A close friend and mentor, Chris McKeith, now runs the Audio department at one of Australia’s leading film schools, AFTRS. He asked me if I could pass on they are running a short course on location recording and enrolments have just opened up.

Head on over to this link to check out the details.

So, next came the back of the room. It was a totally irregular shape, so I felt a bit of symmetry was in order. By cutting off the back corner of the room, I could get a more “understandable” or “consistent” acoustic behind me, and the pay off being a small space to use as a machine room; Luxury!

The other decision had to be where to draw the line of this rear wall. There is a door on one side preventing me from making a true “coffin shaped” trapezium based room, so I erred as close to it as I could get. The wall finishes in line with the centre position of the room. This created some modes to deal with later on, but visually it orients you in the room and I felt it was a necessary trade off.

First came the new frame for the wall, slightly more complex due to a door – Ive never hung a door before, so that intimidated the crap out of me to begin with.

Frame went up easily…

Door got hung…bit of a gap around it, but I figured that would “come out in the mix”…(sighs)

The wall then get some 13mm gyprock on the facing side. I then stuff it with batts and gyprocked the inner wall as well.

Then came the paint!

Once the grey paint was done on the side walls, I took down the projection screen (which arrived in the meantime and was mounted, simply to get it out of the way) and put up some small absorption behind my speakers to minimise some comb filtering off the wall behind them

Once that was done and the screen remounted, I was absolutely dying to put up some of the acoustic treatment that had arrived some time earlier. RPG acoustics make some great diffusors, the ones I was advised towards were the full 7inch high skylines. The come unpainted/flocked in natural white, and that was our ceiling colour, so I went straight to them, found a mirror and a willing helper (thanks James and Tim) and found those points of first reflection on the ceiling and put up the skylines. With those in place, the screen up and the paint on, the room was starting to feel like a place to work…

More acoustics analysis came next and some home bass traps needed to be made up… More on that next time. Thanks for reading!

]]> http://brentheber.com/2010/03/01/sumsound-build-part-2/feed/ 2 http://brentheber.com/2010/02/25/its-different-on-the-other-side-of-town/ http://brentheber.com/2010/02/25/its-different-on-the-other-side-of-town/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:31:55 +0000 Brent http://brentheber.com/?p=185 I just had to share a rant about this…

So Steven Spielberg gets some questions over at Soundworks, but I love how he rounds out the interview, when asked his thoughts on the MPSE organisation and the sound craftpeople he responds:

” (they)…are a great bunch of guys and girls and I’m very relaxed around them because, making a movie is really tense, you’ve got a schedule and there’s responsibility and you’ve got to get it all shot, but post production for me, that’s like a vacation, because y’know we don’t have the same pressure… So I think there’s more of a relaxed repore between the director and the sound editors and the music editors because we’re kindof …you never coast but we are on the downhill of a long ordeal and I think we all feel that together and we get to see the result together…”

I’m sorry? WTF? I’m pretty sure that there’s a bunch of sound editors and mixers reading this wondering when the last time was they felt like they were on “the downhill” and almost cruising towards the finishing line in a relaxed frame of mind!

Last I heard most folks are dealing with picture edit taking longer than expected, less time to do a good job, oh and then there’s that revision 4 of the final locked picture that you need to reconform to…

Picture recuts, shrinking bundgets (or sound budgets becoming VFX budgets), equipment maintenance when you’re being paid less each year than the year prior, and people like Spielberg wanting “holographic sound” – who’s going to pay for the sound stages to upgrade their gear to make that holophonic soundtrack Steven??

So many folks have embraced Facebook, that dreaded viral entity, that I have myself turned to it to organise events.

So the homepage for the SPTUG is link here, you’ll need to be logged into FB to get to it.

If you are in Sydney, please become a fan so you will be made aware when events are posted etc

First meeting penciled in for Tues 16th March, 630pm, somewhere near UTS most likely. Hopefully my Sydney readers can make it!

