Here’s a 12 minute epic video demoing ways of using the SoundToys plugins to add movement and interest to drones and ambiences. Love their plugs, lots of tweakability and great tone. Worth checking out.
In their own words:
“Devil-Loc is the most fun, useful and inspiring audio destruction plugin I’ve come across since Decapitator came out. Totally addictive.” – Fabrice “Fab” Dupont – Jennifer Lopez, Santigold, Brazilian Girls, Sean Lennon
The evil analog level destroyers are here. Devil-Loc and Devil-Loc Deluxe are a SoundToys twist inspired by the classic Shure Level-Loc. These plug-ins add huge sucking compression, grit, dirt, distortion, and take drums (but try it anywhere) to a wonderful hellish nightmare. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Essentially a distorting compressor but so much more, it’s really quite simple but also a bit supernatural. Because the release time of the compression is effected by the input level (like the Level-Loc) it’s a bit hard to predict exactly what will happen the first time you work with it. Luckily with just two knobs, you can find the magic spot for your track fairly quickly and you’ll be going for that sound more and more. Don’t be fooled by it’s simple front panel, this plug-in has a lot more cool sounds than you’d expect out of two knobs. Get crushing kick drums, to almost rhythmic level sweeps with the crazing sucking compression, to blitzed out blasting beat loops. Drive it hard and you get straight hardware sounding break-up and drive. It’s a devil in disguise, and the devil’s in the details, and the devil made us do it and all those other devil references.
To take things beyond the hardware that inspired it and give you even more creative flexibility, Devil-Loc Deluxe adds a “Darkness” control for tone, switchable slow or fast release times and the ability to mix the original back in right on the front panel. The addition of these controls opens up the sonic palette immensely. Dark thundering drums, to driven lo-fi loops, and more, and the mix control saves all that tedious routing and lets you automate mix to keep the Devil from taking over the soul of your tracks. This time, evil is good.
The Shure M62 Level-Loc was designed by Shure to be a leveling amplifier mostly for mics. The concept was it would keep an even level (locked level) once it hit a certain input so you wouldn’t get “fade outs or blasting”. It was super simple with only a switch for three “distance” settings based on how far from the mic you were. The M62V upped the control a bit by adding an input level knob. However, the reason it became famous was not because it did a good job of leveling, it may have, but largely thanks to SoundToys user Tchad Blake and his desire to push, abuse, and do deliciously evil things to his tracks. He discovered that pushing the Level-Loc gave you gritty, dirty, unusual compression that made drums gigantic and nasty. Both of which are good things. So we’ve taken that concept and dropped it in the simple two control Devil-Loc. Then we’ve taken it further than the original hardware with the Devil-Loc Deluxe.
Avid today announced PT 9.02 patch. Lots of stability improvements and bug fixes!
A couple of interesting notes from the readme (yes, I read them!)
Actually I started to copy and paste good ones as I hit them and after copying pasting so many I figured you wouldnt read them I stopped, I also realised at that point in time I was only 20% through the readme. So, in summary, MANY FIXES, MANY GOOD. If you care more, feel free to download and read the aptly named readme file as I did. 
Kind offer from Russ over at the Air users blog for anyone who has Structure or the Instrument Expansion pack:
This is a short video showing how version 9 has sped up routing in the Mix window…
Hopefully show a few tips to help routing to and from busses and other tracks.
This month only, 2 hours of tutoring either online via skype or in the studio, only AUS$100. Session must be taken before Jan 31st. That’s a saving of 33%
HDV camera can be set up to show you my DCommand while we go through advanced automation topics or ICON navigation
Speed up your editing and get the most from your control surface!
Use this quiet time at the start of the year to get your chops up for 2011.
Drop me a line to book via the contact form.
So, 2011 is upon us, and as Julius Chan would say “Where’s my rocketpack and hoverboard?!!”
What does the year ahead hold for us? No one really knows but there are a few indications.
Well, finance is still interesting, with AUD vs USD over parity. We rely on the US production in Australia quite heavily and without OS work the high end freelancers are really suffering. Hopefully work picks up soon.
On the tech front, SSD drives are getting more affordable – Im hoping to replace my laptop system drive with a 256Gb sometime this year. Currently sitting around USD$500 for a decent one. They certainly speed up loading PT and general OS tasks, more robust etc.
PT9 is out and about, I guess this year we’ll all be dealing with more apogee and MAudio IO setups, and getting to see the Digi aggregate driver a lot more. I wonder how sales of the latest Digi IO are going? I still havent heard the OMNI or played with HD native. Not a quick uptake so far, downunder. Most likely due to struggling economy and downturn in work.
As far as our local industry goes, these guys are looking forwards to some good projects… which just seems a bit weird given so many production companies are struggling – how can you make good art when you are stressed about bills? From adversity…?
We’re seeing more LKFS and Dialnorm specs, so DMM2 and the TC meters will no doubt do well, but I also found this more affordable set of RTAS meters which look promising.
Feature requests? Wishes for the Avid Santa?
I wish Multi Mono plugin presets would store all info, not just the left channel, when unlinked.
I wish I had multi-mode on my DCommand ES
I wish more dub stages had the dolby 360 bundle.
I wish I had handles on audiosuite processing
I wish I had clip based gain, like nuendo.
I wish I had a batch processor, like in wavelab. Rather than using Audiofile Engineering’s Sample Manager (which is cool BTW).
