Geek­ing tonight was awe­some. Never seen so many nerds in the one place. Need to get out (to nerd gath­er­ings) more! Con­duc­tor was Arnie Roth, who was vaguely annoy­ing but pos­si­bly only on account of his American-ness and the fact that some­one gave him a micro­phone, and we all know giv­ing con­duc­tors mics is invari­ably a BadIdea™. Akira Yamaoka had some crazy part to play with an elec­tric gui­tar (they only used one mic on his amp, I was appalled!)… he was dressed quite inter­est­ingly. I sug­gested I adopt his fash­ion sense (because, invari­ably, mine is lack­ing!) and was promptly shut down by Claudia.

Video was annoy­ingly bad in the entire first half, because the vision switch­ing was rub­bish, the cam­eras were inap­pro­pri­ate for the task, and the cam­era ops had not the fog­gi­est idea how to pull focus, adjust iris, or obey cues. Alter­na­tively, the per­son call­ing the show was just really bad at let­ting peo­ple know when they were clear to start mov­ing. I’d say some­where between the two. Given there were only four live vision sources by my count (cen­tre at audio desk, cen­tre right (stage left), stage right, organ loft) it’s not exactly as though it should’ve been too com­pli­cated. The first two were house cam­eras and gen­er­ally pretty okay. The third was an XL-1 or –2, whilst the cam­era at the organ was prob­a­bly a XM or maybe a com­pact Pana­sonic cam­era. Both cam­eras 3 and 4 had seri­ous aper­ture issues. The third was often too dark (fail­ing to com­pen­sate for dim light­ing in the room), whilst the fourth was waaay too far open. Appar­ently some­one must have set it up when house lights were on and the organ was not: accord­ingly, it was absurdly bright against the other 3 cam­eras (zebra bars, anyone?).

Part of the issue also stemmed from hav­ing two dif­fer­ent classes of pro­jec­tor in use in a con­fig­u­ra­tion where the pri­mary screen (called A) is ~18x9” and two sec­on­daries (col­lec­tively, B) are per­haps half the pri­mary screen’s dimen­sions (that is, a quar­ter of its size). All three were rear-project and I’d imag­ine that pro­jec­tor A was vastly more pow­er­ful than pro­jec­tors B. Accord­ingly, cam­era 4 appeared on B with­out los­ing details, while on A the sheet music was a vast white expanse. This is why it’s impor­tant for video nerds to look out­side their lit­tle con­trol booth some­times — pre­view mon­i­tors lie.  Also, the larger screen was one of the dirt­ier fast-folds I’ve seen used, with clearly vis­i­ble lines three-by-two across it becom­ing espe­cially appar­ent in bright, high-motion segments.

Some­how video redeemed itself in the sec­ond half (maybe dif­fer­ent cam­era­men, maybe the per­son call­ing shots got a clue in inter­mis­sion, or maybe my hyper­crit­i­cal­ness sub­sided some­what), but I wasn’t left amaz­ingly impressed.

Light­ing, on the other hand… delight­ful. Eight 5kW fres­nels with Colourset scrollers gave a nice wash to the stage above and beyond what the (more) intel­li­gent fix­tures could pro­vide. I couldn’t pick the movers on the back bar, but I’d ven­ture a guess at MAC600’s for the sides. Also four per side, as with the fres­nels. Five along the back bar, though I’m quite sure they were a dif­fer­ent kind of fix­ture. Light­ing didn’t help out the cheap Canon video cam­eras, though the house cam­eras dealt with it admirably… there were a few really beau­ti­ful shots in there from those two.

Audio worked. The 6.1 (which I read about some­where but now can’t find, and for which there were puncy lit­tle speak­ers about the size of SX100’s set up in their appro­pri­ate posi­tions) was use­ful for drown­ing out the organ at one point and mak­ing per­cus­sion come from weird direc­tions, but other than that I didn’t par­tic­u­larly notice it. Which is good. Either they weren’t using it, or the sound was just swal­lowed by the room. Quite a lot of mics and those sound par­ti­tiony things (they surely have a name, but I don’t know it), which would tend to indi­cate they were being quite ambi­tious about either record­ing the con­cert or mix­ing to sur­round and didn’t want audio leak­ing between micro­phones. Hence (in part) my frus­tra­tion at the sin­gle mic on Yamaoka’s amp… redun­dancy is impor­tant where one instru­ment is that impor­tant, espe­cially in a high-traffic area like that (con­duc­tor walks around more than any­one else on stage). There’s always the pos­si­bil­ity to re-set mics in inter­mis­sion, but if either Yamaoka or the con­duc­tor were to knock it on enter­ing after the inter­mis­sion? Stuffed. It was a decent sized amp, but it’d hardly carry through­out the build­ing very well. Aside from that… well, I don’t really know what I’m talk­ing about with audio, any­way. It sounded good.

I shocked myself by remem­ber­ing large swathes of Zelda. This makes me think I must’ve had Butterfly-Effect-esque black­outs in my child­hood, but oh well. I’ve also decided I want to buy a Dream­cast, dif­fi­cult though that may prove, because I really wanted one when they first came out (on account of that whole Linux thing, Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity, the brand’s rel­a­tive inno­cence — hey, maybe that’s why it’s gone now –, and a hand­ful of deli­cious look­ing screen­shots from games which got great reviews) and never got around to it before they stopped mak­ing them.

Kon­ami are morons. Every­one else gives their game footage gratis, quite rea­son­ably under­stand­ing that such cov­er­age is only going to boost the value of their brand, yet Kon­ami appar­ently insisted on a water­mark on some footage pro­vided. I’ve never been a fan of many of their games any­way, but that water­mark pissed me off enough that I’m exceed­ingly glad they’re mostly stuck in arcades with aging pic­ture tube con­soles, any­way. About the same decade as their mar­ket­ing saaviness.

As much as I will always whine about any­thing visual (I “enjoy” or “dis­like” reg­u­lar con­certs with­out too much analy­sis, because I can’t), it was a good night. It made me miss pro­duc­tions enor­mously (live vision espe­cially), which is funny because I think the desired effect was to make peo­ple miss video games instead. Claud had fun laugh­ing at the geeks get­ting all dressed up. We both laughed as cer­tain mem­bers of the audi­ence were baf­fled by per­for­mance con­ven­tions! All in good fun.