Last month, with a little hole in my schedule, an old work contact brought me in to oversee the set up and running of a small series of technical symposium breakout rooms for a scientific conference in New Orleans.

Fortunately the scenic company completed the rooms earlier than scheduled so I set to work setting them up. And rather than having to do it in one day we had 2 full days to work on it.

The rooms were all the same. 2 wireless mics, a Allen & Heath digital audio console with a digital stagebox, 4 powered speakers, 16 x 9 Fastfold Screen and Panasonic projector with a very short throw lens.

I split the teams up based on their strengths and we tackled the rooms systematically. 2 people on speaker set up and taping, 2 audio techs working on the wireless and console at the tech table.. 2 video techs working on laptops and projection.

These 12 rooms were handled by a crew of 5, 4 other techs and me. It was fairly simple to keep the presenters happy.

There were a couple challenges as presenters wanted to present from their own laptops for various reasons (mostly having to do with the IT security of their devices) and we faced resolution mismatches on the projectors but once we identified this it was easy enough to correct.

At the end of the event we started to strike the systems as the rooms finished up and by the end we completed the strike 4 hours early freeing up my strike crew for other duties with the larger conference crew.

I don’t usually handle breakout room crews but this gig was a good reminder I could still do it.