I wish more video editors put “like with like” on their timelines
I wish more video editors knew what ProRes and DNxHD were and why I dont want H264 media all the time.
I wish more of the industry used eSATA connections, rather than FW800.
I wish my mac pro could play bluray disks…grrrrr
Hopefully some of these wishes will come true this year!
Here’s a short tutorial video of how I tend to get Quicktime movies in sync with the timecode in my PT session. Wouldnt it be nice if QT movies were timestamped??
Have a great Holiday Season to all!
Check out Paul Neyrinck’s latest project: V-Control for ipad to control Pro Tools. Paul is a consumate professional, in touch with the high end industry (his regular product lineup are surround encode decode solutions) and his ipad app looks designed exactly to suit most common needs beyond the keyboard and mouse.
Already, early adopters are praising the responsiveness of the implementation, good news and at only US$59 it’s EXTREMELY affordable!
So if you’ve come to a PT9 upgrade from LE8 or Mpowered8 (or an earlier version) you may well be new to all the “traditionally HD only” features that are now included in PT9, so here’s a recap of some of those features:
>
More to come, stay tuned…
Well. PT9 has hit the “online shelves” and folks have bought it up in what seems like a bit of a frenzy. A stack of love from LE users world over for the key feature requests (ADC in LE, unlocking from hardware, more tracks, TC ruler, digiT, MP3 amongst others) but the HD users and post guys on the forums – maybe the verbal minority – just cant seem to find the silver lining.
I think I made it abundantly clear in my last post that I for one am very grateful for this release. Less shannanigans moving projects from home based studios to pro studios and a more common feature set for all.
The main gripes and whines are things like “but whats in it for HD users?? You’re hitting us up for all this money for PT9HD upgrade and what do we get for it? Bugger all”. Simple answer: don’t buy it! You have backwards compatibility with PT8.1, you have Snow lepard support, if you dont see a good reason to buy PT9 HD, wait for the next release…
Whats that you say Brent? A NEXT RELEASE???
Yes folks, I can (sarcastically) confirm (from my own conjecture and suppositions) that Avid are NOT ceasing to develop the ProTools brand and PT9 will NOT be the last release of this software system ever. Yes, there may even be FUTURE FEATURES IMPLEMENTED.
It seems like a bunch of post and HD users are ignoring this simple fact. Its a single release – more will come. Did your parents not ever bash into you to have some patience? That “all good things come to those who wait?”. I don’t have a clue for sure what will come next, there’s much conjecture of some sort of HD DSP card replacement (all well and good without Motorola DSP chips to power it) but I DO have some faith that the guys at Avid will continue working, they are obviously listening to client requests and trying to meet them as this release makes bloody obvious and I for one am very happy with PT9 and what the future holds.
/me endeth rant
/me lies, it continues
So – Post features? I saw some guys whining about the Media composer interop features. Great, you work with FCP, did you forget that with PT8 you got support for Decklink cards for HD QT playback from your beloved FCP clients? This time around, the home team gets the advantage. I for one see not-insignificant time savings when communicating with MC editors now that we can share RTAS plugin settings and memory locates. The vast majority of film and TV clients in Australia work on Media composer, so I’m grateful.
Handles from mixed frame rate Avid sequences. That, for some, is a huge deal. Yes, it reminds users we dont have handles when we process stuff with Audiosuite, but you know what? Just a guess, I reckon Avid knows about it!! Maybe, just maybe, in a world suffering from the global financial crisis, with less programmers than they had 3 years ago, with a streamlined company structure, maybe they cant just wave a magic wand and invent this stuff overnight? MAYBE it will come in the fabled hypothetical NEXT RELEASE? Who knows. I dont see the point in whining about it now though.
AAF improvements – they are STILL fixing things and addressing bugs and making their interop more stable, with every release. Yes, lets snub our collective noses at that one. Thats no achievement is it? Especially since they have thrown away the revenue they were making with DigiTranslator to keep those programmers employed, oh wait, they still have jobs and Avid are paying for these fixes without that revenue now. I want to whine about that don’t I? Somehow thats a bad thing? Oh yeah, I bought DigiTranslator 5 years ago and now you’re giving it away for free?? I’m outraged. It’s AUS$800. The average post room books for AUS$100 an hour. Thats a days work. It’s been 5 years. Maybe try a different business if that’s a concern. Did you know you can claim some equipment purchases, like software, back on tax?? For crying out load!!
Last I checked some car companies were including air con with their cars at no extra cost. I bought a car with aircon 3 years ago and paid for it! I’m outraged!! I’ll write to Holden, AND ford! They’re all doing it! The EVILLLLLL!!
On top of that, you remember the IO setup changes in 8.1? Now, with PT9 everyone can talk the same language and we can move sessions around without radically moving our outputs around all the time. Not a feature of PTHD9, but a byproduct of compatibility that the PT9 release begets. THAT is a good thing and not mentioned by Avid in this release.
/me really endeth the ranting now
So yeah. 
quit your whining and get off the forums and go mix some stuff and make a living so you can afford to buy whatever software you want. If you dont want PT9, fine. Don’t buy it. I for one am all onboard and taking advantage of the timesavings to get my jobs done faster and move onto the next project.
Avid aren’t the perfect company and don’t always get it right, but don’t the people who work there deserve a little gratitude and thanks for this release? I think so, and if that makes me uncool, so be it.
That’s probably enough emotionally laden blogging for this year. Back to tutorial videos next time…lol Who would have thought having a blog could be so cathartic?
