Students from Middle Tennessee State University’s College of Media and Entertainment will lead audio and video production at the 2024 Bonnaroo Festival with support from Focusrite RedNet interfaces
The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival is an annual four-day event held at Great Stage Park, a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee. The festival typically begins on the second Thursday in June, lasts for four days, and features multiple stages with live music of various genres. Performances begin on Wednesday night for early arrivals and continue throughout the event, starting around noon each day, and some stages keep attendees entertained until sunrise. This year’s festival took place June 13-16, and once again, the show’s lineup reads like a who’s who of the music industry, with artists like Post Malone, Megan Thee Stallion, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fred Again, Cage the Elephant, Gary Clark Jr., and more.
In attendance were key faculty members from Middle Tennessee State University’s College of Media and Entertainment, including Michael Fleming, professor of audio production in the Department of Recording Industry, and Robert Gordon, associate professor of video and film production and interim chair of the Department of Media Arts. As part of MTSU’s ongoing initiative to give students hands-on experience in audio and video production, Fleming and Gordon have a partnership with Bonnaroo that began in 2015 when they first took students behind the scenes to film and record festival performances with multiple cameras. Those early efforts were purely archival, but in recent years Bonnaroo has offered MTSU an increasingly prominent role in its broadcast production. This summer, the student team was responsible for both streamed broadcast coverage and live video feeds to “IMAG” screens for on-site audiences at two of Bonnaroo’s main stages, This Tent and That Tent. The challenge of recording and streaming dozens of performances on two stages simultaneously kept a team of 26 students (thirteen audio and thirteen video students) busy using “The Truck,” the university’s nearly $2 million mobile production lab, and a separate flypack. This year, the MTSU team’s video and audio production work from the This Tent and That Tent stages accounted for 50% of the content broadcast on Bonnaroo’s two Hulu streaming channels.
“We did 53 acts over four days and 23 of them aired on Hulu,” explained Michael Fleming. “To achieve high channel count and efficient signal flow, I ended up using two key Focusrite products – three RedNet D64R 64-channel MADI bridges (two at This Tent and one at That Tent) and a Focusrite RedNet PCIeNX PCIe Dante interface with ultra-low latency and high channel count.”
Fleming explains his setup at Bonnaroo: “Our audio system for the OB truck is based on a Calrec Brio36 console and Calrec’s Hydra2 fiber optic network for stage boxes and signal transport. We use a Dante network to extend the integrated matrix intercom into the field via fiber optic switches, and we also use Dante to route audio in and out of the console to do multitrack recording and playback when required. We received a combination of analog, AES and MADI feeds from the PA companies at Bonnaroo. Specifically, we converted these MADI streams to Dante using Focusrite’s D64R units, using asynchronous sample rate conversion to isolate our clock domains and convert 96kHz stage splits to 48kHz for production mixing. These 48k signals flowed into our Dante network and ultimately reached the console via Calrec’s modular Dante Hydra2 interface card.”
“On our second stage,” Fleming continues, “video and audio were switched in a flypack with no Calrec-specific audio gear, so we used a compact Yamaha DM3-D console for stem mixing and a laptop-based DAW for recording. The DM3-D is Dante-enabled, but its digital IO capability is insufficient to meet the total number of stage inputs we expected in addition to our audience mics and front-of-house feeds. We knew we needed a high-density interface to be able to route and select what was hitting the console and the multitrack DAW simultaneously. The best available solution in these circumstances was the Focusrite RedNet PCIeNX, which provided 128 bi-directional I/O channels. We certainly didn’t use all of them, but the Focusrite interface gave us the stability and capacity as an audio device to talk to Reaper and the Yamaha console and our MADI to Dante interface devices. The system transmitted the audio exactly as it should, with low latency and perfect quality. When you’re juggling live stream performances from multiple artists, multiple stages and a range of events, you only get one chance to get it right and the Focusrite gear delivered.”
Summing up this year’s Bonnaroo Festival, Fleming explained that it was a valuable hands-on experience for the university on many levels. “Our media arts and audio production programs benefit tremendously from this annual collaboration, which immerses us in high-level remote production and live broadcasting. This allows our students to learn the intricacies of live and post-production of television production for music performances, while also working with professional equipment like Focusrite RedNet products that they will find in similar OB trucks and studios when they graduate and begin work in the industry.”
