TORONTO, ONTARIO—Members of Canada's film industry recently came out to honor its finest for the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television's (ACCT) 2009 Genie Awards, which aired on Canada's Global Television Network and The Independent Film Channel (IFC). Toronto-based sound reinforcement company P.A. Plus Productions used an Aviom Pro16® system to ensure that acceptance speeches and winner announcements, an integral part of the broadcast, were delivered clearly from the numerous microphones used to capture the event.
Typically, in order to monitor RF signals for multiple microphones, a technician has to plug headphones into each microphone’s receiver to evaluate the quality of the signal, which means he has to be stationed at the receivers. "The Aviom system allows me to use a remote Personal Mixer to create a listening station. I can monitor a mix of all 16 wireless microphones or solo them and listen to them individually,” explains P.A. Plus Productions RF Technician Adrian Sterling.
In Sterling’s setup for the Genie Awards, all of the outputs from the RF racks were outfitted with a passive split wired to an Aviom AN-16/i Input Module that was connected to an A-16R Rack-Mount Mixer with a Cat-5 cable. This setup made it possible to easily monitor the audio from the wireless microphones from a remote quality control location more than 50 feet away. Aviom’s A-16R Personal Mixer gives the RF technician the capability to listen to 16 channels of microphones from one remote location. "That’s really helpful when dressing talent with a microphone. Being able to listen to a microphone while you are placing it has obvious advantages. I never have to go to the front panel of the rack,” says Sterling. Multiple A-16Rs can be used when there are more than 16 RF channels, which is often the case for shows that P.A. Plus Productions works on. A second Cat-5 cable was run between the microphone receivers and a laptop computer that Sterling used to control RF functions.
For the Genie Awards production, a room was dedicated to placing mics on talent and for the monitoring of those microphones. "Since the Aviom Pro16 system allows me to monitor the audio output of the receivers via a Cat-5 cable, I don't have to be in the same room as the receivers, which gives me a lot more real estate," Sterling continues. "All the receivers were on a table, which you typically find on an awards show setup, but we were able to free the room of clutter by not having the racks of monitoring equipment in that room as well. As you can imagine, different departments such as lighting and staging, are often fighting for space in this type of environment. So the fewer pieces of equipment I have in the room the better because that allows for more space for crew members and talent to move around and come to me if they're having any issues. I was approximately 50 feet away in the next room, but I could have easily been a few hundred feet away with no issue. Thanks to the Aviom system, I could even be on a different floor and still receive a clear and consistent audio signal."
