Post Magazine

September 2015

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/571027

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 45 of 51

IN THE MIX www.postmagazine.com 44 POST SEPTEMBER 2015 aving been an audio engineer for the better part of two decades, I've been witness to a sea change in the way music is recorded, mixed, marketed, and consumed. Not only has the business model changed drastically — from the age of the big studio and album-driven sales to the Internet revolution and the growth of online music services — but technology advances have completely redefined the industry. With the latest innovations in software and hardware, what we're able to accomplish now, both technically and creatively and within extremely limited timeframes, is nothing short of astounding. In 1989, I opened an audio post production facility, Levels Audio, in Hollywood, CA, to address a shortage of independently owned and operated post audio facilities, which at that time were fleeing to Santa Monica and the west side of Los Angeles in a rash of corporate mergers. As the traditional music business model began to deteri- orate, migrating into commercial post seemed like the ideal move. In addition to discovering that I could still mix music in the post world, I was able to expand into longer-form television projects — a solid niche that has served us well ever since. Levels Audio began working on American Idol in 2003 and it remained one of our most active clients for many years — along with ongoing projects for Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, MTV, VH1, HBO, Comedy Central, and The Disney Channel. In 2006 we expanded into a 14,000-square-foot facility specializing in 5.1 audio post, music production, and sound design services. Levels Audio in- cludes seven ICON–equipped 5.1 audio dub stages along with an ADR/Foley stage, three audio editorial suites, two visual ef- fects suites, and a central machine room. Since audio post is the final stop on the train before a program goes to air, we continually deal with "out of time/out of money" scenarios. Every minute counts, and to handle the volume of shows we are turning out every week, we've had to develop facility-wise workflows that en- able us to work as efficiently as possible. Audio upmixing is a great example of a workflow that is extremely important MEETING 5.1 UPMIX CHALLENGES AT LEVELS AUDIO H and yet requires the utmost efficiency, especially since we mix 95 percent of our projects in 5.1 surround. The Voice, American Idol, Drunk History, Teen Wolf, Awkward, and The Bachelor are just a few of the programs for which we upmix the music. In rare cases, we're lucky enough to receive individual stems of the score from the composers that allow us to cre- ate an excellent 5.1 field without upmix- ing. Most of the time, however, we're re- quired to upmix stereo music tracks into 5.1, which can yield numerous issues with downmix compatibility since consumer set-top boxes typically play out stereo downmixed from broadcast 5.1. We've had middling luck with most downmix plug-ins, which often destroy the integ- rity of the original track or, in one of my big pet peeves, react poorly to songs with vocals or instruments with long re- verb decay times. Additionally, many up- mix plug-ins create phase issues. If care is not taken with downmix compatibility, networks will often kick upmixed music back during the QC process, disrupting the schedule and budget. Given all these considerations, we naturally jumped at the chance to be one of Nugen Audio's beta customers for its brand-new Halo Upmix tool. Halo Upmix is based on Nugen's proprietary process- es for creating a stereo-to-5.1/7.1 down- mix-compatible upmix for television and film productions. Among all of the sonic upmixing tools and plug-ins we've tried, Halo is by far the best. It not only works transparently and sounds great, but it handles phase and downmix compatibili- ty extremely well. With Halo, we can target various up- mix goals, including full stable surrounds, exact downmix matching, and/or full dialogue isolation. Even better, the tool's center channel control and management enables us to fine tune a surround mix and create intricate mixes when there is no access to the original stems. Halo performs powerful realtime analysis of the original stereo material by identifying and extracting locational cues, which enables us to extend the sound panora- ma naturally without introducing artificial reverb, chorusing, or delay. With nine Emmy Awards under our belt, we feel we're doing something right — but we know we can't rest on our laurels. Our biggest ongoing challenge is the limited amount of time we are given to perform the amount of work needed to make shows sound great. Partners like Nugen Audio offer the solution because they help us continuously adapt work- flows and leverage the latest technologi- cal advancements. We'll not only keep using Halo on some of our most success- ful programs but we're also planning to migrate all of our stages to their ISL 2 inter-sample peak limiter. BY BRIAN RIORDAN FOUNDER LEVELS AUDIO LOS ANGELES WWW.LEVELSAUDIO.COM BETA TESTING NUGEN'S HALO PLUG-IN

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Post Magazine - September 2015