The room at Trackdown that I put my name on was a fairly large sized room, the problem though was its irregularity – there was only one right angle in the place and everything else was rather dali-esque. The solution to this was to firstly build a false wall at the front of the room to turn it into an even sided trapezium within the mix area – that was, after deciding where the front of the room would actually be!

So first I had to put up that false wall (red bit in the drawing above), by building a frame and to make it totally effective, fill the void behind it with as much insulation as possible…

Then came speaker stands, and being on a budget, but needing them fairly high to put the speaker throw into the middle of the screen and above my console monitors, I went for PVC tubing, sand and threaded rod construction. Each tube took a bag of sand (about 20kgs) so each stand is about 60kgs (120lbs) and is coupled with the floor and speaker using dome bolts on the threaded rod, which is pulling the top and bottom plates together.

Speaker stand construction

Finished Stands with my DSMs on it – lined up the acoustic centre of the speakers

Then the acoustically transparent projection screen – the flagship from Oz theatre screens with their top of the line fabric. This was mounted on another floor to ceiling frame…

The frame from floor to ceiling

The 3.5m wide 16:9 screen in place

You can also see my beautiful custom made desk in that shot. Scott from Zellers Furniture in Sydney made this gorgeous piece, with two brass style plates on either side of the main D-Command. These plates are removable and a precise width, so a second 24 fader configured D-Command can be placed into the desk for dual operator mixes, if ever the need arises!

The desk prior to “brassing” and french polishing

The Desk in place with the DCommand dropped in

Next came a second false wall for a machine room at the back. I held off on putting that wall in place until after the desk was in, to get a better feel for the dimensions of the room. The desk is 3m wide!

More to come soon! Hopefully this is an interesting pictorial diary of the construction…

]]> http://brentheber.com/2010/02/13/sumsound-build/feed/ 1 http://brentheber.com/2010/02/09/construction-and-the-state-of-the-industry/ http://brentheber.com/2010/02/09/construction-and-the-state-of-the-industry/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:41:58 +0000 Brent http://brentheber.com/?p=137 So it’s been a week since I left Avid Digidesign and the work has been non-stop!

Finally the room has a lovely coat of paint on it, my XLR connectors arrived today and tomorrow I’ll be making up cables and setting up the machine room in its final configuration (at least for launch!). The RPG acoustic panels arrived today too, some gorgeous red hemifusors

They are all in my machine room until I finish cabling…(see picture above!)

I was reading Screenhub the other day and noted an interesting storyby Nathan Wellington about the future of Aus post production. The article went on to comment on “wellywood” and how SAFilm are building their new facility as well and yet for all this infrastructure what type of movies do we make and how well do we compete on an international level? At Encore, another article was talking about the state of our studios in Aus.

Particularly interesting was Wellingtons comment on the world of HD and the technology evolution over the last few years; “I see the Australian Post industry struggle to keep pace with these developments. Australia has the talent without the exposure to this ‘bleeding edge’ technology find’s it difficult to gain the appropriate experience global productions demand.”

I must admit, reading this I felt pretty good, knowing that Trackdown, myself and Cutting Edge upstairs are all very much on top of the international tech trends into HD production and using the latest gear to get the job done quickly, efficiently and to a high quality. The video satellite system I’m putting in to collaborate/communicate with video editors is one of only about 4 in Aus, whereas it’s well adopted in other major film lots like Sony, Warners, Paramount and even China Film (where they have a vid sat on every PT HD system to speed up their workflow!). Well I guess I’ll open the doors next week to show folks through and we’ll see what they think of this bleeding edge technology and if it’s a case of “producers want it but facilities havent upgraded” OR do producers NOT want it, dont “get it” and aren’t prepared to pay extra for it? Which was the case with surround sound for TV in Aus for the longest time – it needed studio upgrades, the studios charged a premium for surround and producers for the most part, chose to ignore it and kept getting stereo product crafted to keep costs down.

I guess I’ll find out next week…

“Sumsound At Trackdown” – an affordably priced ICON mixing room on the Fox lot at Sydney.

