ARTICLES

WRITTEN BY.....

MIX MAGAZINE Article "Tips from Todd-AO East" - by Frank Morrone & Bob Chefalas - Oct 1999

CANADIAN MUSICIAN Article "Before the Session" - by Frank Morrone -  Apr 1983

Frank Morrone
SOUND FOR FILM:  
​CHANGING THE SOUNDSCAPE

An interview with Frank Morrone

With Tom Inglesby

​
​Frank Morrone wears several hats; he is an award winning Hollywood audio professional who has mixed sound for high profile television shows and movies including The Strain, Boss, Sleepy Hollow, and the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings. He is President of the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) and has served as a Governor for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Morrone is a member of the Recording Academy and has served on the Board of Directors for the Cinema Audio Society. All in all, a sound guy first and foremost.

“I’ve been working in film since mag, then 24-track interlock, and from there to the DA-88s and digital dubbers,” Morrone recalls. “Now we are in Pro Tools land. The changes have been substantial in a fairly short period of time. And the changes keep on coming. The big changes now are just in workflow because our track counts are getting bigger, and our budgets are getting smaller, and our times are getting shorter. That’s been the biggest change.”

The computer has, indeed, taken over the processing of audio for film. “It’s all in Pro Tools,” acknowledges Morrone. “Even composers are all in Digital Performer and converting everything to Pro Tools for deliverables to the mix stage.”

Silly question: Are there things that have transpired with the equipment on the set; the microphones, the recording equipment? “Most certainly!” is his response. “Going from the Nagra days, we went to eight-track recorders, and now to the new Dolby Atmos capabilities. I was looking at a recorder that Sound Devices is putting out, a 64-track recorder for use on production sets. We’ve gone from a single boom and a lav to 64-track capability; that’s huge.”

The impact on production mixers has been equally great. “Their carts have become very, very sophisticated. I’ve been on sets where some of the transmitters they have on the lavs, the custom carts that they’ve built, the custom antennas that they’ve built to work with the number of wireless mics that they employ, are phenomenal. Production mixers have had to get very, very hip to technology, and it’s really impressive how they’ve adapted.”

Audio people are creative and innovative, just like their counterparts behind the cameras. “A couple of years ago, in Los Angeles, CAS held a parade of carts,” Morrone remembers. “We had 14 production mixers bring their carts to a set, and it was amazing to see how 14 different production mixers had 14 totally different carts. Some were on hard disk recorders. Some were in Pro Tools. There were no two carts that were identical. They were all like fingerprints. It was interesting to see how everybody really adapted their way of working with whatever technology they wanted to use.”

All the technology on a set points to heavier bandwidth needs and more computer power and that’s true of audio, as well. Morrone agrees, “Absolutely. Our computers need to operate at much higher speeds and handle much higher loads. We are getting up to 500 tracks of audio playing at one time. So Pro Tools has developed HDX cards, which are fantastic and much more powerful than the previous generation, the HD cards. With TDM systems, you were limited to how many voices you could have in Pro Tools. Now you can just deploy as many of these cards as you need, and every card gives you 256 voices per card. It’s pretty amazing.”

He continues, “Most of the processing power is on the card itself, so it doesn’t tax your computer’s processor so much. One generation ago, Pro Tools cards were doing a lot of the processing but so was your computer. Sometimes you would get that “wheel of death” on the Mac that we all so often fear; the rainbow spinning wheel of death, as we call it.”

Years ago, the audience wasn’t too concerned about the quality of sound in a film. It was possible to create sound on film that was much better than the reproducing capabilities of the theater. Then Ray Dolby came along and changed everything. Newer technologies are making the delivery systems, whether in theaters or in 4K television set, so much better that the original audio on the set has to be that much better. “No question about it,” Morrone says. “The analog-to-digital and the digital-to-analog converters have gotten so much better over the years, and they’re recording at higher sample and bit rates. Now the norm is 24-bit 48K. That’s just the norm. The tools are there.”

But tools are not always enough to overcome the barriers faced on real-world sets. “Production recordings are limited by the location,” admits Morrone. “If you’re shooting under the Brooklyn Bridge, there’s very little you can do about the ambient noise. There are ways to overcome that problem but it makes it that much more difficult when your ambient noise is 85 dB to start with.”