It’s for SALE RIGHT NOW at the Avid web store!!!
US$250 for an LE “download” upgrade, US$349 for a HD “download” upgrade. BIG installer, big download.
Top features at a glance…
With an existing Complete Production toolkit you also get:
ICON support, VCAs, all HD automation features, surround mixing, and 192 voices of playback!
One other thing – a PT9HD auth on your ilok will behave the same as a PT9auth plus a CPTK auth. SO you can take your ilok with you from your HD studio and open PT9 native with all your HD features and use your laptops audio outputs (or anything else) to edit bit sessions on the go…Very tidy solution to the customer feedback that came in after the Micro was released.
Avid are listening and doing everything they can, as quickly as they can, to make their clients happy. It’s a pretty big day!
One thing people are talking about is the ADC is “limited” to being the same as a HD system, ONLY 4096 samples are compensated for automatically. From my point of view I think it makes sense to pick this as an achievable goal with their first “port” of HD over to native so they have clean session interop between HD and native. Moving forwards, who knows what they will do, but to think they would give native a bigger ADC cache than HD out of the block is a bit naive IMHO.
The new Media composer interop features will be a big help – particularly using markers in MC and bringing them into PT9 as mem locates. Suddenly we have another way to talk between video and audio – yes, AVID are bringing better interop to market. It’s been a long time coming but we’re seeing the progress they are making as a single company, rather than Avid/Digi. It’s good times!
Omissions? Faster than real time bounce, freezing tracks, better RTAS performance, all stuff we’ve been harping on forever about, but how can they implement most of these native/host based features without first porting their software over to a host based paradigm? One step at a time, and I for one and happy to renew my trust in them as it really looks like they are heading in the right direction.
Well done Max, Bobby, and every developer who’s been working so hard at Daly City to make this release happen. Well done!
More info on PT9:
PT9 home page (from what I can tell)
Hi all,
As most of you know I’m now teaching the Avid audio/Digi curriculum at UTS:Proschool a few times each year.The next round of classes is coming up in just a few weeks.
Why consider UTS:ProSchool?
a) We’re the only Avid audio partner to REGULARLY run all the courses
b) We run them in order, back to back, so if you are traveling you can feasibly complete up to 200 level operator certification on one trip
c)We offer great bundle pricing
d) I teach it! I’m kinda fun!
So if you’ve been thinking about brushing up on your PT chops, dont put it off – get amongst it with some serious day in day out training without any distractions – and get a WW recognised certificate to boot!
Here’s a quick video showing a way to get continuous wav files across from Logic/Ableton/Garageband/Reason etc into PT for remixing.
After months of conjecture, rumoured leaks (they obviously couldn’t be confirmed) and flame wars on the bulletin boards, Avid have come out of the darkness to announce a milestone release – Avid ProTools HD Native. Basically a host based system (no DSP Accel cards) that can connect to the new HD interfaces (that are expandable up to 64io) with all the features of PTHD (automation features, track counts, VCA faders, etc) AND automatic delay compensation for RTAS plugins AND extremely low latency!
The way it works, is a PCIe host card allows you to connect to your HD interfaces (including Sync HD, its got a digiserial port) using the new mini-digilink connectors, launched with the new Avid interfaces.
Interestingly, the specifications state it runs a 64bit floating point mixer, is this a potential step up or sideways from the 48bit fixed mixer on the existing PCIe Accel architecture? Fixed bit processing makes for less “rounding off” of data to the nearest binary integer, so it was always sold as superior to floating point, but if you throw in that extra resolution of 64bits, even with floating point holding it back, it will be interesting to do listening comparisons to the summing between the two systems.
For those in post, there was a link to the Satellite technology page from the HD Native home page, so I guess we are to assume its all good to go to lock up native rigs with HD rigs – Can anyone say cost effective video satellite/dubber? The US dollar value of their gear puts a HD Native system with a MADI interface and Sync HD for $10.5K. Throw in a Decklink card and you’ve got a 64 track native dubber with HD picture playback for around US$11K (plus a CPU). Not bad value really! For a comparable system before this release you’d need a minimum HD2 core instead of the native core and the difference in price would be US$7.5K. That’s a pretty big saving! (maybe you could afford to renew your WUP or something?)
For a cost effective surround edit suite, the bundle price WITH an OMNI interface (7.1 monitoring system built in and 2 preamps) is US$6K. Open HD sessions immediately – VCAs, all your automation features, syncing and dubbing options if needed. I mean, 6K in Australia would barely have gotten you a 192io a few years ago (when the dollar was down, admittedly).
Interesting times! I wonder what else they’re working on??
If you haven’t already heard, check out the group (buy) action over at Tim Prebbles blog. The kind folk at SoundMiner have offered 10% off for 10 people, 20% off for 50 people. With their imminent release of the new Soundminer HD Pro low cost search tool it looks like a great deal.
Many thanks to Tim for taking the initiative to this to make it happen!
Also, while you’re there, check out Tims latest SFX collections for sale at Hiss and Roar.
I was wondering how many Sydney locals were going to the Avid Audio Showcase?
It’s Monday night at the Macquarie Hotel, Wentworth Ave (Sydneys Home of Funk…)
Their invite says…
Unleash Your Creativity
Be the first to discover what’s coming…
Join us for an exciting opportunity to get hands on with our innovative
products that have just hit the market!
• Featuring local legendary guitarist, Phil Ceberano, plug into Eleven Rack
and experience the most sought-after guitar amp tones in the world.
