Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544300
on it at our shop. I could not have been happier. No more sprockets but it was $125,000 a seat with a one gigabyte drive that cost $10,000! We had 20 editors on Moviolas … and me on our first digital editing system. SSS: I remember that. I remember the Fairlight being like that as well. When did Weddington go to Pro Tools? MM: The funniest thing is, we had just spent this big chunk of change, we had taken a big lease out for it and it was killing us. Within months of that purchase, the first iteration of Pro Tools was released. It was eight tracks and it was $7,000! Richard (Anderson) and Stephen (Flick) and I looked at each other and thought, "well, let's try that." Soon thereafter, Dave Whitaker, a great sound editor in his day, and a dear old friend of both of ours, was cutting circles around me. He was across the hall and doing twice the output, and because it was so much more efficient, and for a 10th of the price. That was crushing. We ended up selling that Screen Sound only two or three years later for $5,000 to a buyer who used it as parts for his seven other Screen Sounds, ones that were falling apart. We went in with both feet with Pro Tools. At our busiest, we probably had 50 systems. SSS: That's where I learned Pro Tools, I got certified on Pro Tools 1.2. I started at Weddington, I was part of the Weddington transition between mag. Street Fighter was half mag, half digital, and they kept Foley on mag for the longest time. MM: I can't remember why. Why was that? SSS: We were doing a single-track recording, one track and one cue at a time. In single-track mode, we recorded to 24-track. We could play back all the stuff together, but we cut on single stripe for the longest time. Did you know that I was the one who created cueing on Pro Tools? MM: What do you mean 'created cueing'? SSS: That you can cue on Pro Tools. You can have your cues—the beginning of the cue, and the end of the cue, what the name of the cue is, and it would be like making region groups in the session. We call them "ghost files." MM: Ah, that's genius! I had no idea. SSS: And then what would happen is all the Foley mixer had to do was click on the ghost file and record, click record, click record … on the beginning, and the end was already established in the ghost file. We did the three beeps prior to every cue. I created a region called three beeps, and the three beeps would go wherever the cue was and repeat for each cue. I was the one who figured it out. MM: I had no idea you had done that! Well, that's why you were the Queen of Foley, among other things. SSS: Thank you. I'm very proud of that, by the way. I would like to discover the part of Mark Mangini that wasn't always that successful and wasn't always the achiever. MM: I'm really not like that as a person. I don't now, nor ever did, aspire to achieve. I'm more of a meanderer. I like experiencing things. I often choose paths that provide insight or education or emotional fulfillment before they might provide a professional goal or achievement. But I am driven by challenge because I want to believe that I can solve problems, things that irk me. For example: I noticed early in my career that after an audience preview, the filmmakers would gather for a postmortem of our movie. This is typical. They'd talk about what the audience liked and didn't like. They "I have a favorite phrase: Sound is cinema's unspoken narrative. Film editors travel in unspoken narrative constantly, ever deciding how the timing of a cut speaks to a character's intention. Are they impatient, thoughtful, reactionary? The editor makes these choices without the use of words. Unspoken narrative." 24 M PS E . O R G