The current and next generation of audio engineers will have more technology to apply than ever before. But knowing when and how to apply it is going to make some winners. “I think the tools that people now have at their disposal are so much more than what we ever had—and there are so many new ones coming. The challenges aren’t with the gear; the challenges now are with workflow, just being able to do work quickly and still produce the quality that the client demands. The audience has gotten used to a much higher quality in their movies so that’s the challenge for everybody on the set. We’ve evolved to where we are now and somebody just coming into the business might not have the background old timers have—I’m not sure if they appreciate it as much as guys that have come up through mag. But whether they appreciate it or not, they have fantastic tools at their disposal right now.”

As the technology has evolved, so too have the educational approaches. Let’s hope that those entering the field take the time to learn the basics before jumping into the deep end. “You have to understand where you’ve been to know where you’re going,” counsels Morrone. “I think they should touch mag, they should know what a splicer is; it’s important to have a feel and a sense of how sound developed. I think that the teachers that I’ve seen at these schools are teaching them about signal flow and not overloading one stage of a preamp or any stages of the signal chain. That was one of the first things I learned, signal flow through a console. How to set up your line inputs and preamps on the microphones, keeping things all at unity so nothing would overload one stage or another.”
​
He adds, “I’ve done a lot of lectures, at universities and schools like Full Sail, and I think the kids are pretty sharp. I love it when I see how enthusiastic they are. When somebody is enthusiastic and wants to do the job right, I get encouraged, because I see both ends of it. You can also tell the students that are not as enthusiastic and may have a tougher time with it. Then there are the ones that are really sharp and on top of it. That makes me realize, the industry will be in good hands.”
Frank Morrone Antoine Fuqua
A closer look at Southpaw’s audio

​Director Antoine Fuqua & the film’s sound team talked about their process at Sony panel.
By Mel Lambert

​With Oscar buzz swirling around the film Southpaw, director Antoine Fuqua paid tribute to his sound crew on The Weinstein Company’s drama during a screening and Q&A session on the Cary Grant Stage at Sony Pictures in Culver City — the same venue where the film’s soundtrack was re-recorded earlier this year.
The event was co-moderated by Cinema Audio Society president Mark Ulano and Motion Picture Sound Editor president Frank Morrone; it was introduced by MPSE president-elect Tom McCarthy, Sony Pictures Studio’s EVP of post-production facilities.

The film depicts the decline and rise of former World Light Heavyweight boxer Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal), who turns to trainer Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker) for help getting his life back on track after losing his wife (Rachel McAdams) in a tragic accident and his daughter Leila (Oona Laurence) to child protection services. Once the custody of his daughter falls into question, Hope decides to regain his former life by returning to the ring for a grudge match in Las Vegas with Miguel “Magic” Escobar (Miguel Gomez).


“Boxing is a violent sport,” Fuqua told the large audience of industry pros and guests. “It’s always best to be ready to train or you’re going to get hurt! I spent a lot of time with the actors preparing them for their roles, and on Jake’s pivotal relationship with his daughter, but I had to make sure that Jake’s character wasn’t too consumed by anger. If you don’t control your anger [in the boxing ring] you cannot control your performance.”

Fuqua is best known for his work on Training Day, as well as The Replacement Killers, King Arthur, Shooter, Olympus Has Fallen and The Equalizer. He has also directed a number of music videos for artists such as Prince, Stevie Wonder and Coolio. The latter’s Gansta’s Paradise rap video won a The Young Generators Award.

Fuqua revealed that he has worked with most of the crew since Training Day (2001), his major directorial debut. “I like to give them a copy of the script as early as possible so that they can prepare” for the editorial and post process. “The script shows me the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the film,” stated production mixer Ed Novick. “It shows the planned environments and gives me an idea of how I can capture the sound. Most of the key boxing matches were staged as a TV event, like an audience watching an HBO Production, for example. I placed mics in the corners of the boxing ring, on the referee and around the audience areas.”

“I drove Ed crazy,” Fuqua said. “I gave the actors the freedom to improvise; Jake is that type of actor and he just went with it! But often we had no idea where we were heading — we were just riffing a lot of the time to get the fire going — but Ed did an amazing job of securing what we were looking for.”

“The actors were very cooperative and very accommodating to my needs,” said Novick. “They wore mics while fighting, and Jake and Rachel helped me get great tracks.”

