Named after the prison number of Nelson Mandela, the host of the star-studded event, the show featured memorable performances from stars including Anastacia, Bono, Peter Gabriel, Ms Dynamite, Queen and Youssou N'Dour. Toby Alington, audio producer for the TV recording, said the five-hour main show, which was broadcast live to 27 countries, was edited into a 75-minute TV version immediately after the concert. "When I was first invited to be involved, the event was technically a lot simpler than it ended up," he recalls. "The original plan was for a house band with visiting vocal artists, and we could have fitted it into a local audio mobile. But it grew into a 96-channel house band system and another 96-channel rig for the guest artists. There were no truck facilities in South Africa that could handle that complexity, so we ended up flying in a complete de-rig system for it."
Two Midas analogue PA desks were used for the house-band mix, handled by Justin Shirley-Smith, and to match the capability of the guest artists' front-of-house setup (a DiGiCo D5 console), Richmond hired a Yamaha PM1D from Britannia Row, with Tim Sumerhayes at the controls. "They were unusual choices for broadcast mixing," adds Alington, "but large format broadcast consoles aren't readily available for rental while PA desks are flight-cased up and ready to go. The Yamaha was great for what we were doing because Tim could concentrate on the live stereo mix while sending the channels off to digital multitrack hooked up to the PM1D's digital I/O."
Two control rooms were created in portacabins, dubbed 'Audio Heaven' and 'Audio Hell' by the team, with 168 tracks of digital multitrack doubled for back-up, giving a total of 336 tracks.Frank Oglethorpe of FX Rentals oversaw the multi-track aspect of the de-rig system which included two Sony 3348 DASH machines, four Tascam MX2424 HD recorders and a large quantity of TASCAM DA88 machines, along with extensive outboard racks. In all, over five tonnes of audio equipment and cables was shipped in by Richmond for the recording.
The five-hour live broadcast began at 7pm and ended at midnight, after which the team went straight into post-production overnight and through the next day. "It went well technically," says Alington, "and it was an amazing show to have done. These huge charity events all too often are done without sufficient resources and therefore don't sound like the fantastic music shows they should, but thankfully the production company, Endemol, understood my arguments about what we needed - helped by discounts from our suppliers because of the nature of the gig - and so we didn't have to compromise too much and were able to do the job to the standard we were after."
A full report on the 46664 concert will appear in the January 2004 issue of Lighting&Sound International magazine.
(Lee Baldock)
