A few years ago on June 16, 2008 I mixed an hour long set for O.A.R. at DeepRockDrive Studios Las Vegas where I was Audio Director and Mix Engineer for the innovative start-up company. This was a live “real-time” mix to HD video simultaneously distributed to viewers over the internet “as it happened”. DeepRockDrive was, and still is, the only live production internet concert providers that had a deep level of interactivity. It hasn’t been matched yet. Viewers at home were able to text the bands in real-time on some forty big-screen monitors positioned in front of the bands enabling them to pick and chose fan comments. Fans would text the band, band would reply over video. The delay was a mere two seconds so real conversations with fans between songs was the norm and the band loved seeing comments during the set.
As it usually happens for a live video music broadcast, the video team of 14, being much larger than the audio team of 2, took the lion-share of the time blocking cameras and lights. Me and our monitor engineer were lucky to get an hour with O.A.R. right before the prompt broadcast. It was a bit of a white-knuckler, but aren’t they all, lol. I mixed the broadcast on a Digidesign Venue console and mastered through a Waves L2 maxx bass processor to our codecs at 128kbps for audio.