“Sound secured from the set is always the best,” added the film’s dialog/music re-recording mixer, Steve Pederson. “There was very little ADR on this film — most of it is production.”

“We developed a wide range of crowd sounds, which became our medium shots,” explained supervising sound editor Mandell Winter, MPSE.

“We made a number of ambience recordings during HBO boxing matches in Las Vegas using microphones located around the perimeter of the boxing ring and under the balcony, as well as mounting a DPA 5100 surround mic below the press box and camera platforms,” added sound designer David Esparza, MPSE. “We covered every angle we could to place the action into the middle of the ring using the sound of real crowds, and not effects libraries.”
As sound effects re-recording mixer Dan Leahy stated: “We used a combination of close-up and distant sounds to accurately locate the audience in the center of the fighting action.”

“It’s all about using sound to reinforce the feeling and emotion of a scene,” stressed Fuqua.

Picture editor John Refoua, ACE, added that “the sound also drove the cut. We had an initial mix with pre-cut effects — the final mix evolved with effects being cut at different audio frequencies to heighten the crowd’s excitement. It was an amazing process to witness, to have the soundtrack evolve during that period.”
“You could feel the heart beat rising,” Fuqua added.

For the major fight at the end of the film, Refoua recalled that there were 12 cameras running simultaneously, including a handful of Canon EOS-5D DSLRs being assigned to the press. “That was a lot of footage,” he recalled. “We looked at it all a shot at a time, and made decisions about which one worked better than another.”
Originally, the final boxing match was choreographed for six rounds, “but we then cut it into 12,” continued Refoua. “We stretched and took alternate takes to build the other rounds.”

Regarding the use of a haunting score by the late James Horner, music editor Joe E. Rand said that the composer was drawn to the film because of the intimate father/daughter relationship, “and looked to different harmonic structures and balances” to reinforce that core element.

But the sound for one pivotal scene didn’t run as expected. “For the graveyard scene [between Gyllenhaal and Laurence, at the grave of the lead character’s wife] we lost most of the radio mics,” reported Winter. “We had a lot of RF hits and [because of camera angles] the boom mic wasn’t close to the actors. The only viable track was Oona [Laurence]’s lavaliere, which still had RF dropouts on it — iZotope RX saved the day.” “We needed to use iZotope to extract the signal from the RF noise,” recalled re-recording mixer Pederson. “Mandell [Winter] and I were surprised it worked out so well.”

“No director can make a movie by themselves,” concluded Fuqua. “The sound crew all came up with creative ideas that I needed to hear. After all, moviemaking is a highly collaborative effort.”

Mel Lambert is principal of Content Creators, an LA-based editorial service. He can be reached at mel.lambert@content-creators.com. Follow him on Twitter @MelLambertLA.
 
Picture
Why Digital Audio Restoration Software Is So Important To Music, Film, And TV
Forbes Magazine By Nick Messitte

There’s a film available for streaming on Netflix right now entitled The Conversation. You may have seen it; it’s a classic Francis Ford Coppola picture, released in between The Godfather one and The Godfather II.  The film follows Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman), an audio surveillance expert who, hired to tape and transcribe a conversation held in San Francisco’s Union Square, uncovers a murder plot.

As well as displaying classic 70s paranoia tropes, the film features a panoply of scenes in which Hackman futzes around with his tapes: he cranks knobs to filter out unnecessary noise; he strains to make the conversation intelligible.  Hackman frequently uses hefty pieces of analogue equipment to meet this task, and the more work he does (the more time he puts in, the more knobs he twiddles) the closer he gets to demystifying the tapes, and the closer he gets to figuring out who’s going to die.  It’s a great picture, but it’s dated in one respect: Hackman’s job would be undeniably easier now, in 2014, than it was in 1974.

You might not know it, but within the pro-audio industry, there has been a explosion of software innovation—a torrential downpour of audio plugins has brought about a sea change in the way professionals handle raw, unproduced audio before it ever hits the marketplace.  We’ve made it clear in other articles that many facets of the audio industry have been affected by this explosion, from drum production to vocal tuning.  But in my estimation, no nuts and bolts technology is more important these days than audio restoration software, for such technology impacts a larger (and more profitable) terrain than the music industry—it has also shaped the modern sound, workflow, and budgeting practices of film and television.