• Be one of the first to see the much-awaited new Pro Tools® Mbox® family
of personal recording systems – Mbox Mini, Mbox, and Mbox Pro.
• Preview our new HD series interfaces and listen to what we’re doing to
turn up the HEAT with our latest software innovation for Pro Tools|HD!
• Get hands on with our M-Audio range of keyboard controllers and find
inspiration at your fingertips!
• Check out the latest in M-Audio monitors, including the SBX10 active
subwoofer, designed to give your monitoring system some serious low end.
Might see you there!
Well! A bunch of new product releases announced today! Pro Tools HD version 8.1, a free update for 8.x HD system owners!
Now, you may think, 8.1 is a point release, probably some bug fixes and support for the NEW INTERFACES ( back to those in a tic) but in actuality, 8.1 sees the release of a massive, amazing, brilliant new feature set that will save serious mixers potentially hours and hours of their life. No, its not HEAT, the new tube/analogue warmth buss flavour feature….it’s the I/O setup.
Yes, the I/O setup! New in 8.1, the I/O setup has been totally overhauled to make moving sessions between rooms a much, much easier process! Avid audio listened to the gripes about moving large projects between rooms, endlessly moving those little squares around to just get audio out your speakers. Taken from the I/O Setup primer:
“In Pro Tools 8.1, changes to the I/O Setup have
been made in order to solve session interchange
issues (such as maintaining studio settings on
different Pro Tools systems) and to provide better
overall workflows for session interchange. In
lower versions of Pro Tools, I/O settings are recalled
from the Pro Tools session document, so
studio settings corresponding to your hardware
could potentially change each time a session is
opened. This can result in a temporary loss of
monitor paths. In Pro Tools 8.1, I/O settings can
be recalled from the system. This means that
your studio settings can be maintained when
opening sessions created on other Pro Tools systems”
So, THAT is cool! Cant wait to play with it and put it through its paces.
Secondly, the new interfaces! It’s been over 7 years since Avid nee Digidesign released the 192io and 96io series of HD interfaces. Since then, manufacturing has gotten cheaper, specs on AD/DAs have improves and low jitter clocks have become much more affordable, time for Avid to up the competitiveness with some new hardware. AND they got Butch Vig to talk up the sound of them!
The pick of the bunch definately looks to be the OMNI…preamps, monitoring, some analogue and a bunch of digital ins and outs…a bit of everything for everyone in small 1RU box. Retailing in Australia for around $3600, cant wait to hear what this box sounds like.
Another important and long overdue addition to the IO choices is the new MADI interface. I’m guessing that with 64io to arrange in your I/O setup this box was a bit part of the reason to overhaul the way ProTools addresses output paths versus internal bussing.
Given Avid just acquired Euphonix I wonder if they looked over the Euphonix AD/DA specs before release? Only good can come from that pedigree. Another interesting question will be how these interfaces fair against the main rival that was announced a few weeks back, the updated Apogee Symphony IO. I’m sure info will come to light soon, hopefully some of it will be objective!
Lastly, HEAT…Harmonically Enhanced Algorithm Technology. Niiiiiiice acronym usage! So basically, a button at the top of your channel strips to turn it on or off and a global “character” setting for drive and tone across your mix buss. Very cool idea. A 30 day demo download is available and I’m very keen to try it out in the coming weeks.
We’ll also be running 8.1 and HEAT at the Integrate trade show in Sydney next week at AT World is anyone is stopping by. I’ll be running two masterclasses on behalf of UTS:ProSchool and plans were hatched today to present a mixing automation seminar at AT World as well. Hope you can make it!
It’s been a while since I made some fresh tutorial videos. I thought I might start with some fundamentals of quick PT operation.
Starting off with how to move regions around with precisions, using the grabber tool and your cursor position, in combination with keyboard modifers.
If you are coming down to the Integrate 2010 trade show at Sydney’s Hordern Pavillion in a few weeks (August 24-26), I’ll be presenting Pro Tools “masterclasses” as part of the seminar series, flying the UTS:ProSchool flag.
Topics such as shortcuts to speed up editing and other HD specific topics like snapshot automation and VCA faders will also be discussed.
Hope to see you there!
Sumsound at Trackdown was recently booked by Pete Purcell to premix “A Heartbeat Away”, a local film. Pete’s preference when mixing is to have PT screens outside his immediate line of site so they dont pull him away from the picture and story onscreen. Prior to PEte mixing in there, Will Ward was doing sound design for the film and spent many weeks searching SFX databases. The screens were too far away for him.
SO, I invested in some new 16:9 samsungs and mounted them on Spacedec arms, as used on the Digidesign D-Controls…
Take a peek! A very flexible arrangement now, allowing for 3 primary positions depending on who is using the room for what…
The arms allow the screens to be positioned out wide, so they dont get between the mixer and the projection screen:
Or can be moved closer to the operator for editing/sound design:
Or lastly, my own preference, in the line of sight for mixing:
A little survey to establish what you readers would like me to blog about next?
Since the inception of a plan to build Sumsound, two technologies have always been at the forefront of my mind…
The Satellite technology from Avid Audio foremost, which led me to invest in the video satellite rig, running both Media composer and PTLE with a decklink card. IMHO, any way we can both save time and improve picture quality on the mix screen is a good thing for everyone. It saves having “that discussion” with directors/producers about “pixels/image quality/why???”.
