At the end of October, the Toronto section of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), has held a series of online workshops, thus keeping faithful to the intention, declared on its official site, “of meeting the fourth Tuesday of every month at 7:00 pm, from September to June”.
In one of these live events an old friend of ours, DirectOut’s Product Manager Luca Giaroli, has talked, among other things, also about Vivivaldy’s feats and remote production capabilities.
Luca’s speech was centered on remote production challenges and, after showcasing the evolution of DirectOut’s latest devices, he recalled how the idea leading to ViVivaldy’s project birth came up:
“Back at the start of the Pandemic, I, like many others, found myself stuck inside my home, with no possibility of going out, but I had an Internet connection, my Ravenna card, and a Prodigy MP, which both have Internet capabilities. The only problem was that I could not transfer audio over the Internet without using video call software, which is not indicated at all for such professional use. But I knew that something could be done, so I called a friend of mine, who has a great experience in the field, having worked for almost 13 years for one of Italy’s main Internet Service Providers, and asked him if he could provide me with some idea to help. As a matter of fact, from that idea, Vivivaldy came up with a professional solution to offer remote production via standard Internet connection”
Luca went on to demonstrate what he could do with a Vivivaldy device, connecting a Prodigy in Milan, linked to a computer running a virtual sound-check of Jennifer Lopez, recorded in 2013 by Rick Camp, to an identical Prodigy in Toronto, from where he was speaking. He even publicly pinged the device in Milan to demonstrate his good faith. The results? He could stream flawlessly 2 SRT encoding 48 KHz streams and one UDP monitoring feed, over an ordinary Internet connection, while deciding channels, and levels of the mix remotely, thanks to Vivivaldy VPN tunneling.
“Vivivaldy comes to you already pre-programmed. You just have to connect the power and the Internet cable. And as soon as the device gets the IP address from the local router it knows which cloud it has to point to. You do not even need a public address, nor do you have to set up port forwarding or ask for help from a busy IT guy.”
One of the (many) beautiful things about this setup is that, since you can remotely control the mixing panel, you can work locally in whatever quality you choose, no matter the dimensions of the files, since they are on your local machine. Once the final product is reviewed, you create a stereo feed and send it over a standard Internet connection. Once the content is uploaded, it’s up to the cloud to distribute it anywhere in the world it is needed so that you can have multicast capabilities.
But you can also consider doing more, like a live concert, as Luca has promptly illustrated:
“During the lockdown, we made the experiment – and we succeeded – having a bass player in Verona, a piano player in Turin, the drummer in Milan, and the mixing station in Rome, and we managed everything over a standard Internet connection, with no clips, all live in real-time as if they were all in the same studio or on the same stage. Since we managed to keep the latency within 16 milliseconds, they did not have the impression of being in separate locations.” (NOTE: Milan is 140 Km from Turin, 160 Km from Verona, and an impressive 600 Km from Rome).
So the duo ProdigyMP + Vivivaldy could operate this magic: live multicasting and remote production with a neglectable latency, which opens up a road to very interesting scenarios, also because, since then, Vivivaldy cloud tunneling capabilities have improved much and are now to the point of covering up the entire globe.
If what Luca said rings a bell for you, and you would like to know more about Vivivaldy feats or if you ever want to submit a specific audio application case, don’t hesitate to reach us out at https://www.vivivaldy.com/contacts/