An "unfinished" Sumsound at Trackdown front wall

Lots of techy details coming…feel free to skip if you’re not into it…

Heart of the studio is an 8 core “Nehalem” HD3Accel rig with a D-Command ES 24 sitting in a lovely custom made desk running lots of plugs; McDSP, Sonnox, SoundToys, Waves 360, Brainworx, URS amongst others. Attached to that system is then a Video satellite (8 core Xeon) running Media Composer but it also loads up PTLE for HD Quicktime workflows (ProRes, DVCPro etc)

The video satellite would be silly unless we could show that picture nicely – so, a 150′ (3.5m wide) 16″9 projection screen with the LCR speakers mounted behind. Responsible for display of the HD image is a current generation Sony BRAVIA projector. This projector is rather massive weighing in close to 10kgs but it’s ridiculously quiet! (Thankfully!)

Bass management is being handled by the Waves 360 bundle, but interesting the sub channel is then split through a crossover into two subs. The idea here being dual subs, time and phase aligned and positioned carefully should give a smoother bottom end in the room, rather than a single point source. Room EQ curves are then through the Serato RANE 31 band graphic plugin suite. Benefit being we can tune the room to flat, small room XCurve or Large room XCurve, and play around with them until we find the best translation to the larger rooms in town like Soundfirm, Deluxe or Audioloc.

Monitoring, well, you could accuse me of being a company man…my near fields for several years have been the co-designed PMC/Digidesign RM2s. I love the transmission line design and the incredibly smooth bottom end. Then the satellites I’ve gone with the new DSM series. 4 x DSM2s and a DSM3 centre. What I dig about the DSMs is the great imaging but also the filter section on the back – you can really go to town tailoring these speakers to your own needs.

The room is psuedo “coffin shaped” – 6m deep and about 7m at is widest, an even sided trapezium making up the front of the room and then the rear walls are joined in the middle behind the mix position. To place the mixer as far back from the LCRs as possible (for theatre translation) we’re using a fair amount of diffusion on the rear wall, some on the ceiling and some on the first reflection points on the side walls, and then appropriate amounts of absorption to tailor the reverb time to our liking.

So that’s Sumsound! We’re at the point of painting now, then comes the acoustics treatment(mounting RPG “Skylines” and “Hemifusors”) and calibration. We’ve taken “before” measurements of the room, and will take several measurements as we progress and I’ll post some updates as we go along – hopefully you readers are as interested in the real world effects of acoustic treatment with non-parallel walls as I am…??

Hope you’re all having a good Jan 2010 – back to work for me, tomorrow!

Lots of great video interviews with some of the biggest names in sound design and audio post.

http://soundworkscollection.com/

There will then be a follow up 110 course Feb 8-10

Info, pricing and online booking form linked here

It’s been an AWFULLY long time since Ive updated the blog and the reason was fairly simple: The site got “hacked” and I haven’t had time to figure out how to fix it!

So, a new year, a new look and lots of other bits on the horizon…

I’ll be finishing up with Avid Digidesign in January. I’ve been with the company for nearly 7 years and it’s been a great ride but I’ve desperately felt the need to get back to “the craft” and do some mixing! That said, the local management have extended the offer for me to stay involved with training and clinics and seminars, so Aus/NZ engineers, hopefully you’ll still see a bit of me flying the Avid Audio flag!

What’s this about mixing? Yes, I’ve been working hard on the weekends building false walls and getting desks built and will soon have an ICON mix room to call my own on the Fox Studios lot in Sydney. This wouldnt be possible with the support of my business partners, Trackdown Scoring Stage. The studio is called “Sumsound at Trackdown” – more on that in the future, I’ve been taking photos of the build process and I’m keen to post a bit about the acoustics design and analysis. David Spargo of Praxis Acoustics has been the guiding light behind the room’s sound.

One other change for me: as most of you can tell, I love to pass on a bit of knowledge and the local Pro School at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS Pro School) have engaged me to present the Digi curriculum throughout the year. I’m looking forwards to working with the students there in between mixing and production work.

So thats all the new stuff from me (apart from my engagement 6 months ago and buying my first house 2 months ago)!

More regular services are to continue throughout the year, so stay tuned, Happy New Year and hope you had a great holiday season!