Secondly, I was always aware that the video editing house above my room, Cutting Edge, ran Avid Media Composers and centrally stored all their media on an EditShare system. I’d hoped to collaborate with them once the business started and in turn hoped having a Media Composer video satellite rig might come in handy…Sure enough, on a picture we are about to work together on, the SFX editor will be based in my room and need regular picture updates from editorial upstairs, so this past week, Rob Peru the Tech Manager from Cutting Edge Sydney and myself got the Editshare connection in place and tested it out.
Worked like a charm! They are cutting with the Avid HD video codec DNxHD36 for their offline upstairs, so that’s what I wanted to open on the video satellite rig, and stream via the 1000bT connection from their editshare. It turns out it was a straightforward affair.
Editshare have a snow leopard client, its free to install, as you pay for the storage unit, not for client seats on it, unlike some other companies…So since they had a spare port, it didn’t cost anyone a cent to add my room to their existing network.
The Editshare client software is simple to use, and once you’ve mounted the volumes you want, you can save that as a preset and it loads them automatically next time you log on.
So my vid sat mac pro has two ethernet ports, one is connected full time to the Editshare directly, and the second goes to my 1000bT switch that connects to my PTHD rig, ICON and local network for the audio team.
The one issue we are left with is that the rest of the audio team are not connected to the editshare, so they will need DV Pal QT movies to work to. I’m curious to test if I can open the sequence in MC, export a QT Ref movie for PTLE to open on my deckink card, open THAT, then start rendering the QT movies in the background while running PTLE in the foreground as my video VTR…Hoping to test that this week coming. Hopefully the 8 core Xeon and the bandwidth from the Editshare will cope with the demands of both tasks simulaneously, which would be awesome. I think this will have benefits when it comes to consistency of the materials that we need.
The only trick we needed to configure on the Editshare, was that I wasnt streaming picture from my Media composer onto my projector, rather I was using a QT ref pointing at the media and opening that on my Decklink card. To make that work, we needed to turn on “QT Reference mode” on those volumes on the Editshare. Seemed logical, we didnt even bother to test it without that mode switched on. It just worked, looked fantastic on the 3.5m projection screen and scrubbed and updated smooth as all get out, just like local SD video, but looking far, far sexier.
A happy engineer here – love it when a good plan comes together!
To any local Sydney readers of the blog, we’ve set the details for the next Sydney Pro Tools User Group!
Tues 18th May, 630pm for a 7pm kick off.
Location: Trackdown Scoring Stage at the Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park (easy parking)
Special guest speaker/interview: Eden from Song Zu. Eden has been using PT in music composition and production for many years and is a great advocate of both elastic audio and AIR instruments. Eden has a fairly start studded history in the business, working with legendary producer Nellee Hooper in the UK on projects for folk like Gwen Stefani, Puff Daddy, Kelis and even, Holly Valance! Should be interesting!
To RSVP please visit www.facebook.com/sydneyprotools
Hope to see you there!
Hi all,
Shameless plug here, Ive been working on a new flash website for sumsound and its gone live in the last few days.
Visit it at www.sumsound.com.au
Well, the buzz on the street was the NAB announcement that Avid (aka The Borg according to many, unimaginative detractors) have struck a deal to acquire well respected console manufacturer Euphonix. The full news story is here.
There’s pretty much two camps on this one – those who use Pro Tools love the idea, those who use other systems are wetting themselves they will lose the only viable market alternative to ICON, their Eucon protocol.
Basically, Euphonix make great consoles and when ICON came along, realised that integrated with a DAW would be a good thing, so they made a communications protocol for a DAW to send and receive mix information to their mixing hardware, a bit like HUI but on steriods. Its a bit like HUI becuase it’s seen as an “open platform” that many developers can use, such as Logic, Pyramix and Nuendo and the like. Nuendo and Euphonix have very tight integration today using Eucon and have sometimes been mentioned as a viable alternative to ICON and ProTools, but most clients still go ICON due to price, support, and most importantly industry adoption of PT over Nuendo.
So what does this mean going forwards? Well, I dont work for them anymore so this is just conjecture, but here’s a few ideas Ive seen posted by folks in LA and discussed around the world in the last 24 hours:
Eucon protocol on Digi hardware – ICON and C24 working as a control surface for Logic, Nuendo and Pyramix? Sounds like a good idea to an ex Digi sales guy. It expands the possible candidates who would buy Avid Audios mid prices offerings (c24 vs Tango, what would you buy?)
Eucon protocol in ProTools – I dont know how long this will take with the current economic climate, lack of resources etc but I’m guessing this HAS to happen to make this acquisition make sense. I just dont think it will happen overnight…
Eucon in Media Composer – this would be a good thing when you look at the Artist series. Its a modular control surface with jog/shuttle wheel and programmable touch screen. Why should it just be an audio device? The Command8′s buttons can be used to control anything in Media Composer, the Artist series would simply be a new and improved version of the same thing. Sexeh…
Euphonix not only make consoles for audio post, but many of them are used in broadcast situations for live to air mixing. Venue and ICON sit really on either side of this industry and have wanted inroads for some time. I would expect Euphonix style technology would be an asset to the ongoing product line when it comes to Avid Audio selling consoles into broadcast alongside their video offerings where the own that space.
Console automation? In feature film post storing your mix automation on the console would seem to me like a PITA. Any time you have to chase a picture recut and reconform your mix, you can do that fairly easily in ProTools using third parties like VK, Conformaliser, Editrace etc You would then have to reconform your mixing console automation as well and hope the two marry up nicely! If I were a large scale euphonix user, chances are I’m using Pro Tools as a dubber and to me I’d be begged to access the Pro Tools automation features from the desk, or at least store the desks automation inside the PT session.