It’s a bit of a paradox: when employed correctly, you’d never hear this technology at work. However, this technology has become increasingly more necessary in all commercial media–or at any rate, any such media with a soundtrack.

In the music business, the necessity of this software can be attributed to the home recording revolution, which has brought a whole host of changes to the industry—some positive (free recording time for any artist almost anywhere, so long as they have invested in their own rig), others negative (studios shutting down across the country).  But at least one of these changes should have been apparent to everybody with functioning ears. That this change hasn’t been glaringly obvious only testifies to the efficacy of the technology being discussed:

Raw audio—the stuff an engineer receives months before you hear the finished product—can often be quite dirty. Dirtier than it used to be, at any rate.  What do I mean by “dirtier?”  Here’s an example: in an ideal world, a raw vocal track would sport the sound of vocals and nothing else. This would be a “clean” audio track.

But in a home recording studio, a vocal track can often showcase other, undesirable sounds—the noise of an air-conditioning unit, for instance, or the electrical hum of a power supply, or street noise (cars, sirens, etc), or indeed, people talking in other rooms.  Any such sound would render raw audio “dirty.”

In the halcyon days of recording, bands and artists alike would seek a proper studio setting in order to circumvent the problems of dirty audio.  But in these days of home recording—these days of shrinking budgets and declining payouts—one inevitably soldiers straight into land-mines of dirty audio.

The nature of home recording ensures this fact:  your typical bedroom boasts a window, and windows are portals to extraneous noise. Your typical bedroom also sports methods for regulating temperature; consumer-grade regulation units are a far cry removed from silent. Your typical bedroom probably hasn’t received the full complement of acoustic treatment (free floating floors, for example); if anything, it has been “deadened” with whatever you could muster, from professional fiberglass panels to packing blankets lining the walls.

All of this means a vocal sung in such a room will carry a specific ambiance, a bit of echo or reverberation which essentially makes up the sonic signature of your room.  Such sonic signatures often present difficulties when the usual techniques of mixing—equalization, compression, distortion, or spatial effects (reverb, delay)—are applied.  

Any one of these aforementioned situations can often lead to dirty audio, which, in turn, can often lead to engineers pulling their own hair out in frustration.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that within this new ecosystem of home studios, plenty of talented engineers have figured out their own ways of obtaining and delivering pristine audio.  However, even the best audio engineers can find themselves in impossible situations: What if the perfect take picked up the singer stomping on the microphone stand by accident? What if the bass player dug in harder than anticipated on his best performance, accidentally clipping (digitally distorting) the preamp in the process? What if an amazing live piano recording is marred by the coughs of one audience member?

This is where digital solutions come into play. Indeed, such solutions have been implemented across genre lines, from classical recordings (where an unwanted page-turn of sheet music might need to be removed) to country recordings (where the fret-squeal of an acoustic guitar might need to be subdued) to indie genres (where a vocal or a bass might sport unwanted hums, clicks, or pops due to the aforementioned problems) to pop recording (which is expected to sound pristine—even if the raw audio is dirty).

Indeed, for all the dirty audio recorded in this new home-recording paradigm, you’d never hear it on the pop charts. You can bet digital audio restoration plays a part of that.

Moving on from music industry matters, we can also see this software in high demand across film and television arenas, largely for reasons having to do with budgets and timeframes.

“I think the schedules are getting tighter,” Frank Morrone recently told me. He knows of what he speaks; a veteran Re-Recording mixer, his credits include the film Ransom and the TV show Lost. “We’ve adjusted our workflow to work within the parameters of those accelerated schedules.”

Yes, Morrone and his peers have taken full advantage of this software boom in order to handle the twin problems of “tighter schedules and tighter budgets.”

“We have better tools at our disposal,” Morrone told me, “they know we can do more.”

Indeed, the clearest examples of how engineers can now “do more” come from film and television: in such a universe, where the integrity of dialogue matters so much (in order to further plot, sell you product, or both), the fruits of digital labor are on their proudest display.

I’ve noticed that the proliferation of relatively cheap audio restoration software has had a democratizing effect on the sound of movies from the bottom up; cheaply made independent features looking for distribution deals on the film festival circuit now tend to sound just as good as big studio pictures—and for a fraction of the price.

