Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/110591
Uber Audio created character voicings for the orc creatures featured in the film, The Shadow Cabal. SILVER SOUND Cory Choy is a co-founder/supervising sound editor at Silver Sound (http://silversound.us) in New York City. He has worked on almost every Troma Entertainment film since Toxic Avenger II, and is looking forward to working on Troma's newest, Return to the Class of Nuke 'Em High. Other career highlights include the sound design and mix for Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. Silver Sound does more than just audio post; they also handle the production side. "We can send a team out on-set with a full cart and all the gear, and then we can take that sound back to the studio and do full sound design and the final mix to get it ready for theaters." Silver Sound has two 5.1 dub stages, both with their own vocal booth. The B room also has a Foley pit. Choy points out that Silver Sound also features an abundance of lollipops, a Segue, and best of all a Theremin. "A lot of places you go, you expect NASA, with these crazy control rooms with all these ceiling fans and someone is wearing a tuxedo and handing you a cupcake. We are more of a boutique. We work with directors very closely. We have more of a personal relationship with our clients." When it comes to gear, Choy doesn't live for the past. His giant racks of outboard gear are more like dinosaurs in a museum; they don't do much anymore but they're still fun to look at. For Choy, digital tools provide more versatility, and Reaper (http://www. reaper.fm) is his digital audio workstation of choice. "What I like about Reaper is that it's a DAW that's looking forward. It doesn't try to make old people, or people used to the older ways, feel comfortable. It's not trying to emulate older technology. It's trying to build a workflow from the ground up that makes sense for what people are doing today with computers." Reaper ($225/full commercial license) is a DAW that is shockingly small, Clean Cuts' Joe Powers uses the Alloy 2 plug-in on all projects, including Hard Riders. See page 34 for more. versatile, easy to use and completely malleable to the user's taste. According to its site, Reaper is a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing and mastering environment. It has 25 pages of customizable preferences that allow the user to set Reaper's look, feel and behavior to best suit the user's needs. Reaper claims to support "almost" any third-party audio or MIDI plug-in, including: VST, VSTi, DX, DXi, AU (OSX only) and JS. In addition, the site says the user can sidechain any plug-in, even if the plug-in does not natively support sidechaining. "There are a plethora of plug-ins that come with it," explains Choy. "You can run the standards too.You can run Waves, iZotope, or anything you want because it supports VST and DirectX." Another key point is there is only one version of Reaper, and that's the full version. You don't have to pay more money to unlock any features. The difference in license cost is based on usage. An individual using Reaper for personal or educational use is charged a discounted license amount. Choy points out that Reaper is very small. "The install file," he says, "is around 8MB." It's small enough to run off a USB drive, and it's cross-platform, so you can take your DAW with you anywhere you go. "If I want to take it to a studio that doesn't have Reaper, but has a nice computer, and a really nice sound system, I can just bring my whole DAW system with me. That way, I don't have to worry about the studio having different plug-ins or whatever, I can just bring it all with me." Recently, Choy used Reaper to do the sound on the independent film, Two Pints Lighter, directed by Matt Lawrence. Two Pints Lighter is a vampire love story that is everything the Twilight series wasn't, he says. A particularly tricky scene in the film, in regards to ADR, was a drunk girl riding a bicycle down an empty boardwalk, yelling. As the shot changed perspective, the natural reverb on the voice changed. To match the ADR to those changes, Choy used the width envelopes on the ADR tracks in Reaper to adjust the stereo information of the reverb. "Matching that reverb, you didn't just set it to one thing. While she's riding along, the perspective changes, so the perspective of the voice also had to change. Just doing volume and panning wasn't cutting it, and wet/dry of the reverb wasn't cutting it. It was that ability to manipulate the width dynamically that really brought that scene to life. It really made the ADR sync into the scene." While you can adjust the width of a stereo image in other DAWs, Reaper makes it easy by proving a width envelope on every track. Being able to adjust the width gave Choy the freedom to choose whatever reverb sounded the best. He didn't have to limit his choices to only mono reverbs. "When you're doing ADR, you generally want everything centered. There www.postmagazine.com Post0213_032-35-audioMLV3finalread.indd 33 Post • February 2013 33 1/25/13 2:30 PM