Then there’s the automation tree – a Euphonix consoles has an incredibly elegant way to following the progress of your mix. A bit like a labelled undo tree where you can see where decisions have been made and you’ve changes directions in the mix. In the real world, Ive heard its great but you only use the three most current levels most of the time, whereas the tree is sold as a feature with many levels of recall. Still, this sort of feature would be great integrated with ProTools. Either into the software so all Avid Audio’s surfaces benefit or just some level of communication between the two to restore a saved PT session that matches that tree state. who knows?
Really, looking at the existing Euphonix product line, there aren’t that many places they and Digi overlap:
Artist series – replaces the aging Command 8 and makes it much more attractive to a wider market
MC Pro – I had no idea this existed until today and it looks pretty much like the mock ups Ive been shown by clients wishing for an “edit station” for sound designers using Pro Tools for years. Again and again folks have said “yes, you do good mixing surfaces, but I just want something intuitive to edit on and ride a few faders” Looks like a winner if it starts to talking to PT soon.
System 5 MC…well, there’s the rub. Its a controller only and sits in the same space as DControl in many ways. I’m guessing ICON and system 5 MC will have some sort of love child down the track and this area will get tidied up.
System 5 Fusion – brilliant! A tracking room solution! Clients wanting to record many audio channels into ProTools have often bemoaned the existing mixers and how to set up headphone mixes and latency etc A System 5 fusion that talks to PT would be ideal for Pro Tools based recording facilities as you’d have the brilliant sounding front end and then could use it as a mixing surface inside the box when the session is finished (with all the automation benefits, third party plugs, and conforming assistance etc)
System 5 – well, some folks would say ICON sits here as well but I think we all need to sit up and smell the roses and know that isnt the case. System 5 has a brilliant reputation for sound quality, expandibility and automation ease of use/ergonomics. ICON just doesnt have the same build quality, largely because the System 5 is about 4 times the price! You get lovely meters and feedback on this sort of console, a common gripe with ICON ops. If a system 5 could talk to PT with regards to automation, again you’d have this lovely integration. Set up the PT rigs to playback audio through the Euphonix mix engine, but some vapourware future feature allows you to send your mix state to PT, EQ/Dyn as virtual plugins (ie plugins in the mix window for automation but the processing is being done by the console) then when a picture cut comes along, you reconform your PT session and your console now tracks to the new automation. THAT would be quite cool I would imagine.
Anyways, lots of conjecture and ideas on where this could go. To me, as a PT op, I see it as a brilliant thing and wish the team at Avid Audio all the best on bringing everyone’s wish list to fruition over the coming years.
I have attended two seminars recently, watching panels of experts sitting at a table chat to a room of professionals in the media industries. I was frustrated at one by the lack of understanding of mic technique, nothing new for the rest of you reading this I’m sure.
This video struck me as the first time I can remember watching a whole panel of chaps talking and not noticing bad mic technique, if anything they all had fairly stunning mic technique! They clearly deserved their awards! j/k
An interesting video for newcomers to the industry.
CAS Awards 2010: “Meet the Winners” – Randy Thom from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.
So, in my records of the build, we’ve looked at the room analysis, tailoring bass traps, using rockwool of specific thicknesses to deal with higher frequencies.
The final piece of acoustic treatment was a ceiling cloud, as the ceiling and floor over the mix position were the only parallel surfaces in the room. I turned to Bradford Ultratel, a fibreglass insulation board of 75mm thickness. By putting two of these boards together and joining them with small quanitities of spray adhesive and wire, I made the ceiling cloud. This was then covered in Japarra, a breathable cotton based material that has a sufficiently tight weave not to let any glass fibre through, and it was suspended from the roof, on a slight angle, over the mix position.
You can see from the photo above that a few other surfaces, like the bass traps and doors and skylines have all been painted to match the walls as well. Lastly we have some nice chairs in front and behind the desk.
Looking to the front of the room, I took this picture with my olympus camera on “night mode” – supposedly a longer exposure type filter. The thing that blew me away was the definition on the projection screen! It looks like Ive cut and paste a picture onto it as it’s so sharp and clear!
The front of Sumsound
So now the missions is somewhat different – using the ears and learning the room. And lastly, but most importantly, putting the gear and all that behind me to concentrate on tapping into creativity!
A good friend and amazing mentor of mine, Simon Leadley, always made the point that the newest and flashest gear doesnt make the movie, the people make the film – which reminded me that equipment doesnt gift you with skills or creativity, that has to come from within.
I’m so grateful to him for his constant inspiration and support to get Sumsound to where it is today and to have supported me to chase my dreams. He was an incredibly talented, generous guy and I’ll miss him dearly – those of you who weren’t aware, he passed away recently.
Having a mentor like Simon was a life changing experience for me. I guess we all have people who inspire us, who push us to do more than settle for mediocrity. Simon was one of those key inspirations for me and I can’t help but think about his legacy when I work at Sumsound. Memories of our many chats help me to focus on what’s really important and to take a step back and remember the big picture – people, loyalties, doing a good job, and giving freely of yourself where you can to help those around you in your community, be it your local audio community or your family or where you live.
