News
StageOne’s new DFCs deliver spectacular results for Australia
23 December 2008
AMS Neve DFCs at StageOne Sound, Deluxe Australia's new multi-million dollar mixing stage, debuted with a marathon mixing job for Australia
StageOne Sound – Deluxe Australia’s new 1,500 cubic metre mixing sound stage – is impressive. Representing a A$4.5 million investment in local sound post production, it has given the Australian film industry a serious, high quality facility that, says Deluxe’s General Manager, Anthos Simon, ‘can easily match anything in the US or Europe’.
The credentials are all there. Acoustic design by Charles M Salter Associates, which numbers Skywalker, Dolby and Fox among its clients; a 10 metre wide screen; seven sound edit rooms in addition to the main stage; and Dolby Premier accreditation. ‘Both international and local producers are now starting to see and appreciate quality and exceptional performance,’ Simon adds.
The centrepiece is a 72-fader AMS Neve DFC with more than 400 digital input channels, making it the largest and most advanced film mixing console in Australia. And the console has just had the workout to end all workouts – a 15 week marathon on Baz Luhrmann’s $130m epic, Australia.
Predubbing and premixing of Foley and FX had taken place in Deluxe’s Stage 2, also newly kitted out with a 24-fader DFC, and refitted as an acoustic match for StageOne. For Australia, with the award-winning Hollywood team of Andy Nelson and Anna Behlmer having to keep their sound mixing options open until the last minute, it was also used for overflow.
But StageOne and its 72-fader DFC was the star of the show. ‘Anna was working 24 8-track stems for FX, atmospheres and Foley, while Andy was working six stems for dialogue,’ says Angus Robertson, StageOne’s Sound Manager. ‘David Hirschfelder’s score, mixed by Shawn Murphy, accounted for a further 96 tracks on 48 outputs.’ That amounted to 336 inputs even before taking account of reverb returns and inserts.
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‘What comes out the other end does sound bloody good. The Neve has helped put a buzz around the industry that there’s something big here.’ Angus Robertson |
The workload was huge. ‘We put in an average of 90 hours per week on each of the two stages for the last six weeks,’ he adds. ‘We were working seven day weeks, which meant no time off for the desks. To throw a new desk into a mix of 15 weeks duration just four weeks after commissioning is a fantastic achievement for everyone involved.’
The mix itself required the DFC to handle two 88-track, and one 64-track ProTools systems replaying FX stems, one 64-track ProTools system taking care of dialogue stems plus a 48-track ProTools system on music replay. ‘Then we hired in two further ProTools systems, a 16 as the dialogue fix-up machine, and a 24 for FX fix-ups, so that we didn’t have to go offline with the existing systems,’ says Robertson. ‘No downtime was a major factor. The only real delays were on initial set up days, because we were still learning,’ a process made easier, he says, ‘by Andy and Anna’s patience and invaluable experience and knowledge of the DFC. And the training and support provided by AMS Neve has been outstanding.’
The ability to handle jobs of this complexity has always been one of the DFC’s strengths, but in the final analysis what really counts is the sound.
‘What comes out the other end does sound bloody good,’ says Robertson. ‘The Neve has helped establish StageOne as a brand new entity prepared to take risks. It’s put a buzz around the industry that there’s something big here.’ A spectacular debut in every sense of the word, then.