I’m not the only one to notice this—but we get ahead of ourselves; for now, let’s address how cleaning up “dirty” audio worked before the days of digital, and let’s use the film world as our backdrop, as the flaws of dirty audio are easier to spot within the context of the history of cinema sound:

While clean audio in the music industry has historically been obtained in perfectly calibrated studios, the same cannot be said for film:  Capturing good location sound has always been fraught with peril, and audio captured on a soundstage often isn’t much better—such is the nature of the business.  But as anyone who’s read Sidney Lumet’s highly instructive Making Movies could tell you, the integrity of dialogue is paramount, and in the old days, achieving sonic integrity was no easy feat.  Lumet even labeled the process “The Only Dull Part of Movie Making” in his book. He also told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that the mixing process was “a drag.”

Even to someone like me—a relatively young man somewhat versed in digital audio restoration—the analogue way of doing things is full of confusing, jarring nomenclature:  “In the analogue days, especially on mag, it was a lot of riding faders in and out, cutting on mag, mod to mod, using the Dolby Cat 43, eq’ing, notching—we had a lot of tools that we were using.”

The above description comes from Frank Morrone, and if it sounds incomprehensibly complex, don’t worry—it is.

The laymen’s takeaway is this: Before digital, individual hardware pieces existed to whip such sound into shape, but as Tom Marks (a member of CAS and a Re-Recording Mixer for Warner Brothers) said, “Everything was a one trick pony.”  When it came to classic hardware pieces, they could often “do this one thing great, and that was it.”  Such equipment was expensive to own, and complicating the matter further, film/television audio could often sport problems beyond the boundaries of a typical hardware piece.

Take the dialogue on Lost, which Morrone told me was “extremely challenging, because if they pointed the mic one way you’d get the surf coming in.”   If they pointed it the other way, a superhighway and a military base became glaringly audible, and the resulting audio often sounded as if it were plonked “between helicopters and Mack Trucks going by on what was supposed to be a deserted island.”  Compounding the problem, a matter of simple costuming: you couldn’t very well place wireless microphones on the actors because “nobody ever had shirts on.”  The resulting sound, through no fault of the original recording engineers (to be clear, their circumstances are inherently fraught with problems) was “really tough because they were picking up so much extraneous noise.”

Though this is a relatively contemporary example, the experience of exceeding the parameters of hardware was not uncommon.  Indeed, if a task fell beyond the realm of what could be handled on a mixing stage, the job of cleaning up dialogue could very well be outsourced:  “For stuff that required more surgical work,” Tom Marks told me, he would have to farm the audio to “an office where you can send them files, and you kind of describe what you’d like to get done, and they do their process.”

So a line of dialogue would be sent to the offices of a company like CEDAR Audio, where Tom would interface with their staff:  “‘Hey, [the audio’s] got X issue, can you see what you can do?’” He’d tell them. “Then they’d send back, let’s say, a few different versions of it—with little processing, medium processing, and full processing.”  Even in CEDAR’s capable hands, the results might not always be an improvement: “When you plug it in, if it’s better, great, and if it’s not, you know you tried.”

But the recent digital revolution—of which Avid’s Pro Tools is a huge part—started to change standard operating procedures over the years; as Pro Tools rigs gained steam in film and television, software companies sought to streamline the process for post-production mixers and other markets in need of audio restoration (home studio recordings, for example).

Entities such as Waves, Sonic NoNOISE, Sony Oxford, and Bias began releasing audio restoration suites. However, in the earlier days of such technology, these plugins could be quite pricey, and even then, often delivered mixed results.

Indeed, post production mixers still strained for options when it came to reducing unwanted noise in their dialogue: “Waves always tended to have too much latency for real time use,” said Tom Marks, referring to a common problem (digital signal processing causing an ultimate delay in the audio signal, thereby messing up the all-too-important sync between sound and picture; net result: lips not corresponding to speech.) “For everything that Waves did, I found something, you know, better.”


In my talks with industry pros, such sentiments didn’t keep themselves relegated to Waves Audio. Often times engineers could find themselves using software tailor-made for the music business, rather than the film and television industry.

“I was using this sophisticated gate to get rid of [unwanted ambiance], but it never worked effectively,” said Frank Morrone, referring to a plugin engineers on the music side have traditionally used to enhance the transients of drums.

