Optocore in the Fabulous World of Amélie
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Paul Gatehouse was asked to create the sound design by Simone Linhof, the creative producer at Stage Entertainment, Germany, and as part of the complex audio design he deployed a pair of Optocore’s DD4MR-FX to give him the large quantity of MADI channels required.
Speaking of the production, Gatehouse said, “I’ve worked with Simone and Stage Entertainment many times over the years and I was thrilled to be asked to design this production.
“The real attraction was the brief created by the producers and Christoph Drewitz, our director. They wanted the production to feel deeply organic and hand-made, and the music had to have a rich acoustic texture, with the cast performing a lot of the sound effects vocally or with props in real time. I also really liked the songs Daniel has written, and after hearing Will Stuart’s orchestration demos, I was in.”
Stage Entertainment hold a large inventory of sound equipment and the designer elected to use their KV2 SL412 loudspeakers as the main system, along with smaller KV2 speakers (EX26, EX6, ESD25, ES6, ES5) as fills and delays.
“I’m a long time DiGiCo user and rely on the ’T’ theatre software as the backbone of my workflow, so we reached a good place where I could add some of my tools to their stock, mainly the SD10T and UAD-2 Live Racks, which I use to process plug-ins via inserts and are a big part of the sound.”
Stage Ent also own a StageTec Nexus system, which he describes as “an incredible eco-system of physical I/O boxes and a routing matrix. Its internal connections run on fibre but we needed an interface to get in and out of the Nexus via MADI”.
This is where the Optocore DD4MR-FX units come in. “The Optocore devices gave us 128 inputs and outputs of MADI to fibre conversion at 96kHz, by using two units on an optical loop. The DD4s sit between our DiGiCo SD10 console and StageTec Nexus StarRouter, which handles all our physical I/O and signal routing. These interfaces are incredibly easy to configure and always feel rock solid.
“In fact, every show I do generally has an Optocore device somewhere in the system, whether it’s the integrated fibre loop of our DiGiCo console network, MADI interfacing to provide I/O to orchestra monitor mixing systems or MADI multitrack capture at FOH to work offline with material from the show. As the DD4 units sit in such a vital point in the chain, I’d always reach for an Optocore converter and feel confident about how they are going to perform.”
(Jim Evans)
