AES Section Meeting Reports

From Left to Right: Mike Nunan, Joshua Tidsbury, Paul Sellers (all of CTV)

Meeting Topic: Vancouver 2010: Going for Gold

Moderator Name: Sy Potma

Speaker Name: Mike Nunan, Paul Sellers, Joshua Tidsbury — CTV

Other business or activities at the meeting: There are some changes to Executive Members, Sy Potma explained that Rob DiVito is now marketing and Blair Francey is membership secretary. Sy welcomed new exec member Frank Lockwood.

Our next meeting is April 27, 2010, the presenter will be Bill Whitlock from Jensen Transformers, "Hum, Buzz and Groundloops".

Earl McCluskie discussed the upcoming panel discussions at the PAL/MIAC Conference on May 16/17 at the Direct Energy Centre in Toronto. For more information, check out the Toronto AES section website.

June 22 will be a meeting with Research in Motion.

Meeting Location: Eaton Lecture Theatre, Rogers Communication Centre, Ryerson University

Summary

Sy introduced Mr. Nunan. The coverage of the Olympics was a large scale surround-sound broadcast. The consortium had a few thousand people working at the Olympics! Mr. Nunan indicated that the total time spent by Canadians watching the Olympics was 1.25 billion hours, or an average of about 38 hours per person.

This was the First winter Olympics done completely in HD and 5.1. There was also a need to maintain compatibility with two-channel listening. Hence, eight channels of audio were required (5 + .1 + 2). No systematic up-mixing was the goal.

As the Canadian Broadcasters were a consortium, a unified technical specification for program creation and delivery was required. For example, what is expected in a 5.1 mix. What does the centre channel carry? How is the LFE used or is it just the "bass" channel?
How is stereo handled? Level-based regime or loudness based regime. Workflows and formats must be agnostic so that they may be used by anyone. All audio assets must at least be 5.1 Legal.

Some interesting statistics:
- Consortium occupied 40,000 sq ft of three levels of the Vancouver Convention Centre.
- A million feet of cable was used.
- Storage use was about 10 TB per day.
- HD-SDI with 16 channels of embedded audio

Many different audio mixes were required. As some members of the consortium were multi-lingual stations an "international" mix was required, which allowed the broadcaster to insert their own voiceovers at their station. Mixes were done in 5.1 and 2.0 with and without English commentary. Monitoring was done in "12.1", that is 5.1 plus 7 channels for show production.

There were, of course, a few tense moments. One morning an OC-48 line went down. The occasional audio console dropped out for a few seconds. The router crashed just before the Canada-Russia Men's Hockey game.

The most watched event was the Gold Medal Men's Hockey Game (Canada vs USA), which peaked at 30.5 million views. There were hundreds of thousands of streams active during this game.

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