To be candid, I have had my own struggles with such software, tussling with Sonnox Restore, Bias Soundsoap, and Waves in my efforts to wrestle unwanted noise to the ground on movies such as Joanna Arnow’s award winning I Hate Myself :) and Sumi, a film by Hye Yun Park and Rachael Grace.

On these films, all of the above software almost worked for me, but inevitably, I would find myself reaching for some other plugin for the necessary juice to make it across the finish line.

Frank Morrone
Inside the World of Emmy-Winning Re-Recording Mixer Frank Morrone 

Avid Blogs Pro Mixing By Tom Graham

I recently sat down with Frank Morrone on a sunny, summer morning to discuss his experience mixing the new hit TV show The Strain on FX Network at Technicolor Toronto (Canada). The show has racked up some really big numbers in it’s first few weeks while Frank has been mixing ahead non-stop for the last few months on the S6 surface and with Pro Tools HDX and Pro Tools HD 11 software. 

I’ve been lucky to know Frank pretty well for the last 10 years now – as I was the product specialist helping him design, install and get up on the ICON and Pro Tools HD rigs for the hit show LOST. Frank is not just a mixer, he’s also a passionate advocate and leader for the industry. He has served as a Governor for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and is currently President of the Motion Picture Sound Editors. He is also on the Board of Directors for the Motion Picture Editors Guild.  Additionally, he is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Recording Academy and has served on the Board of Directors for the Cinema Audio Society. 

TG: Could you speak to the level of expectation for soundtracks today? Are consumers demanding a bigger, higher quality experience from all media? 

FM: Consumers today expect and demand a theatrical experience from (modern) TV shows. Shows are broadcast with High Def (picture) and 5.1 (audio) so we are very conscious of delivering a high level of quality for the consumer and our clients. The shows live on with the 5.1 Blu-Ray, DVD and streaming versions as well, where people want a great experience.

TG: With that in mind, what are the big challenges facing you as a professional mixer today?

FM: The challenges we face in mixing for television today are that track counts continue to get bigger, our budgets are getting smaller and the schedules are getting tighter… we’re basically asked to deliver a (high quality – theatrical) 5.1 mix in a fraction of the time than we would have with a feature film. Days as opposed to weeks. Having a streamlined workflow is the key to efficiently delivering that mix.

I was really excited to join the Technicolor worldwide team because to me, they really represent a modern, forward thinking company that wants to invest in the technology and facilities needed to deliver modern streamlined workflows and foster an environment for a great client experience and great results.

TG: Could you speak to the evolution of sound mixing and over the last 15 years and how has Avid helped shape that evolution?

FM: Initially I started mixing in film and television back in the days of mag film and analog consoles and so I never take for granted the power that Avid and Pro Tools has brought to our workflows. I’ve worked on traditional (analogue and digital) mixing consoles and you end up writing two sets of automation because besides automating the console, I like to use a lot of the plug-ins (such as reverbs and noise reduction) in Pro Tools, so you’re carrying along two sets of automation with every session. The great thing about working (entirely) within Pro Tools and S6 is that the automation stays intact wherever you go and it makes it seamless to move from one studio to another.

We didn’t have the demands on us that we have today and Avid has provided us with a means to get the job done and deliver high-quality results. It’s been an evolution that’s been ongoing… Every time Avid has released the product, they’ve listened to us, to what the needs of mixers, editors, music engineers and composers are and have responded to that.  Every release that they have put out there has been a tremendous help because they do listen to what we need and they deliver.

TG: Can you talk about how you came to the Pro Tools | S6 solution and how you think S6 changes the way you mix (compared to the previous solution)?

FM: When we started mixing LOST many years ago – we knew right away that the ICON and Pro Tools HD was the way to go to deal with the huge track counts and streamline our workflow. It was a tremendous tool for us to use on that show and I loved it.

With LOST we had 7 computer monitors (for the 7 HD Systems) in front of us to get the visual feedback we needed.  Now with the S6, I have the TFT (Meter) displays and all the information is streamlined right in front of me. I can get at it with a lot less clutter. And I really love the scrolling waveforms because when I’m doing my dialogue premixes I can see when a piece of dialogue is coming in on a track and if I need to raise my Fader because of the (relative) size of the incoming waveform.  To be able to also see my metering, my compression and my EQ curves right next to the scrolling waveform are just great features and they really get you into a rhythm when you’re working. It’s a rhythm and efficiency that you could never get before.

