Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/466366
www.postmagazine.com 31 POST FEBRUARY 2015 he gear doesn't make the engi- neer, but the right tools can make his or her work/life much easier. Smooth sessions make happy clients. Being able to handle any client request, and ending the session on time, is just part of the job — especially when working with adver- tising clients, where four or fi ve sessions might be booked for a single day, or when mixing an hour-long TV show on a strict two-day schedule. If the gear is slowing you down, or it can't handle the job, may- be it's time to move on. Here are some tried and true audio tools recommended by experienced audio post pros. IZOTOPE RX 4 ADVANCED Chris Afzal is a mixer/sound designer at Sound Lounge in New York City (www. soundlounge.com), where he's been working under the gun for three years. Fast turn-around times are simply part of the job. Sound Lounge provides award-winning post sound services. The company's agency work includes brands like Cadillac, Budweiser and McDonalds. When you've got to crank out the hits, there's no time for fi ddling. Afzal's tool- box includes iZotope's RX 4 Advanced, which he recently used to help balance noisy production dialogue with pristine ADR in a fi ve-minute Western Union Web video. He says, "The iZotope RX4 Advanced is amazing. The EQ Match and Ambience Match features were a massive time saver." iZotope (www.izotope.com), based in Cambridge, MA, has become a post household name. The RX 4 Advanced can be found in studios across the industry, from major fi lm mixing facilities to boutique post houses. Aff ordable, powerful, and user-friendly, it's a tool that many post audio pros are turning to for dialogue restoration and noise reduction. New features include EQ Match (match EQ of diff erent audio recordings), Am- bience Match (create consistent envi- ronment noise for diff erent recordings), Leveler (automatically balance out levels of dialogue/voiceover), and Loudness (monitor/adjust mix levels to meet broadcast specs). The Western Union Home Cooked: Bringing Home A Little Closer video (which can be found on YouTube) tells the story of fi ve New Yorkers and their connections to family and culture through food. Each interview was recorded on-lo- cation at diff erent places in New York City. In addition to the varying location noise, the ADR was recorded at several diff erent studios. Afzal says, "I had two hours to turn around a seamless mix for the fi ve-minute video, and deciphering the OMF took an hour of that time." He notes the dialogue was all over the map in terms of background noise and frequency spectrum. That's where Afzal was able to really put the iZotope RX 4 Advanced to work. "Everyone turns to the iZotope RX for noise reduction, as I did. However, the new EQ Match and Ambience Match built into the RX 4 Advanced allowed me to quickly forge ahead without getting caught up with inevitable tinkering." Using EQ Match, Afzal selected an audio fi le to use as the master EQ setting and then applied the learned EQ from that fi le to the other audio clips in the project. Next, he used the Ambience Match to extract the ambience from the most background-prominent audio clip and applied that sampled ambience to the ADR tracks. Afzal adds, "Thirty minutes later, I had a beautifully-con- structed dialogue track that sounded as if it was recorded in one environment. I then had a leisurely 30 minutes left for client tweaks." AVID SYSTEM 5/TC ELECTRONIC SYSTEM 6000 Re-recording mixers Joe Earle, CAS, and Doug Andham, CAS, have spent the last fi ve years working together at Tech- nicolor at Paramount. Their past work includes popular TV series like Dexter and Castle. The duo were recently been nominated for two CAS Awards for Out- standing Achievement in Sound Mixing for the TV movie The Normal Heart, and the series American Horror Story: Mon- sters Among Us. They currently mix Glee for Fox, the new HBO series Together- ness (created by off -beat writers/direc- tors Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass), and an upcoming comedy series for Netfl ix ti- tled Grace and Frankie, which stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Technicolor at Paramount (www. technicolor.com) is located in the heart of Hollywood at the Paramount Pic- tures studio lot. The sound facility, with its award-winning post sound mixers, editors, sound designers and supervising sound editors, handles projects from blockbusters and indie fi lms to TV and Web series. One of the biggest challenges re-recording mixers face on TV series is time. Run-times for cable and Web series, where there are no commercial breaks, can be upwards of 54 minutes an episode, and a typical show schedule allots a week or less for the post sound edit and mix. "Our timeframe on shows is ridiculous, considering we are doing one-hour shows, a full 52 minutes, and having to mix and then fi x in a two-day schedule. When you put that up against some of the fi lms out there that get eight to 10 weeks for edit and mix, you can see we're really under the gun. If it wasn't for excellent production mixers, like Philip T Technicolor's (L-R) Andham and Earle, along with TC Elec- tronic's System 6000 used for show's like Fox's Glee (far left). Sound Lounge's Chris Afzal regularly calls on Izotope's RX4 Advanced.