To say things this time around at BronyCAN came together as a miracle would be an understatement.

Let's see...

So I expected the Alberta REPLACEMENT AV crew to arrive at 5PM Thursday but they arrived at Noon instead. (Our main AV guy had a mental meltdown due to demands placed on him) Meaning I missed out on 5 hours of testing. Also, with stuff already setup, there would be no overnight fire testing possible.

First experiment: Trying to get Premiere CC output into the native MXF format of the HyperDeck recorder failed. So we had to fall back to DNxHD QT... or so we thought...

With only one SSD recorder available and with playback and recording impossible on the same machine, this meant we needed a different playback device:

Second experiment: Trying to play directly from Premiere CC to a Ultrastudio Pro USB 3.0 device. Works... for 30mins... After 30mins, the picture freezes but the audio keeps going. I'm pulling my hairs clean at this point.

Third experiment: Trying to use CasparCG Server. Works for 24/7 reliability, but there's audio microstutter not present when I use the same device with Premiere... Frustration keeps mounting here.

Final fallback: MPC-HC out the HDMI out of the laptop. Worked, but wasn't vertically synced with videos with frame rates lower than 59.94fps.

Now to the recording issues:

Our livestream refused to accept output from Wirecast and OBS... We toyed with it for 2 hours before using Xsplit. Our local Xsplit recordings suffered frame rate discrepancies because it was set to 30fps non-drop frame... When I learned we were using hardware independent devices for capture, I was able to use OBS to record the Saturday concert in 1080p60. The Ultrastudio 4K that was feeding OBS then decided it was going to feed Cylon audio at random just like it did last year. If I had 2 HyperDecks, I should have done the rest of the panels through OBS at 1080p60.

AV emergencies were nearly everywhere, from a camera running out of memory during Kithop's panel, to no core AV staff other than me and Kheetah in the main theater for Equestrian Idol.

The final nail in the coffin of issues: We don't have Sunday's panels in high quality, cause I was so busy I had no time to transfer anything or dedicate someone to doing that. There's also a Friday panel on Kheetah cam that I still have to get.

And there's more issues... The SSD recorder we relied on to give proper recordings produces audio error bits in it's bitstream for the recording mode we chose... Also, video stream corruption is present too in our archives. Whether this is because of data transfer errors or because of the HyperDeck we will never know. The 960GB SSD it was originally on is no longer available for us to use after the convention. Once we have access again, it would have already been wiped.

I cannot call the convention a success until the data has been gathered.

Then there's the ADR and Foley work for the Closing Ceremonies...