Recently in Belgium a number of broadcasting firsts have taken place. Being a bi lingual country, Belgium has 2 national broadcasting stations, VRT which broadcasts in Flemish and RTBF which is the national French language station. There is normally little collaboration between the two stations but for the Belgian pre-selection heats of ‘Eurosong for Kids’ there has been massive collaboration. Another ‘first’ for Belgium is for a TV show to be recorded and broadcast digitally.
Leading Belgian pro audio dealers Amptec supplied RTBF with 3 Yamaha PM5D digital mixing desks to use at the Eye-Lite studios where the ‘Eurosong for Kids’ pre-selections were taking place. “We chose the PM5D’s because we only took delivery 2 weeks before the first show and we knew they were easy to master,” said Pascal Zander, one of RTBF’s sound engineers.
Two PM5D’s were used for Front of House and monitors. RTBF’s third desk and one from VRT were used in the translation room. Crucially, the two different languages must go on air simultaneously and off-line Yamaha software was used by the engineers to prepare different settings for the PM5D’s to ensure that the French transmission was overdubbed while the Flemish version was given subtitles which is their preference.
MADI 64 interfaces gave the desks access to the Nexus network that was controlled from RTBF’s OB van. “The vital element here is the network,” Zander explained, “and the MADI interfaces ensure the desks get their signals from the network.”
The final of the European Junior Eurovision Song Festival takes place on November 26th in the new Ethias Hall in Hasselt, Belgium where Yamaha digital mixing desks will be used.
