Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1491103
44 S P R I N G 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y changed, recognizing that this is entertainment and we needed SFX. How many tracks of sound did you end up with in your session? There were about 700 tracks, including the stems. Since this was a single person mix, I really utilized SoundFlow, which has been a huge help. I use multiple iPads all programmed with SoundFlow and it helped navigate through such a large session. You must have a fairly powerful system to be able to handle the number of tracks and plugins and DSP required to run a session of that density and play back the stems. When I started this project, I actually had a 2009 Mac Pro with three HDX cards. At the end of 2019, I transitioned into a 2019 28-core Mac Pro with three HDX cards and 384 GB (not a typo) of RAM. That helped tremendously in handling the processing power needed for a session this big. Even though the planetarium had a powerful Pro Tools system, I had to pre-bake a few things before taking the session to the planetarium as their system was running native with no cards and I had to make some minor DSP adjustments. How were your source tracks delivered to you? The sound design by Jon Schell was delivered in 5.1 and stereo with mono tracks and separate LFE enhance tracks in a Pro Tools session. The music was done in Logic and Dan Radlauer delivered 70 stereo pairs of virtual instrument music splits plus a 60-piece orchestra of live stems. Did you do any of the sound design work? Jon Schell did most of the sound design while I did the occasional sweetening to enhance the mix, mostly for panning and low-end elements for the LFE. Let's talk about the final adjustments that were made at the planetarium versus the prep you did at Sound Striker Post. Sure. A lot of the legwork was done at my studio. We would have the composers and producers come to the studio and listen to how the music and sound design was working with temp narration and see where we could feature the music or sound design. Once we were finished with the pre-dubs, the only time we could get into the planetarium was at night because pre-pandemic, they were running shows for the public all day. So, we would be able to mix from 9:30 p.m. to around 3 a.m. The translation from my studio to the planetarium worked really well but there were areas that we had to work on. We use JBL's in my studio and the