<\/a>Micheal DiCrescenzo (background) and NBC Olympics A1 Fred Hedemark at the IBC<\/p><\/div>\n
I loved the skateboarding where you could hear the board riding down the rail.
\n<\/strong>Yeah, skateboard is good, but we\u2019re sort of challenged a little bit by a couple of sports like BMX. The ramps are soft, and the rubber wheels are soft, so you\u2019re trying to reach for those sorts of sounds. In 3×3 basketball, the court is different from regular basketball courts, where you hear squeaks and ball bounces, so you need to try to pull those [sounds] out as well. With those new sports, you want to promote that sport to people audibly as well as visually.<\/p>\nIt has been challenging, but that’s the fun part: how can we get more out of this sport and bring it home to tell the story?<\/p>\n
Any tips for someone who has not worked in immersive audio about what to expect and how to do it?
\n<\/strong>We\u2019ve always talked about having a base layer of ambience for the heights. I think that has always been very successful with us, and that’s what OBS has provided us with: a nice base layer to build on.<\/p>\nWe’ve gone 16 channels wide with our edits and audio coming from the truck, and we came into this knowing that’s our plan. Sixteen channels of audio gave us the first eight channels for our standard 5.1, plus we do dummy headsets and clean announcer tracks to help edits. The last eight channels are fully immersive: we take the four height channels, and we have a stereo mix for the last two pairs, which we’ve been able to place into certain areas of the stadiums to add to that base.<\/p>\n
For example, we would use those pairs to isolate a certain section of fans in the crowd and put that into the heights with the base. That hasn\u2019t been borne out at these Olympics, but, technically and engineering-wise, we\u2019re getting that through the edits, and that has been very successful. Making that 16-channel workflow work and getting editors to edit across 16 channels is something we’ve never done before. And that has been very helpful to us.<\/p>\n
That may be how everybody else will do it, but, for us, it is having the base layer and then building on that base layer by being able to add certain things to bring your ear up.<\/p>\n
When someone is editing with 16 channels, are they hearing the height signals?
\n<\/strong>No, they are not hearing them in an immersive overhead configuration but rather as isolated tracks, which they can solo and QC. Ultimately, they\u2019re passing them through from the trucks or the venues. The editors are doing their normal 5.1, and everything’s mixed live in the audio-control room for the final mix.<\/p>\nF<\/strong>inal question on the immersive land. What does it mean to see spatial audio getting its due, even seeing commercials on TV from Apple about it?
\n<\/strong>I think anything that can add to the experiences is going to be worthwhile. I know I say this all the time, but immersive audio does make the picture look better. If you add spatial audio and the immersive audio to our production, it makes the production overall a much better and more enjoyable production. And it\u2019s not that the pictures don’t look great; they look fantastic in HDR. But it’s all part of that package that you’re providing people: the best-quality audio and the best-quality video give them the best product possible.<\/p>\nLet\u2019s talk commentary. There is a lot of remote commentary going on for NBC around the world. First, audio delay is always a concern, so where you are with that?
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s probably about 120 ms. That\u2019s really nothing in a voiceover booth. But we have announcers and analysts for tennis, soccer, athletics, and baseball at Telemundo, Sky in London, here, or in Stamford working with a co-commentator in Tokyo. We have two spy cams so we can have play-by-play and analyst see each other from two different continents, and nobody would ever know that they are separated by continents. That\u2019s the kind of magic behind the screen.<\/p>\nAnd we have four remote venues for indoor volleyball, basketball, golf, and beach volleyball, and those production crews are either at Sky or Stamford while commentary is here. It\u2019s built on the LANCE Dante system and the Calrec RP1, which is a virtual console that allows mix-minuses to be done locally so there\u2019s no latency for announcers. Everything is Dante-connected and embedded via MADI and then controlled by the Calrec consoles that are in either Stamford or Sky. That\u2019s a seamless workflow, and nobody can tell where it is being produced from, with, once again, the trucks on different continents.<\/p>\n
Looking forward to Beijing, is there anything you want to tweak?
\n<\/strong>We have definitely proved the success of the immersive-audio workflow between the editors and transmission, check-ins for the trucks, making sure the 16 channels pass. All we needed is the material with the crowds so we can immerse people in a venue, where right now we’re focusing on the athletes. But the crowd is the key component in capturing the passion that goes with sport, and that’s what we really look forward to.<\/p>\nWhat else strikes you about these Games?
\n<\/strong>I think the Friends and Family efforts have been fantastic. We have cameras and watch parties in the U.S., where the families can interact with their sons and daughters. It brings the Games home to the athletes\u2019 families like never before (to see a clip, click here<\/a>) and gives that emotion and passion that you sort of miss by not having the crowd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Karl Malone, NBC Sports and NBC Olympics, director, sound design, says the 2020 Olympics is truly the audio Olympics. He jokes that he says that every Olympics, but it’s hard […]\n More<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":208249,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13681,9248,33,2155,17560],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208248"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208248"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":208330,"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208248\/revisions\/208330"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}