ILIVE MANAGES PRESTIGIOUS FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL

DATE: August 18, 2009

The opening night of the annual Jules Verne Film Festival was held at the Grand Rex cinema in Paris this year, with the theme ‘Space Conquest’. Many of France’s top astronauts attended the gala to pay homage to the guest of honour, Buzz Aldrin, and FOH audio was managed by an Allen & Heath digital iLive system.

A documentary film about Aldrin and Armstrong’s lunar conquest was projected on a large screen, accompanied by a specially-commissioned live orchestral soundtrack called ‘A Symphonic Voyage to the Moon’ written and directed by renowned Emmy Award-winning composer, John Scott, who wrote soundtracks for blockbusters including King Kong and The Saint.

The festival’s technical audio manager, Serge Babkine, chose an iLive system, comprising an iDR10 MixRack and iLive-144 Control Surface, to mix and record the score that was performed on the night by the 90-strong Jules Verne Adventures (JVA) symphony orchestra.

To produce a CD and DVD of the performance, an EtherSound feed was taken from the iDR10 and sent to an ES/AES converter to provide 40-tracks for Pro Tools, and also to an LX6464ES Digigram PC card to record 64-tracks on Cubase.

The JVA symphony orchestra also performed at last year’s festival, directed that time by Lalo Schifrin, who wrote soundtracks for Mission Impossible and Starsky & Hutch. The 2008 CD was recorded and mixed in the studio by Serge Babkine using an iLive system.

EtherSound: ethernetworking professional audio (www.ethersound.com)
EtherSound is an elegantly simple and open standard for networking digital audio using off-the-shelf Ethernet components. Fully compliant with IEEE 802.3, EtherSound is a deterministic network protocol with high data capacity at mixed sample rates and powerful control functions. EtherSound's latency is stable and easily calculated: the point-to-point transmission time between an audio input and an audio output in an EtherSound network is six samples (125 microseconds at 48 kHz), independent of the number of channels transmitted.

As Ethernet standards evolve, EtherSound is able to keep pace easily, since the Network and Data Link layers are implemented via FPGA's (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). EtherSound licensing programs are available to manufacturers and qualified implementers.
Current adopters include: Allen & Heath; Apex NV; Archean Technologies; Atelier 33; Audio Performance; AuviTran; Barix AG; Bittner Audio International GmbH; Bouyer; CAMCO; DiGiCo; Digigram; Focusrite Audio Engineering Ltd; InnovaSON; InOut Audio Communication Systems; Klein + Hummel; L-ACOUSTICS; Link Srl; Martin Audio Ltd.; MC2 AUDIO LTD; MEDIACHIP - Sistemas Multimédia, SA; NetCIRA by Fostex; Nexo; Opaz; Out Board UK; Peavey Electronics Corporation; Pinanson; QSC Audio, Inc.; Richmond Sound Design Ltd.; Tesi; VTG Audio; Whirlwind; Wisycom srl; XTA Electronics; Yamaha Corporation.
Qualified implementors who offer third party engineering support to product developers include: AuviTran; Barix AG; Lab X Technologies, LLC.
Stardraw Control software uses the EtherSound API to enable control and operation of multiple devices from separate manufacturers across EtherSound networks.

EtherSound is developed, patented and licensed by Digigram. Using current 100 Base-T Ethernet hardware, EtherSound networks provide bi-directional transmission of up to 64 channels of 24-bit digital audio at 48 kHz (or 32 channels at 96 kHz), plus bi-directional control/monitoring data. EtherSound networks can accommodate more than 60,000 networked audio devices in daisy-chain or star architectures, or a combination of both. All daisy-chained devices can send and receive all channels concurrently.