Yup. I’m told it’s still the beast of choice for smuggling into concerts under your jacket…
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Was stopped because of the Zoom once. I was there at the request both the composer and performers, but some little gobshite wanted to try and throw his weight around. I’m not sure he appreciated the organiser telling him to get back to putting out chairs like he was being paid to do.
Talking of jumped-up gobshites:
You’ve replied 3 times to @HedgeSparrow in this particular topic!
A great discussion involves many voices and perspectives. Can you get anybody else involved?
Others are entirely welcome to join in. Just not over-zealous bots. Return to your spaceship* and leave.
*UFO
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Ummm
Not me as I am not techie minded
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I do appreciate that they are recording again, but I think the monologues are going to get tedious, I don’t understand why they can’t just have two people on a recorded phoneline, in the most simple way to still enable a conversation. Am not up on video conference or zoom myself…
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Since the simple solution of rapidly reducing said 'bot to kit form might result in unacceptable collateral damage to the cellar, I guess I’ll just throw in a thought of my own to deflect the thing.
I’m sure the BBC have competent, innovative, and really quite clever directors, producers, and techies, and could manage a “distributed studio” quite handily. But my guess is “middle manglement” is resisting like fury; in vast swathes of business, carrying on in the face of Covid is beginning to show just how useless and unnecessary most middle management actually is. So they’re pooping themselves and desperately scrabbling to persuade their bosses that it’s THEY who are truly indispensable …
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That sounds more likely than any other explanation I have seen put forward.
I have seen several middle-management spiels, but not (yet) anything from any of the techies involved.
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If they’re trying to be contemporary, as well as socially responsible, they presumably need to rejig the scripts so that characters aren’t meeting in person – which would mean lots of Kara’s recorded phone lines, and possibly some conference calls (described diegetically as a video call). That’s probably harder work for a poor harried scriptie than a monologue, so perhaps they will move on to those eventually.
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They have completely new scripts to work with, not rejigged ones. And they have been working on this since 15th March.
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Sorry, what I meant was the initial panicky reaction was probably “monologues!”, on the basis that that was something any scriptie and any actor already knows how to do, and that they may then have started to think about how to do it properly.
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Apparently Keri Davies is going to “answer questions” this evening some time; my bet is that will be the same old same old, because whatever he may think of himself, he is not a techie.
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‘Mr Davies, are you as satisfied with the monologues as you are with yourself?’
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Our own @Armrest has managed to elicit a response from a BBC techie on The Archers - The Official Unofficial Discussion Group on FB:
Tim Ashburner …as Martin points out it’s not really just a case of quality of microphones. Zoom is only used for live stuff like news.
We now use a system which is partly commercial and partly built in a house that allows people to congregate on zoom but makes a dual recording. The zoom track is recorded on the left-hand channel and a high-quality version is recorded direct into the users PC. When the session is over the high-quality version is automatically transferred to our server and then all recordings are multi tracked together and remixed. Principle of using zoom to create that immediacy and ability to interact with each other.
This system is used successfully on the News Quiz / Now Show at the moment which is why you hear the audio quality without any of the normal “video conference glitches” you would expect)
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I think that may have been what That Bird was talking about upthread, only with something other than Zoom.
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Feral says, while you are doing this don’t eat crisps. Or even celery.
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Pretty much dead on. When I’m editing the audio, the videoconference track gets recorded because it’s valuable for synchronising the individual recordings, but only for that reason; the quality of it doesn’t really matter.
(Also we record each speaker in stereo, because we’re not practically limited in number of concurrent tracks, though I don’t think there’s a lot of value to it and it wouldn’t harm the sound quality much if we went to mono recordings.)
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Again, from the naive listener, why have they opted for monologues rather than one to one calls? They’re scripted after all, so you won’t get awkward silences or people speaking over others!
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We could have fun telephone Chinese whispers, rather than what has put me off listening after day one of monologue tedium…
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Well, yes, that was pretty much my original point. There’s no technical barrier to recording a scene with a “phone call” or indeed a “videoconference”, or an actual meeting among members of a household, all of which are plausible things to happen.
So my working theory is that the managers said some time in March “oh briefcase, we can’t use the studio, panic panic, write some monologues because we know how to do them”. In other words, they tried to get something up and running quickly, using known techniques, to avoid having to have a gap.
(Then they had a multi-week gap anyway.)
It may well be that after this initial panic phase they’ve decided to do something more sensible. I wonder if the monologues are being done on a six-week recording block.
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frightful prospect, that.
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If you want to create a sense of location, it’s much easier with mono files - you can place that image anywhere in the soundfield without running the risk of phase problems. Every headache I’ve had when producing stuff for multichannel playback has been caused by trying to work with multiple stereo files.
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