Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1359892
40 C I N E M O N T A G E T E C H and changes in real time. "I love that I'm still able to have that interaction with my director and production team that normally would take place in an edit bay," Lopez said. Evercast for Sound Editing/Mixing On the sound side, sound designer/ re-recording mixer Konrad Piñon, CAS, at Margarita Mix Hollywood, a Fotokem Company, found Evercast to be the most reliable choice for mix review sessions with creatives and clients. Through the pandemic, Piñon has been working from home, editing and mixing a multitude of animated series including "Rick and Morty," "Big Mouth," "Star Trek: Lower Decks," "Bless the Harts," Adult Swim's "Lazor Wulf" and "Tigtone," Hulu's "So- lar Opposites," and more. "When the COVID lockdown began, 90% of our projects kept going. Even though everybody was being forced to work remotely, deadlines didn't change. We had our delivery dates and we needed to hit them," said Piñon. After trying several remote collabora- tion options, Piñon chose Evercast. One main reason was Evercast's scalability. "You can scale your video and audio settings to where they're going to work. I host the sessions, and once I got the bandwidth I needed, I was able to scale everything up: scale the audio all the way up, crank up the video, and add more people. It made a huge difference, for me and our clients. We weren't worrying about technical flaws, like sync issues or glitchy video. Our clients could focus on the creative part of it and that's really what we wanted to do." Having the ability to host up to 20 participants reliably, with high-res audio and video playback, was important for Piñon. While working on the CBS All-Ac- cess animated series "Star Trek: Lower Decks," at times Piñon needed upwards of eight people to join the session. "We'd have creatives, the composer, music edi- tor, production team, and editorial. There were so many signature elements within the program that we really had to nail them down in real-time, in context, and decide if we liked it or not. I couldn't have done it any other way," he said. One of Piñon's favorite aspects of Evercast is their 24/ 7 tech support, which has helped to guide him through the process of sending his Pro Tools out- put (audio and video) through their EBS streaming player. They also helped Piñon tweak the settings within the EBS soft- ware (like video bitrate, codecs, audio bitrates, and so on) to deliver maximum quality audio and video to the clients. Piñon notes that a high-res output s t a r t s w i t h a h i g h - r e s i n p u t , s o h e requests a ProRes video file from the picture editors for reference, preferring to downgrade the video on his end (if needed) using the EBS. He said, "This way I'm pretty confident that the clients and creatives are looking at the highest quality that we can provide. We do a test before our mix review, set the output to the highest resolutions the connection Konrad Piñon.