because it’s where the FCC is going to set aside some room for wireless mics. H4 is where I feel like we could have the most potential interference in the future and need to move frequencies around.

I’ve spent a lot of time going over and revising the room distribution plan from Shure to make sure that our priority mics land in the G1 band in each room while also trying to get a balance so that we can have flexibility to swap transmitters between rooms when we need to. This is all complicated by the different quantities of channels each room is getting and the varying needs. For example, the Attic will have all their mics in G1 because they aren’t a heavy RF user. Meanwhile KidStuf and the auditoriums will get a mix of G1 and H4. If we put all our bodypacks in H4, the Attic won’t be able to use them so we need to get those mixed into G1. If the theatre has most of their bodypacks in G1, and they need an extra handheld where will they put it? They’ll probably be using all their G1 channels so they’ll need an H4 handheld which would come from my room. Will I have an extra in H4 to give or will those most likely be the ones we’re using? There is no perfect solution.

At any rate, I feel like I’ve finally got everything equipment wise in a good place. I dumped our prospective 2009 RF equipment into my intermod software from Professional Wireless the other day. A rough coordination using prospective digital TV stations in 2009 gave me the best results I’ve ever had using the software with only a couple of intercom devices potentially problematic. I feel very good knowing this is probably going to be a better setup than we’re currently using every week.

But even with the equipment side sorted, there’s still a good amount of work to do. The next big thing I need to figure out is an implementation plan. We’re going to do a new coordination for the entire site so the entire campus is going to need to turn over within a week. That means there will be a lot of existing gear getting reprogrammed along with all the new gear coming online all at the same time. It’s going to be big and unfortunately we might need to wait until the analog TV stations disappear on February 9th. I’m going to talk to Luis and get a plan formulated with him for implementing everything.

I feel like I’ve neglected the blog lately, but my mind has just been very preoccupied with projects that all seemed to start right about the time of the fall Night of Worship. I’ve been hesitant to talk about this stuff because a lot of things have been a bit loose, and I wanted to make sure things were a bit more nailed down before mentioning them. I’ve already talked about the PA repairs, but now I feel like I can finally talk about the next big one: 2009 RF.

As you have probably/hopefully heard by now, the RF landscape is set to change in February of 2009 when the FCC takes away the 700 MHz band as part of the digital TV transition. If this is news to you, Mike Sessler has been posting regular updates on things so his blog would be a great place to go get some info on what’s happening. Mike’s posts can also point you to more resources, but just to summarize, the 700 MHz band’s availability for wireless use will go away in early February 2009.

We have a ton of RF in use on a weekly basis at North Point, and I get to manage all the frequency coordination for the campus since we are a large user. My current chart lists about 135 channels of RF each week spread across 12 environments and a bit in between. However, the actual number of frequencies on the chart is closer to 150 because we like to keep some spares (open channels, not gear) around in case of emergency. Usage includes wireless mics, in-ear monitors, intercom systems, and 2-way radios. Frequency use needs to be carefully managed so that there is no interference between gear or with existing RF outside of our control which is currently primarily made up of television stations. On our campus with the amount of wireless gear in operation, it can be a very dangerous thing for folks to just add an RF channel. We’ve been fairly stable for the last couple years, however, this 700 MHz deal affects close to 50 channels of wireless in use and is having a big effect on us.

Our three primary production environments are our two main auditoriums(my rooms), the Attic where high school meets, and the Theatre which plays host to KidStuf Live and our Spanish service. These environments also host other events here and there. The bulk of our existing 700 MHz gear resides in the main auditoriums and the Theatre so a few months ago I sat down with the TD’s for the Attic and KidStuf, Jayce Fincher and Michael Simmons, to discuss how best to approach the disappearing 700 MHz frequencies. Principle in the discussion was how much RF do our environments really need. This was a concern not just from a stewardship perspective, but also from a logistical reality perspective. Our campus is so RF heavy that there were definite concerns about how much room there would be in the RF spectrum below 700 MHz to replace equipment our soon to be outlawed gear. In addition we needed to be prepared to start compromising our RF use if the RF space was going to be too tight.