So, some years ago I attended Sydney uni to do a Masters degree in Design Science (Audio). Basically they (the academics who ran the course) intended it to be a post grad coursework program for folks interested in acoustics. It was run by the dept of Architecture, so yes, it had(has) good acoustics cred. Problem was, acoustics is a tricky subject and after studying it part time for a year, on top of full time work, I decided it was better left to folks who were far more interested in it. So I did all the TV and film electives and still graduated. Possibly to the chargrin of my fellow acoustic students.
Point is, one of those wonderful fellow students went on to greater and greater feats in the field of acoustics, is currently doing his PhD at the old alumni and wanted some more data from the field for his Phd. So David Spargo, of Praxis Acoustics, has been my guiding hand throughout the build of the new mix room. We’ve bounced ideas back and forth, he’s taken quite a few measurements of the room for his Phd (before and afters as we progress) and Ive been mostly cutting back on all his dreams to meet my budgets and no doubt depressing him immensely.
So, from watching and learning as David used Fuzzmeasure to analyse the room, we noticed a few key room modes popping up.
David using the “dummy head” mic to measure the room
So, how best to tame them?
Panel traps and tuned bass traps was the answer. The two best tools for the maths involved were this spreadsheet and this link to a list of specifications on insulation. I could then punch in the numbers of the various Bradford products available locally, such as Ultratel and Fibretex 350 and see what results I would theoretically get from various sized panels.
First the killer mode in the room, 60Hz. It simply wasn’t decaying like it should. This was visible in the waterfall plots taken using Fuzzmeasure. So, for a specific frequency I turned to Helmholtz resonator traps.
Construction was fairly straight forward, if laborious, involving many many 2mm holes into a panel of MDF…
Grids for the perforated absorber
Drilling the holes for the perf panel
3 ozito drill battery recharges later...
I then needed to mount the absorbent material inside the trap, but with an air gap. I decided to leave the air gap at the front of the panel and the absorbent at the back, for ease of construction. Basically attaching it with a membrane of material loosely into the cavity, then batts, then seal it up with more upholstery material…
laying the batts between 2 membranes of material to hold them up
As above, then repeat…Now I had 2 perforated panel absorbers, tuned to 60Hz with a fairly tight Q. I then built two panel absorbers, with the stuffing in front of a larger cavity, that should be effective down to 100Hz thereabouts.
Once placing them in the room, I did some checks on where they were most effective, again use fuzzmeasure, before settling on the back wall array as seen here:
The new rear wall of bottom end absorption
The difference with them in place was, as you’d expect, night and day! I had to completely re-calibrate the subwoofer split coming from the satellites to the LFE channel in addition to fairly dramatic gain changes in the LFE levels. Once there, the bottom end was tight, controlled, articulated and everything I could have hoped for!
The top end was now less masked by room modes and on consultation with Andy Stewart, Brad Watts and Chris Holder from Audio Technology magazine, it was felt some more absorption aimed just below the sibilance range was in order.
I then took two wall panels apart and bolstered them with 50mm of Fibretex 350 rockwool, and lo and behold, that was taken care of as well!
More to come shortly!
Hi all,
A close friend and mentor, Chris McKeith, now runs the Audio department at one of Australia’s leading film schools, AFTRS. He asked me if I could pass on they are running a short course on location recording and enrolments have just opened up.
So, getting on with the visual diary of the build of the new room.
The front of the room was looking good and we had the desk in place – giving us a feel for how much space we had. As budgets shrink and premixing is becoming more prevelant, I felt strongly that I needed to make the room dual operator friendly, hence the big desk as discussed in the first build diary post. Due to it’s size (3 x 1.2m) I really didnt want to committ to the back wall until it was in the room and I could get a feel for it – and where the clients were going to sit!
So, next came the back of the room. It was a totally irregular shape, so I felt a bit of symmetry was in order. By cutting off the back corner of the room, I could get a more “understandable” or “consistent” acoustic behind me, and the pay off being a small space to use as a machine room; Luxury!
The other decision had to be where to draw the line of this rear wall. There is a door on one side preventing me from making a true “coffin shaped” trapezium based room, so I erred as close to it as I could get. The wall finishes in line with the centre position of the room. This created some modes to deal with later on, but visually it orients you in the room and I felt it was a necessary trade off.
First came the new frame for the wall, slightly more complex due to a door – Ive never hung a door before, so that intimidated the crap out of me to begin with.
Frame went up easily…
Door got hung…bit of a gap around it, but I figured that would “come out in the mix”…(sighs)
The wall then get some 13mm gyprock on the facing side. I then stuff it with batts and gyprocked the inner wall as well.
Then came the paint!
Once the grey paint was done on the side walls, I took down the projection screen (which arrived in the meantime and was mounted, simply to get it out of the way) and put up some small absorption behind my speakers to minimise some comb filtering off the wall behind them
Once that was done and the screen remounted, I was absolutely dying to put up some of the acoustic treatment that had arrived some time earlier. RPG acoustics make some great diffusors, the ones I was advised towards were the full 7inch high skylines. The come unpainted/flocked in natural white, and that was our ceiling colour, so I went straight to them, found a mirror and a willing helper (thanks James and Tim) and found those points of first reflection on the ceiling and put up the skylines. With those in place, the screen up and the paint on, the room was starting to feel like a place to work…
More acoustics analysis came next and some home bass traps needed to be made up… More on that next time. Thanks for reading!
