The evangelistic movement, founded by Reinhard Bonnke in 1974, generally stages events in Africa, where audiences ranging in size from 100,000-1.6 million gather.
A long-time live sound veteran, Hopkinson can generally be found behind an analogue mixing board. But when CfaN's technical manager Derek Murray suggested using one of Wigwam's five Digidesign Venue systems, the FOH man needed to reshape his thinking.
"Christian events are not like a normal rock show when you know there's a set list and set time. With something like this anything can happen - sometimes it's entirely spontaneous, and the prospect of using a new sound desk was an additional concern," he admits.
But the Wigwam support team kicked in, and inside an hour Dave Hopkinson experienced his own spiritual awakening, as he piloted the Digidesign Venue D-Show. While Wigwam's Alex Hadjigeorgiou talked him through the mute groups, Billy Ellison demonstrated the ease of routing and patching via the central display; Nick Warren added further assistance.
"It was an obvious decision to use the Venue, since we were using Pro Tools and needed to arrange splits to the monitors and to God TV," qualified Hadjigeorgiou.
With HDx cards installed in the FOH rack, Hopkinson was ready to go, hooking up the Venue to two Pro Tools|HD 3 Accel systems, running timecode from the desk and sending the live mix to an L'Acoustics V-DOSC rig.
The event was supported by full broadcast cameras and the broadcast feed was mixed in the Total Audio 'Tardis' and God TV trucks.
The sound engineer concluded: "Digidesign made my life so much easier and this system made the soundcheck really fast. Normally in the analogue domain you would be looking at the FX rack and messing around endlessly. With Venue you can load up preset programmes and make these adjustments - and be able to scroll through channels quickly and seamlessly."
Alex Hadjigeorgiou confirms that with the growing trend towards live DVD recording, and uploading performances onto internet sites, Wigwam is progressively being asked to supply Digidesign Venues complete with Pro Tools HD rigs to their clients.
(Jim Evans)
