The 2010 Global Leadership Summit presented some new unique challenges from an audio systems standpoint.  The Summit is an annual conference at Willow Creek the first week of August, and is broadcast live via satellite to, in 2010, over 225 churches, colleges, and other types of venues throughout North America to some 60,000 viewers who are attending the Summit in their local venues.  Along with our live transmission, the west coast sites receive a 2-hour delayed broadcast to line up well with the time zone change.  At the 2010 Summit, a new challenge was determining a solution for recording this 2-hour delay in-house and broadcasting that through a second satellite uplink.

In addition to needing to transmit our “Oprah” FOH feed both live and 2-hours delayed, several of our remote sites request to receive some of the language translation feeds that are being done at our South Barrington campus…thus the challenge of determining routing of live as well as delayed language interpretation.

Furthermore, the Leadership Summit programming is such that the local campus needs to be able to make announcements without broadcast to the satellite, as well as our own local overflow rooms that need to consistently receive our room feed.  This is also true that our local recording and capturing of the sessions want to capture the local room feed for archive.  In addition, other’s have specific audio archive requests – such as just a dry board feed or only audience mics for future remixing.

As a backup to our live satellite feeds, Willow provides several different bandwidths of web streaming to our remote sites in case their satellite goes down, storms in the area, etc.  Of course, there’s a set of streaming encoders for live streaming as well as the 2-hour delayed west coast stream too – all encoders needing the satellite mix.  Finally, another streaming encoder is setup for in-house Willow staff to be able to watch the in-house feed in their offices while they work…needing the in-house mix.

Ok – so that’s the need, what’s the solution?

From an infrastructure standpoint, I know that every destination that audio is needed, video is needed as well.  SD-SDI video signals allow for up to 16 channels of audio to be embedded into the video signal, to be de-embedded on the receiving end.  With this application in mind, and knowing that 98% of my destinations could already receive SDI embedded audio, I knew that if I can get the necessary audio onto the room/house SDI video feed and satellite SDI feed, we would be in business.

Therefore, 2 SDI embedding paths needed to be setup.  We used a MUX-8258-8C 8-channel card for our house feed, and a Leitch MXA6800+A4 4-channel card for the satellite feed.  SDI audio assignments are organized by 4 groups of 4 channels, for example group 1, channel 1-2.  My audio assignment was as follows:

MUX 1 – House Feed
G1:1-2: Oprah
G1:3-4:  Oprah AGC
G2:1: Dry Feed Mono
G2:2: Audience Mics Mono

MUX 2 – Satellite Feed
G1:1-2: Oprah
G1:3: Spanish Translation
G1:4: Korean Translation

A problem still exists – Oprah is our FOH feed, but that needs to be able to be silenced for the satellite send.  Also, while mic checks are being made, some CD music needs to be rolling to be able to send to the satellite instead of sending microphone checks/rehearsals…so the answer was putting a Yamaha LS9 with Yamaha’s new MY8-SDI-ED card inline.  This card allows the console to receive an SDI video signal, assign the channels from SDI to the console, and then patch the outputs from the console back to an output of SDI.  So, the LS9 received the MUX 2 feed, group 1 channels 1 and 2 remixed (satellite to silence, CD, tone, delay insert for video/audio sync), translation channels 3 and 4 passed thru, and fed down the chain to the sat truck, streaming encoders, and the Grass Valey K2 Solo used for delaying the sessions 2h (which only takes embedded audio as a matter of fact).  Therefore, all remote/satellite site related devices receive the video/audio SDI feed from the LS9, making the assignment:

LS9
G1:1-2: Satellite Mix
G1:3: Spanish Translation
G1:4: Korean Translation

Our translation is transmitted to the sites who request translation by dialing into a few different telephone interfaces, primarily the JKAudio Innkeeper4 which received the live translation, as well as the de-embedded G1:3-4 channels coming from the Grass Valley K2 delay server in order to have delayed translation for our west coast requests.

SO – that answered the needs.  Wherever any video/audio was needed, whether that is an edit suite, VTR deck, sat truck, monitor/meter, streaming encoder, it received the SDI video signal with embedded audio, and receivers tuned into whichever SDI audio channel they desired.

Some notes:

• Oprah AGC is the Oprah feed through a Symetrix 422 Stereo AGC that compresses our FOH feed and drives it nice and hot for internal streaming/laptop listening devices
• At the audio station in Master Control, used a Wohler AMP2 L8 Series SDI/AES/Analog audio monitor allowing me to monitor MUX2 and LS9 mux output
• The LS9 received a direct output of the FOH CD/iPod player so that when mic checks or rehearsals were performed in the room, I could simply pot up the direct out, fade out Oprah, and the music stays the same, and those listening perceive the audience mics fading in/out