While I understand that this 700 MHz thing has become a real pain for a lot of churches, we’ve really tried not to look at the downside too much. In fact, it is sort of a mixed blessing for us. We’ve been wanting to upgrade our RF mics in the main auditoriums for a couple years now, but those desires have been at the very bottom of a list we haven’t been able to start chipping away at. As I sat down with Jayce and Michael to discuss the potential problems thanks to the FCC debacle, we also discussed how we can use the situation to our advantage. We figured if we are going to be forced to make a large investment in order to continue to do our programming in its current fashion, we should do it in the best way possible for our organization for current needs along with future growth in mind.

(to be continued…)

So what do you think of this 700 MHz debacle?

Sheldon had a good post over on the DUC about a digital console survival kit. While I’m not doing many gigs outside of my house gig, I still have a kit together which consists of two USB drives. One of the drives has all my show files and some favorite presets, and the other contains my favorite plugin installers. Both of these drives also come in handy for the occasional Venue update that wipes the drive.

One thing that has frustrated me at times when I’ve had to reinstall anything has been the plugins that lack Venue installers. But I did a little messing around one day and figured out how to build my own Venue “installers”. This allows me to insert one USB drive and install everything without exiting to the desktop which greatly speeds up the process.

*** Bear in mind that this isn’t an officially sanctioned and certified technique, and if you’re going to screw around on the OS side you are doing it at your own risk. ***

So the Venue installers aren’t really installers at all. What it really comes down to is putting the right files in a file structure that the console software recognizes so that the console software will automatically put those files where they belong. Once you understand this structure, you can fairly easily create your own plugin installers. This will only work with plugins you have already installed so you’re going to have to go through the trouble of exiting to the desktop at least once to install it the first time, but that is also a good time to make your new backup installer.

Once you have a plugin you want to make an installer for, the first thing you need to do is get your USB drive ready. This is best accomplished on a Windows system, but I believe you could do it on the Venue as well if you exit to the desktop. At the root level of your drive you will need a folder called “TDM Plugins”. This is where the Venue looks for your installers. You might have already dumped some official Venue installers in here before.

Within the “TDM Plugins” folder, create a new folder with the name of the plugin you want to create an installer for. Bear in mind that this folder name is going to be the name you will see within the Venue software’s interface. Sometimes you’ll find files for plugins that have odd characters in them, and you’ll want to leave those out of the folder name. You can put them in there, but it’s probably going to make it harder to find this plugin later so just name it what you want.

Now within your new plugin folder, you need to create two more folders. Call one of them “DAE Plug-Ins” and the other “Presets”. The DAE Plug-Ins folder will contain the actual plugin and the Preset folder is where you can stick the factory presets.

Now you’ll need to go find the actual plugin files. If you haven’t exited to the desktop (hold down CTRL and click on Shutdown on the Options tab), you’ll need to go there now. Click on the Start button and pull up My Computer. You’ll see that there are two drives; these are actually the same hard drive just with different partitions. One of the partitions is for the system files and the other is for user data. The plugin files are going to be on the system drive which is called “Console”. You can find all the plugins in the DAE folder on this drive. This is located in “Program Files\Common Files\Digidesign\DAE\Plug-Ins”. Within this folder you’ll see a whole bunch of files along with maybe a few more folders. You’re going to be looking for two files for each plugin. They will probably be named the same, but they will each have a different extension. One of the extensions is “.dpm” and the other is “.rsr”. Locate these two files and copy them into the “DAE Plug-Ins” folder on your USB drive.

