Avid Everywhere announced that the prestigious 2014 Gent Jazz Festival brought the Avid Everywhere vision to life by empowering performers with a collaborative live sound workflow based on the Avid MediaCentral Platform.
Acclaimed jazz artists including Michael Kiwanuka, Melanie De Biasio, and Gabriel Rios, used Avid S3L live sound systems to deliver pristine-sounding live performances at the festival, which took place in Belgium. Through the Avid MediaCentral Platform, opportunities for future monetisation of performance content were also presented to the festival’s artists and producers.
Key to the decision to select Avid as the exclusive partner of the festival’s Garden Stage live sound workflow was the need to be able to capture and mix live performances as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. Given the wide variety of acts appearing on the Garden Stage and its relatively small footprint, the festival’s organisers also required a powerful, proven and compact live sound set-up.
Ives Mergaerts, Artist Production Manager at Gent Jazz Festival, says: “Crucial for us was to achieve exceptional sound with as compact a footprint as possible.’
The festival is using the ultra-portable Avid S3L System, part of the Avid Artist Suite, powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform. Using the S3L for both FOH and monitoring enabled the floor space in front of the stage to be maximised and all aspects of the live mixing and recording were sped up through the integration with VENUE software. This enabled the engineers to run an expanded creative toolset of Avid and third-party plug-ins using the board’s Pro Tools HDX-powered processing engine. An additional S3L System was used to record the output from all stages through the industry-standard audio production platform, Avid Pro Tools, presenting monetisation opportunities for the artists beyond the festival.
“The lifespan of a live performance carries on long after the curtain has closed and the audience has left the venue,’ says Tim Carroll, Vice President of Worldwide Audio Programs at Avid. “Artists of the caliber that play at the Gent Jazz Festival need to make their performances available for future use in order to connect more powerfully with audiences even after the show is over – so the ability to replay, resell, and reproduce content through a variety of channels is critical. The Avid Everywhere vision guides the integrated and versatile nature of our live sound workflows, enabling future monetisation and delivering massive benefits for both festival organisers and artists.’
