Post Magazine

Control Your Final Cut Stop repeating. Start creating. The Euphonix MC Mix and MC Control offer hands-on control of Apple's Final Cut Studio with a host of power ful features to speed up an d e n h a n c e v i d e o a n d a u d i o e d i t i n g . From faders an d k n o b s t o p r o g r a m m a b le touch-screen, the Artist Series media controllers allow you to concentrate more on the creative process and less on repetitive tasks. euphonix.com Jet Stream's all-new facility incorporates a tapeless workflow. Studio A features a Digidesign ICON D-Command integrated console in an Argosy Mirage workspace with Pro Tools|HD. Studio B also features Pro Tools|HD with Magma Expansion and range of plug-ins. A mid-size booth allows for voiceover recording and small ensem- ble sessions. On the DVD front, Jet Stream offers commentar y recording, mastering and restoration services. And in the game arena, the studio has been handling voice tracking for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Company of Heroes for Relic Enter tainment, and Stormrise for Sega. Cahill says he's par tnered with Voice- works Productions (www.voiceworkspro- ductions.com) on a number of titles. "They do a lot of voice casting for major games. The first game I did for them was Dawn of War. [Another], Company of Heros 2, is just being released this week. It's quite a produc- tion. We spent a couple of weeks on it. There's hundreds and hundreds of hours of dialogue in these games." "It's more than any feature that you'd ever work on as far as ADR and VO goes, with the exception of an animated feature," adds Larimore. "I tracked two solid weeks of dialogue for this game last April," Cahill recalls. "All of the games that we've done have slightly different deliver y requirements. Some want the dia- logue almost mastered, ready to go, and oth- ers want the very raw track." Larimore most often chooses a Neumann U87 for voice recording."It really depends on which character is coming in and what they are doing," he notes. "We generally like the U87 mic. We're pretty old school in that way. And we also have the Sennheiser 416." Talent is recorded separately, but to create a group walla, they will each ad lib at some point in the session, and those tracks will later be combined into a group performance. For Dawn of War, each voice talent sang their own version of a fight song. Larimore says he later combined the collective tracks into one. "It was supposed to sound sloppy and coma- raderie-like, but it was a fun challenge." Elements are typically delivered via an FTP site, either as a Pro Tools session or as one large, merged file from the entire day. Voiceworks' Doug Carrigan produces the sessions and keeps track of the cues. S T U D I O X L A B S Paul Ruskay founded Vancouver's Studio X Labs (www.studioxlabs.com) 10 years ago, after working at Radical Entertainment as an audio lead for more than four years. A shake up at Radical gave him the chance to take what he learned there and put it to use at his own shop. In fact, many former Radical em- ployees set up their own independent stu- dios, and Ruskay and team — fellow sound designers and engineers Greg Sabtiz and Rob Plotnikoff — have worked with them on a range of game titles in recent years. Audio for games makes up 80 percent of Studio X Labs' work, and Ruskay says Van- couver is an active location for production in that genre. His studio is located just a few blocks from where he worked while with Radical, and he estimates that seven or eight developers are within walking distance of the audio house. "I was looking to get out of Radical, and I al- ways had a desire to be independent," he notes. "I didn't really know how to start a stu- dio or run a studio, but being at Radical, we built theirs.That was sort of my fledgling expe- A U D I O Studio X Labs needs about 10 months to work on complex games like Turok: Rebirth. www.postmagazine.com May 2009 • Post 35 continued on page 51

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