While the original production cost around £1 million to stage and was so big that it could only take in three cities, its 21st century counterpart has reputedly cost £37m and has been performed a total of 120 times at venues all around North America and Europe.
This spectacular tour culminated in Athens in July, where Waters performed three shows at the 2004 Olympic Stadium. These were captured for posterity by a crew of nearly 100 people just to tackle the filming, making this the biggest European concert film project for nearly 30 years. The video for The Wall Live In Athens was shot on mainly 4K high-definition cameras but video services company Panavision provided a brand new 5K super-high-definition unit as well.
Given that the music was just as important as the visuals, Roger Waters called in long-time Pink Floyd producer James Guthrie to handle the sound recording and mixing. Guthrie, in turn, requested the services of Prism Sound to help build a mighty 96-track, 96kHz fully mirrored SADiE recording set-up modelled on that of his private studio, which overlooks the shores of Lake Tahoe in California.
Prism Sound's Sales director Graham Bowell explains, "James is a perfectionist who has a passion for clean and transparent recording. For this project James used the Le Voyageur II mobile with the 48-channel Neve V-Series analogue recording console onboard the truck, but this time recordings were captured using the SADiE digital multi-track recorders interfaced through Prism Sound ADA-8XR AD-DA converters. For monitoring, he used Le Voyageur's ATC units, another brand that he favours."
In Athens, Waters spread his performance across two stages - the main stage and the front stage outside the wall - with audio lines switching between the two at various points during the concert to reduce channel count. A total of 96 tracks were recorded, distributed between the main 64-track SADiE system and a smaller SADiE LRX2 system running 32 tracks. All of the tracks were recorded at 96kHz sampling, 24-bit resolution.
To complement the Neve console, 16 channels of outboard Neve pre-amplifiers were used, a mixture of 1073 and 1081 units, which were provided by London-based FX Rentals. These were boosted by the addition of 16 channels of Prism Sound's Maselec Master Series MMA-4XR mic preamps. Two separate Neve 16:2 mixers, also courtesy of FX Rentals, were used ahead of the V-series console to help contain the total number of recording tracks.
Audience reaction and the ambience of the venue were captured using a SoundField MK V microphone system, kindly loaned for the project by Ken Giles, CEO of the SoundField company. The microphone's output was recorded in 4-channel B-format for later decoding to stereo or surround formats during post-production. The top 32 tracks on the SADiE LRX2 unit captured, among other things, playback of SFX and pre-recorded orchestral mixes, these sources feeding the quad speaker setup. In addition, the LRX2 recorded a number of audience mics plus click tracks and show timecode.
Recording in Athens took place over six days, with three live shows and three days of filming for close-ups. The 1TB mirrored drives in the main SADiE systems were changed every two days and the main and backup disk sets were dispatched separately to reduce risk in transit.
(Jim Evans)