At this point you can call it quits because your installer is ready to go. Optionally you can also add FX presets to the installer, but first you’ll need to locate the presets on the console. These are stored on the “User Data” drive. You can find them here: \D-Show\User Data\Effect Presets. The factory presets will be in the folder “Factory Presets”. Just locate the folder for you presets and drag that folder into the “Presets” folder on your USB drive. Now, I’ve honestly never bothered with this because I keep all the factory presets on my other USB drive with my show files, but theoretically this will work as well. The only thing you should do is remove the brackets and extraneous characters listed within from the plugin folder on your USB drive.

This isn’t an overly complicated thing to do, but it’s still a bit of work and definitely not for folks unfamiliar with a Windows file structure or uncomfortable mucking around on computers. If you’re thinking about doing this, just be smart and have your System Restore disk handy along with your original plugin installers and you can always reformat the whole thing. I haven’t had any problems with this, yet, but you’ve been warned and I am not responsible if you mess up your console because you followed one of my crackpot ideas.

I’m not a fan of removing our Venue’s FOH rack from the rack where it’s mounted. This is because there is a single, blank rackspace directly below it. That blank space serves a purpose because it leaves room for excess cable to be dressed and hidden underneath the rack, but it’s not so handy when you have to remove the unit and that’s exactly what needed to happen to fix the Venue. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Wednesday morning started off with a video shoot in the auditorium for the message coming up on Sunday. This particular message was part 2 of the Illusions series presented by Jeff Henderson. The message opens up with Jeff on video for the first couple minute followed by the real Jeff coming out from behind the screen to converse with himself. Of course, we needed to shoot the illusion Jeff prior to Sunday and Wednesday morning was the time to do that. So with the system roughed in we ran through the shoot without any major problems.

As soon as the shoot was finished I put the measurement mics back out and started to fine tune the system. For the first time that week, things started to come together with a standard system optimization process. I tweaked and walked around for a couple hours getting as satisfied with the main floor as I could for a first shot at the new speakers which was good because just before lunch the parts for the Venue came in.

After lunch I got started on the Venue and was quickly reminded why I am such a big fan of service loops. The entire FOH Rack needed to come out of our rack to work on it, but thankfully I had enough slack on all the cables that I could leave everything with the exception of power hooked up. The Venue’s CPU assembly is basically the entire lower half of the FOH Rack, but all of the connections are on the upper-half.

I had never torn a Venue apart to this degree before, so in all honesty I was sort of enjoying the idea of performing a CPU transplant. The repairs were pretty straight-forward. Disconnect everything from the CPU assembly to the rest of the FOH rack internally and then pull it out. The hardest part for me was just removing all the screws and making sure I got them all out. In fact, here’s a tip for all you Venue users who are thinking about repairing your own console: make sure you have an electric screwdriver because the thing is made of screws. I once asked about this and the reply was that they cut down on RF interference, and if you read Bob Katz’ Mastering Audio book you’ll know that RF can play with digital conversion so somehow all those screws might a good thing. Although, when you’re taking them all out knowing you have to put them back in, it’s not so much fun.

At any rate, the whole process took me about 2 hours, and if I had to do it again I could knock that down quite a bit. Once the CPU assembly was back in, I fired up the console and set about reinstalling all of our plugins. I left our original hard drive with the old CPU assembly since the new one used a new motherboard and had all the new drivers already installed on the new hard drive. I keep a USB drive with me at all times that contains all of our plugin installers including some custom installers I built for plugins that are missing them. In less than three hours I had the console back up and running.

With the console complete, I started working on our balconies and fills to have everything working for rehearsal that night. By the time 5 o’clock rolled around, everything was working for rehearsal. I spent Thursday doing some more minor tweaks to the system along with the mix.

Now that we’ve been running on the new drivers for a bit, I can honestly say that I’m happier than I’ve ever been with the rig. There is no perfect system and this one still has its quirks, but it plays a lot better than it ever has in my two years on it. Since the changeover, I’ve continued to tweak things here and there as the drivers break in, but I think we’re almost at the point where we can settle in on things for a few months without anything other than a weekly walk around the room to listen. That’s a nice place to be.