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www.postmagazine.com 35 POST JULY 2015 ing in Times Square and the Rockefeller Center area, city traffic is one of the biggest battles they fight on the dialogue tracks. "The city traffic is very busy and noisy. It's always an adventure trying to calm that down and get the dialogue to come through cleanly," says Pipitone. During the dialogue conform and edit, the iZotope RX 4 is used to clean up clicks, ticks and pops. Then Pipitone handles the main noise reduction using the iZotope RX 4 Denoiser and Waves W43 plug-ins. Additionally, Pipitone runs the dialogue through the FabFilter Pro-DS for de-ess- ing, and uses the iZotope Ozone EQ Match feature to help the ADR sit nicer with the production tracks. Loudness metering is handled by the Dolby Media Meter, and iZotope's Insight in the RX suite, depending on the dub stage. Originally, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was planned for broadcast on NBC, but after six episodes were edited and mixed, word came that the series would be on Netflix. While the loud- ness spec for NBC and Netflix are the same, and both required a 5.1 mix, the six episodes still needed to be remixed. "Netflix has no commercial breaks, and those first six shows were formatted with commercial breaks for air. In terms of story, they tried to tie things up before a commercial break, or leave a scene hanging. They couldn't just pull out the commercial break to make it work. They had to rethink the edit," explains Pipitone. Re-editing the episodes did have an up- side. Now free from broadcast time con- straints, the series creators had a chance to put back in jokes that were previously cut for time. "It'll be interesting to see how the writers approach Season 2 be- cause they'll have a little more freedom in terms of content than they could on network TV. So it will be fun to see how they change for Netflix." CATASTROPHE A series co-written by 'the funniest person on Twitter,' Rob Delaney? Yes, please! To be fair, that distinction was granted by Comedy Central in the Comedy Awards of 2012, but with- out having held any Comedy Awards ceremonies since, Delaney will forev- er rein supreme in that category. A Google search for 'the funniest per- son on Twitter' still comes up with his Twitter account as the first search result. Delaney and Irish actress/writer Sharon Horgan, who won two British Comedy Awards for her series Pulling, co-created, co-wrote and co-star in Catastrophe, an Amazon Originals series now available on Amazon Prime. The R-rated comedy tells the tale of a brief romantic fling that overshoots its mark when Sharon Morris, a schoolteacher in London, is accidentally impregnated by Boston ad exec Rob Norris, who is visit- ing on business. Rob moves to London while they try to sort out their delicate situation. Catastrophe first premiered on Channel 4 in the UK back in January. Suite TV's re-recording mixer on the series, Matt Baird, knew the series was headed for Amazon Prime while he was mixing at Channel 4. "Everyone was very excited about that because the viewer- ship is potentially massive," he says. From a technical standpoint, the mix created for air on Channel 4 is the same mix sub- mitted to Amazon Prime for streaming. "Often, when I mix international versions, we have to take the music out because there can be licensing issues. But for Catastrophe, they were able to keep all of the original music in it. The version we mixed for Channel 4 is the same version on Amazon Prime." Suite TV, located in London (www. suitetv.com), has a three-day sound edit and mix schedule for each Catastrophe episode. Baird's assistant, Dan Smith, spends one day prepping the tracks, and Baird spends one day premixing and de- signing before the final mix session on the last day. Catastrophe is edited in Pro Tools 11 and mixed in stereo through an Avid/ Euphonix MC5 Pro 16-fader console. Catastrophe is filmed in London, and production sound mixer Richard Munns had to contend with traffic noise on busy street scenes. Baird says, "He is definitely my favorite sound recordist. I always get beautifully recorded production tracks for everything he records. But even though they are beautifully recorded, it's still a bit of a challenge." Baird explains that in wide shots on the street, the boom mic picks up a lot of noise be- cause it can't get in close enough to the talent, and lav mics can sound weird if they're buried under clothes. Additionally, Delaney and Horgan had particular tastes about the choice of mics in a scene. The lav mics might sound like they're not coming from the scene. Or, the boom might sound too clean. "You never know how they're going to feel, so often I would mix a scene twice, once using the booms and once using the lav mics." This allowed Baird to demo a scene with both mic options right away. "The director, the producer, the talent, and the editor are all in the room approving the mix and mak- ing decisions. That's quite a lot of people, so just trying to negotiate that and make sure everybody was happy was a bit of a challenge." Baird's favorite part of the job is working with the dialogue tracks. "I really love going to town on them, and going through my processes and methods to get the very most I can out of them," he says. Baird uses iZotope RX for noise reduction, and its EQ Match feature to help smooth transitions between ADR and production lines. "We didn't do too much ADR for the series so sometimes we just tried very hard to make the production dialogue work. For noise reduction, I like to do multiple passes using different processes," says Baird. "You don't want to hear the cuts in the dialogue. You have to try and keep the atmospheres consistent." He used Audio Ease's Altiverb to help the dialogue sound as if it's coming through a wall, or from down the hall, and Audio Ease's Speakerphone plug-in to help sounds seem like they're coming through a phone or stereo speakers in the scene. "We wanted the show to have a very realistic sound. If there's a song playing on the radio in the background, we really made it feel like it's in the back of the scene. It doesn't feel like it's cheated in, as if it were part of the score. Keeping the realism was our main goal." Baird (top) and Smith spend three days on each episode of Catastrophe. AUDIO FOR WEB SERIES