Power Failure
It never fails. On a day when I have to make a FEDEX delivery by 5 pm, just about everything that could go wrong goes wrong. Michael Bishop, formerly of Telarc and now a partner in Five four Productions, recently recorded a very interesting project in Dallas, Texas and recommended AIX Media Group to do the DVD production. So I’ve been busy designing, compressing, and authoring a DVD of a charity concert event called, “Cancer Blows”. The organizers brought together at least twenty notch trumpet players including Doc Severinsen and Arturo Sandoval, a symphony orchestra, and a jazz ensemble in support of cancer research. By the looks of the video, this was a very special evening (I’ll be proofing the video tomorrow…so I haven’t yet seen the program).
The concert took place in March and there’s another event coming up that requires the DVDs to be completed (they’re going to be duplicated discs…not replicated. Not enough time.). But they have to have a master and I only received the assets on Friday. The project coordinator is based in Ohio and has supplied the packaging graphics from which I created the DVD menus. After a couple of rounds and tweaks, they approved the menus yesterday.
To cut to the case, I encoded the videos yesterday and planned to author the disc today. That was until the power in West LA cut off. That was 5 hours ago and it’s still off. Time for some creative thinking because all of the graphics are on a machine at my studio that I can’t access. I have my laptop and I have the small portable drive that Erica sent with the videos AND that I used to dump the MPEG-2 encodes onto.
So I called her and asked if she would send me the approved menus that I had previously delivered. I planned to head home and rebuild the graphics and author a preliminary disc. I got most of the work done at home but headed back to the studio when the electric company said the power was back on. I returned to the studio…they were mistaken. My laptop was out of batteries so I headed to Staples and plugged into a workstation to burn a couple of discs. For a 90-minute program it takes about 30 minutes to mux and burn a disc. With an hour to go before my FEDEX deadline and knowing the closest FEDEX is only 5 minutes away, I figured I had it made.
I left the Staples with 2 DVD-Rs and headed to FEDEX. It was 4:48 pm…plenty of time. Until the guy behind the counter informed me that this particular FEDEX has a 3:30 pm cutoff. Oh great! But the location down Wilshire Boulevard takes packages until 5 pm. So I raced a couple of miles in the middle of traffic and arrived with 2 minutes to spare. Success and a lot of stress!
But I hadn’t written the blog and couldn’t get access to the ADMIN panel without supplying the IP at my home to my ISP. I really didn’t think the blog would get written and posted today. Better late than never.
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Back up generator? Or have they outlawed those in California?
I actually owned on when the studio was in West Hollywood…and used it more than once!
Good story. If you paid your light bill you wouldn’t have these issues. 🙂
Right!
I had wanted to attend the Cancer Blows concert, but it sold out before I had a chance to get tickets. It’s good to know that Michael Bishop was able to record the concert. I found information about his recording of this concert. He recorded both DSD 11.2 MHz and “high resolution” PCM using five Sanken CO-100K microphones (100kHz) supplemented with Royer ribbon mics for the soloists. One thing I find interesting is his discussion about the difference in the audio and video sound mixes, “Again, I had the five Sanken CO-100K’s across the front; that was my main pickup. That’s where the overall bloom and picture came from; in particular, on the classical and on the softer ballad-like pieces, that’s where the real beauty was. I needed Royer ribbon mics to zero in on various soloists for the mix to video where I wanted to emphasize more closely the solo artist and make it sound like a close-up. For the audio-only program for CD, I’ll depend more on the main microphones for the overall sound.”
http://www.digitalproducer.com/article/2015-GRAMMY-Engineer-Michael-Bishop-Records-Cancer-Blows-Benefit-3903484
The recording is stellar and the playing amazing. It’s a shame there not doing a surround release.
Even when surround releases are available, all too frequently the surround release is only available as a DSD SACD. The Linn Records recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 conducted by Benjamin Zander for which Michael Bishop received a surround engineering Grammy nomination is an example of this. High resolution stereo downloads are available for this recording, but the only way I could find to get the surround mix is to get the SACD.
It’s unfortunate but those are marketing decisions. The “Cancer Blows” concert that Michael recorded sounds amazing…I heard the 48 kHz/24-bit PCM version.