Sound Post for the Big Brother 2007 Launch show

Last Sunday, I was the sound mixer for the Big Brother 2007 (Australia) Launch show on Channel Ten.

The show was taped on Saturday evening, edited during the night, sound posted early Sunday morning, checked and delivered Sunday afternoon and aired on Sunday night.

DigiBeta video tapes arrived, along with a USB hard drive with an OMF of the segment. The video was digitised and the OMF loaded into Pro Tools.

The OMF contained the main stereo program from the Saturday evening show, just as if it was live to air. (This was in remarkably good shape - big thanks to all the live sound guys on the Saturday night shift.) The OMF also contained an ISO of Gretel's mic (the host of the show), and music and transition effects that needed to be mixed in (and sometimes re-edited).

We were given about 9 hours to do the job - for about 80 minutes of content. This all makes for an incredibly fast turn around.

Unfortunately, the video tapes arriving from editorial were 3 hours late. We couldn't shift the air time later - surprise, surprise - so we just had to work fast.

To make things worse, all of the pre-edited bio-packages had no sound post done on them at all. So they sounded pretty yukky (easily the weakest link in the sound of the show).

To make things even worse again, some of those pre-edited bio-packages did not play correctly during the Saturday night taping of the show, so I had to go back to the original source audio clips for that package and do a complete sound post mix on the package as well!

Fortunately, I had a great assistant for the job: Matt Tegg, who works at the facility (Cutting Edge). He did a great job of digitising video and loading OMFs in one Pro Tools sound suite, whilst I edited and mixed like crazy in the other suite.

One segment, which was 15 minutes long, had to be finished 30 minutes after I started. And that includes 15 minutes for laying it back onto tape! Needless to say it took longer than 15 minutes to do, but not by much... I think it was actually 40 minutes.

At the end of the day, we got all 7 packages (about 80 minutes of content) loaded, edited, mixed and laid back to tape in 7.5 hours.

Phew.