Another big difference for me between the ICON and the S6 is the use of real estate. Avid has really maximized the space that you have on the desk and you get a lot of functionality in a much smaller space. The S6 is a tremendous improvement – it really has been well thought out and laid out ergonomically for us to have everything we need at our fingertips and I find that I work much faster. It’s been a real treat and a joy to work on the new S6.

TG: And how was the transition from ICON to S6 for you?

FM: Moving from the ICON to the S6 was virtually seamless, just a few hours really.  Once you’re familiar with working and mixing within Pro Tools HD and it’s automation, the ICON and the S6 are just an extension of that and it was a very easy move.

TG: Could you talk about the transition from Pro Tools HD to Pro Tools | HDX?

FM: With the release of the (Pro Tools) HDX cards there was a huge advancement in the power that we gained, it helped us get much higher track counts, much more DSP power and it sounds better too, the difference was noticeable and we’re really happy with the move. What took 7 HD systems onLOST is now 3 HDX rigs: (1 for Dialogue/Music/Group, 1 for FX, BGs and Foley and 1 recorder for all the stems). It was a huge advancement that really helped our capabilities to work more efficiently and streamline our workflow.

TG: What stands out to you as the most compelling features of S6?

FM: Between the HDX cards and the S6 console – we have a very powerful combination.   Some of the features that the S6 offers (and now especially with the latest release of software version 1.2),  I can basically use the touchscreen or the VCA’s and VCA spill and the Layouts to get at any of the tracks I need quickly. Those are all powerful tools. But if I had to pick just one – I love the touchscreen; it’s a great, great feature! I find that I am constantly going to it and being able to scroll through tracks or go to EQ’s or the surround panner – and it just really allows me to work very quickly and efficiently. It’s also fun – that’s the best way to put it, the S6 is a lot of fun to work on.

TG: Can you describe your experience with the Avid team on supporting your sale and installation.

FM: The overall support from Avid has been phenomenal. When we (at Technicolor) ordered, (really the first dual operator S6 in North America), we needed to know that we were going to have the support to get our show (The Strain - on FX Network) up and running under our tight deadline. They were fantastic in supporting us, getting us up and running and they were available to us when we needed them. And that’s important with any product – it’s only as good as the people standing behind it and they did an exceptional job.

TG: Any advice you would give to students or young mixers who want to do what you do?

FM: My best advice to someone wanting to get into the film and TV mixing industry starts with: Pro Tools is the lifeblood of our industry.  The more proficient you can get on it – the more valuable you become to a facility. Mastering Pro Tools and the surfaces like the S6 will make you a huge asset to any studio looking to hire someone.

Amin Bhatia - Interstellar Suite  5.1 Surround Sound Mix Review - Audio Ecstasy
by Wesley Derbyshire

Picture
Triplet Records has released the 25 year anniversary edition of award winning composer Amin Bhatia's ground-breaking electronic music work, The Interstellar Suite.  Initially available as a high-resolution FLAC download 24/96 stereo and surround sound versions, a Pure Audio Blu-ray is planned for release in the near future.

Remixed by award-winning producer/engineer Frank Morrone, the Interstellar Suite has attained cult status in both electronic and progressive rock music circles since its release in 1987. Bhatia has taken electronic synth orchestration to another level, going far beyond similar artists like Synergy, Wendy Carlos, Klaus Schulze, Tomita, or other similar albums up to that point.

After winning the Roland International Tape Contest with a piece he had created on just a Minimoog and a four track tape machine, Bhatia was asked to work on the upcoming Toto album, Fahrenheit. During this period, Capitol Records was in the process of founding their Capitol/Cinema division, and based on his growing reputation as a composer of cinematic soundscapes, he was signed as one of the four synth artists who would launch the specialty label. The Interstellar Suite and its nine movements, which were originally created as his demo reel from stories he created in his head and then articulated through music, were released. However, the Capitol/Cinema division was short-lived and The Interstellar Suite was released only on vinyl, skipping the radically growing CD
market at that time.

What separates Bhatia from similar artists is his choice not to use digitally-recorded samples of any instruments out of respect for "real" musicians and orchestras. Instead all the sounds and textures were created with a synthesizer, commonly the Minimoog, all without touch sensitivity. Incredibly all the dynamics were created manually with a fader and sequenced on a Roland MC-500, with only 16 MIDI channels.

