Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/7010
32 Post • February 2010 www.postmagazine.com ever yone is being asked to do twice as much in half the time. So if you have a se- quence with 16 explosions, for example, the ML4000 limiter is great for keeping it at -6 or whatever arbitrar y number it needs to be under. In my completely biased opin- ion, the ML4000 stands out from the com- petition with features like a knee control and low-latency operation. For people who still want dynamics in their productions, you can dial up this knee control and return some dynamics to your mix while the lim- iter still maintains your output ceiling." FutzBox is ver y much for post, he says, and is used on ABC's Lost for a variety of di- alogue effects. "By incorporating the distor- tion, filtering and Simulated Impulse Re- sponse [SIM] models of FutzBox into their production, they created authentic sounding futz-effects for all the wireless communica- tions," explains McDowell. Another popular plug-in they make is a convolution reverb called Revolver. "It's as flexible as a synthetic reverb, but it uses con- volution as its primary engine," he says."Con- volution reverb technology is the idea that you can capture an impulse response (known as an IR), which is kind of like sam- pling or taking a snap shot of an acoustic space or other signal path. From this tech- nique you can obtain reverb sounds from places like the Taj Mahal or your kitchen.Then using the computer power of today, you can play back that experience so that when the sound comes into the reverb, it will replicate that audio snap shot of the acoustic space." McDowell offers some insights into what the future for audio post may bring. He an- ticipates a significant trend in video gaming with the growing need to make sound effects variable based on game play. "An- other interesting technol- ogy trend is how many movies are turned into video-games," he says. "The people making the sound effects for a movie only need to make them one way, for one time. But, the gaming industry now needs many variations of the sound effect used in the movie. For the games, they want to have all the sound effects available in realtime and configured in such a way that they can be changed based on what the player does. So, realtime processing of effects in gaming is going to be a pretty inter- esting market. It will no longer be enough just to have the sound effects from the movie in the game anymore. Those sounds will need to be controlled based on the player, or 10 players, of the game." P E N T E O Penteo (www.penteosurround.com), founded by John Wheeler and located in the San Francisco Bay area, provides both a product and a service for converting stereo mixes to 5.1 surround sound. The process works with any stereo master from any year. Wheeler explains, "The name Penteo is a link together of the words pentagon and stereo. We specialize in taking stereo mater- ial and converting it to 5.1." The idea stemmed from Wheeler's love for listening to music in a unique way. "It is something that I star ted working on as an experiment about five or six years ago. I have always been fascinated by listening to left minus right of stereo recordings. In many old recordings from the 1960s, there would be only hard left, hard center and hard right. It was always fascinating to hear how much you could dissect and uncover musical per- formances that were buried under the lead vocal. Through a lot experimentation and a lot of math, we came upon a method that enabled us to break down stereo based on its pan pot position and turn it into 5.1" The process is based on deducing the pan pot positions of the original stereo recording. Wheeler explains the presenta- tion of this idea: "Our real first demonstra- tion of it was at the 2008 AES show in San Francisco. We showed it purely as a service. You would FTP a stereo file to us, then we would do the 5.1 conversion in our lab and then FTP it back to you. That was our first incarnation as a business. That's how we wound up doing the motion picture Watch- men for Chris Jenkins at Universal. They had bunch of songs, like "The Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" and the classical piece "The Ride of the Valkyries." Jenkins had heard what I was up to and gave me a few files to process. We have done several mo- tion pictures purely as a service." Around December 2008,Wheeler started working on a piece of realtime hardware. "That's because there are many TV shows broadcasting live in 5.1, like spor ts," he ex- plains. "We took the algorithm and, through a couple of months wor th of work, turned it into a realtime processor that is specifically designed to do live broadcast production." In today's computer-based world, he has no plans for a plug-in version anytime soon. Penteo is only available as either a hardware device or through its audio service of con- ver ting stereo to 5.1 in the lab. Wheeler prefers the audio service over the hardware whenever possible. "The quality level is slightly different. When you send your file to us, it can be quite complicated to process. If we are doing a major motion picture, or a 5.1 music CD, or anything that is going through tremendous audio scrutiny, we pre- fer to do it in the lab. That's simply because we forensically make sure that the stereo master we have is flying straight and level. We check for any mistakes that could have happened from the time it left the original recording studio, which could have been 25 or 30 years ago. We prefer to take that ma- terial under our own wing and use all the knowledge and tools we have developed in- ternally to make it the best 5.1 version pos- sible. It's done by hand and it's a painstak- ingly-careful process to make sure that what we give back to our clients is master quality." He says the best part about all Penteo al- gorithms is that no matter how they are done, they all down-mix back perfectly to the original stereo mix. "We are not doing any sort of bandwidth filtering, we are not doing any delays, and no phase rotation. All we are really doing, to illustrate the point, is slicing a block of cheese into five pieces.You are able to hear the individual pieces in their separate 5.1 positions. And when you down-mix back to stereo, it's like re-melting the cheese back into its original form. There is absolutely no difference when you put it all back." When conver ting older stereo masters, the available technology during the time of Smart Post Sound has opened a Penteo/RT-equipped dubbing stage. Pictured (L-R) is Smart Post's Joe Melody, Matt Preble and Tamara Johnson and Penteo's CMO Chris Stone and Sasha Owen. Unsung Heroes PHOTO: DAVID GOGGIN