Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1451070
20 S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y albums, demos, and scoring sessions. Then I got into a lot of remote work, touring with bands and recording their concerts and mixing those. Around the same time, I got into doing a few TV series while based in Toronto. There were also a few documentaries that were on TV, but my time in television was probably three to four years. At the same time, I was doing some IMAX films back when it was a very small company, and we did films for the world's fair and stuff like that. Why did you get out of music and into TV and film mixing? Well, in the '80s, I was working for a small studio in Toronto and recording acoustic music was starting to decline. It was when individuals were working at home with MIDI and sampling. We could see that studio work wasn't going to survive so the studio decided to get into TV post-production using multitrack recorder technology. 24-track at that point? 24-track and also the Sony 3348 open-reel digital format. The studio was Masters in Toronto, and we had the first machine in Canada. They also developed the synchronization of tape machines and video, which was still in its infancy. They ended up developing Sound Master from the same studio, and we just sort of moved ahead in TV post using tape for audio. That progressed into dabbling in film. I did a very gradual move over toward film; it was never my objective to get into film mixing. I really enjoyed that! Are you doing another IMAX movie this year? Yes, I'm doing a David Bowie IMAX film right now. There are two films actually; one is a doc, and one is a concert film from top to bottom, which has never been seen before. I love working in IMAX. IMAX numbers throughout the world are far less than Atmos, but I love all it has done for us, and especially the awareness [of sound] for the public, which is great. It's interesting, though, seeing features that were mixed for a theater and then somebody's watching it on their iPhone. There seems to be an awful lot of variables when it goes to streaming or when it arrives on your TV in terms of sound. With picture, you're going to get a reasonable image on pretty much every screen you look at. There will be differences, yes, but it's not going to be as severe. Audio, unfortunately, suffers greatly; sometimes through downmixes, which we don't have any control over even though we've tried our best. Other times, theatrical mixes go straight to streaming without any [dynamic range] treatment. I think dialogue is suffering greatly from the variables. I think Netflix does a great job with our audio, but I had an instance where a film I had mixed that was within spec for Netflix sounded great on their app, but it sounded completely different on a different app. The signal was coming from a different location and, with some investigation, we found out that there was some (L-R) Paul Massey, director James Mangold and actor Harrison Ford at the 56th Annual Cinema Audio Society Awards Massey with re-recording mixer Tim Cavagin and production sound mixer John Casali at the Oscars. Photo: Best Image