I just had to share a rant about this…
So Steven Spielberg gets some questions over at Soundworks, but I love how he rounds out the interview, when asked his thoughts on the MPSE organisation and the sound craftpeople he responds:
” (they)…are a great bunch of guys and girls and I’m very relaxed around them because, making a movie is really tense, you’ve got a schedule and there’s responsibility and you’ve got to get it all shot, but post production for me, that’s like a vacation, because y’know we don’t have the same pressure… So I think there’s more of a relaxed repore between the director and the sound editors and the music editors because we’re kindof …you never coast but we are on the downhill of a long ordeal and I think we all feel that together and we get to see the result together…”
I’m sorry? WTF? I’m pretty sure that there’s a bunch of sound editors and mixers reading this wondering when the last time was they felt like they were on “the downhill” and almost cruising towards the finishing line in a relaxed frame of mind!
Last I heard most folks are dealing with picture edit taking longer than expected, less time to do a good job, oh and then there’s that revision 4 of the final locked picture that you need to reconform to…
Picture recuts, shrinking bundgets (or sound budgets becoming VFX budgets), equipment maintenance when you’re being paid less each year than the year prior, and people like Spielberg wanting “holographic sound” – who’s going to pay for the sound stages to upgrade their gear to make that holophonic soundtrack Steven??
For those of you who are local readers, Ive kicked off a new PT User group under the auspices of my role with UTS:ProSchool.
So many folks have embraced Facebook, that dreaded viral entity, that I have myself turned to it to organise events.
So the homepage for the SPTUG is link here, you’ll need to be logged into FB to get to it.
If you are in Sydney, please become a fan so you will be made aware when events are posted etc
First meeting penciled in for Tues 16th March, 630pm, somewhere near UTS most likely. Hopefully my Sydney readers can make it!
So this topic may be a bit long due to photographic evidence, but if you’re interested read on!
The room at Trackdown that I put my name on was a fairly large sized room, the problem though was its irregularity – there was only one right angle in the place and everything else was rather dali-esque. The solution to this was to firstly build a false wall at the front of the room to turn it into an even sided trapezium within the mix area – that was, after deciding where the front of the room would actually be!
So first I had to put up that false wall (red bit in the drawing above), by building a frame and to make it totally effective, fill the void behind it with as much insulation as possible…
Then came speaker stands, and being on a budget, but needing them fairly high to put the speaker throw into the middle of the screen and above my console monitors, I went for PVC tubing, sand and threaded rod construction. Each tube took a bag of sand (about 20kgs) so each stand is about 60kgs (120lbs) and is coupled with the floor and speaker using dome bolts on the threaded rod, which is pulling the top and bottom plates together.
Finished Stands with my DSMs on it – lined up the acoustic centre of the speakers
Then the acoustically transparent projection screen – the flagship from Oz theatre screens with their top of the line fabric. This was mounted on another floor to ceiling frame…
The frame from floor to ceiling
The 3.5m wide 16:9 screen in place
You can also see my beautiful custom made desk in that shot. Scott from Zellers Furniture in Sydney made this gorgeous piece, with two brass style plates on either side of the main D-Command. These plates are removable and a precise width, so a second 24 fader configured D-Command can be placed into the desk for dual operator mixes, if ever the need arises!
The desk prior to “brassing” and french polishing
The Desk in place with the DCommand dropped in
Next came a second false wall for a machine room at the back. I held off on putting that wall in place until after the desk was in, to get a better feel for the dimensions of the room. The desk is 3m wide!
More to come soon! Hopefully this is an interesting pictorial diary of the construction…
So it’s been a week since I left Avid Digidesign and the work has been non-stop!
Finally the room has a lovely coat of paint on it, my XLR connectors arrived today and tomorrow I’ll be making up cables and setting up the machine room in its final configuration (at least for launch!). The RPG acoustic panels arrived today too, some gorgeous red hemifusors
They are all in my machine room until I finish cabling…(see picture above!)
I was reading Screenhub the other day and noted an interesting storyby Nathan Wellington about the future of Aus post production. The article went on to comment on “wellywood” and how SAFilm are building their new facility as well and yet for all this infrastructure what type of movies do we make and how well do we compete on an international level? At Encore, another article was talking about the state of our studios in Aus.
Particularly interesting was Wellingtons comment on the world of HD and the technology evolution over the last few years; “I see the Australian Post industry struggle to keep pace with these developments. Australia has the talent without the exposure to this ‘bleeding edge’ technology find’s it difficult to gain the appropriate experience global productions demand.”
I must admit, reading this I felt pretty good, knowing that Trackdown, myself and Cutting Edge upstairs are all very much on top of the international tech trends into HD production and using the latest gear to get the job done quickly, efficiently and to a high quality. The video satellite system I’m putting in to collaborate/communicate with video editors is one of only about 4 in Aus, whereas it’s well adopted in other major film lots like Sony, Warners, Paramount and even China Film (where they have a vid sat on every PT HD system to speed up their workflow!). Well I guess I’ll open the doors next week to show folks through and we’ll see what they think of this bleeding edge technology and if it’s a case of “producers want it but facilities havent upgraded” OR do producers NOT want it, dont “get it” and aren’t prepared to pay extra for it? Which was the case with surround sound for TV in Aus for the longest time – it needed studio upgrades, the studios charged a premium for surround and producers for the most part, chose to ignore it and kept getting stereo product crafted to keep costs down.
I guess I’ll find out next week…
Sound Works Collection Tim Prebble’s Blog Sound Design DownunderClick the badge below to be taken to my profile page
