In Bangor, Wales, OB trucks from BBC Radio’s new fleet hit the road recently for Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Gwynedd, the first major British music festival of 2010. The live action, interviews and activities were covered on Radio 1, Radio 1Xtra, BBC Three and Red Button. Each truck was equipped with consoles and/or routers by Stagetec.
The action took place on four stages. The main stage lineup included Florence and the Machine, Rihanna, Pendulum and Cheryl Cole, who flew in from the Cannes Film Festival to perform in front of Prince William and his girlfriend, Kate Middleton. Faithless, Ellie Goulding and Crystal Castles were just a few of the acts on the In New Music We Trust stage. Both of these stages used Stagetec NEXUS routing as the stage delivery system.
The main mix from the Dance stage, where DJs Chris Moyles and Tim Westwood went head to head as well as featured Tiesto, and the Live Lounge stage, where Radio 1 DJ Jo Whiley presented acoustic bands, was handled by Stagetec AURUS consoles installed in two of the new trucks. That mix was then fed to the main hub truck near the main stage where all the stages were brought together for transmission on Radio 1.
To reduce the workload of the hub truck, a central control room was set up next to it with a stage box from each truck to act as I/O for the whole site. A sub truck was linked to the hub truck to ship different material to Radio 1Xtra.
The third truck, tasked with compliance, used a mixture of editing systems to remove the more “colorful” language from the material before transmission. This was then played back to the hub truck via the AURUS and NEXUS systems.
The OB manager for BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend revealed that for the event next year, he wants to take advantage of the MADI capability of the Stagetec AURUS and NEXUS systems in the trucks to connect the whole site, because the long cable runs and MADI’s ability to ship 64 channels of audio along one fiber will save on rigging time and reduce costs by eliminating the need for a central control room.