I had a chance to ask Bhatia a few questions about Interstellar Suite.

Q: I am very impressed by the dynamic range and silent noise floor of the surround mix.  Were any noise reduction tools employed to strip any hiss from the analog multi tracks?

Bhatia: “No the only noise reduction method was using the "strip silence" feature in Pro Tools so that any areas of tracks that weren't playing anything are totally silent. Credit is also due to producer/engineer Dan Lowe who took great care in maximizing the gain structure when recording these tracks to analog tape originally back in 1986. We used AGFA tape at a high flux level so the multi-tracks themselves have great signal to noise ratio.”

With some further thought Bhatia continued: “On second thought, there was some noise reduction used on a couple of solo tracks for Interstellar Suite. The odd French horn solo or dialogue line had a little bit of give-away tape hiss which producer Frank Morrone was able to clean up using some plugins from iZotope as well as using his, oh yeah, his amazing ear.”

Q:  “With the use of reverb over a 360 degree  space, how do you feel this texturally changed the piece from its original stereo release?”

Bhatia:  “This was a big part of the new mix and in my opinion the only way to use reverb in surround. There's a known quick method where one uses two stereo reverb units to create some sort of delay between front and back but that was driving me crazy. We finally found a plug in from Avid called Revibe which has a 5-point tap so that any sound from any source has 5 distinct but inter-related reverbs.  For surround I think this is the best way because I think not enough care is given to the relationship of the side speakers. For example Left and Left Surround should have a distinct stereo field between them but many surround releases currently have that "wall of mono" on the sides.”

Q:  “Did you find using Pro Tools allowed you to become more precise in placement and movement of effects and instruments while creating the surround mix?”

Bhatia:  “Very much so. The approach we used was to first ensure a musical balance that worked, and then we sub-mixed to 4 six channel stems: music, reverb, SFX and flanging. (The flanging stem was the old fashioned vari-speeded copy of the original program which we just faded in and out against the original to create and steer the flanging effects (just like the old days.) After that we manipulated the stems using Iosono's Anymix as well as Avid's internal plugins.  The music was to be very concert hall and orchestral but the sound effects and flanging could go nuts around the room. But again we could quickly fix that if we thought we'd gone to far on listening back the next morning. And even at mastering we could adjust the balance of dry to wet and the treatment of SFX versus the music. Frank Morrone and I always envisioned the dynamics as more of a film mix than an album mix so every now and then you get those extra decibels of SFX you never expected.”

Q:  “If you had the opportunity to record it all over again, would you wish for more than 24 tracks?”

Bhatia:   “Maybe a few more tracks sure but not a lot more. Today’s systems with hundreds of tracks have never appealed to me. I'm very much a fan of premixing my instrument groups and layers and making decisions early in the writing and mixing process so that the final mix is a finishing process, not a "try and
find something good" approach.”

He continues: “Apologies if I'm sounding a bit sarcastic but part of returning to Interstellar Suite was to revisit the idea of linear recording and linear decision making. We have far too many options today and I want to find some way to return to the more pre-planned ways of music making and recording. I'm certainly not against overdubs or technology or digital, but today it's far too easy to go into a studio without a goal and just mess around. How do we get back to linear decision making and recording? That's the key.”

Q: “Had you already been a fan of surround sound recordings when asked by your fans to remix Interstellar Suite in 5.1?”

Bhatia:   “Yes, I've been a fan of both dynamics and spatial mixes for years. I have many DVD Audio DTS and SACD recordings and love to immerse myself into a piece of music with the lights off and a favorite consumption.”

Q:  “Are there additional pieces that you have written or would like to write specifically to be mixed in an immersive surround sound version?”

Bhatia:  “Actually my sequel album Virtuality has many pieces already mixed in surround.  I'll revisit some of them but others are good to go. But first we'll see how Interstellar pans out (pun intended.) We've only just started on the surround downloads and are looking forward to the Pure Audio Blu-ray format.”

In addition to Bhatia’s responses above, the Interstellar Suite includes a booklet containing elaborate details of the composition, recording and mixing of the nine pieces.  While I don’t have the original vinyl record to compare against the new mixes, I downloaded both the stereo and surround files each with their unique characteristics.  As one would expect, the stereo mix is a powerful wall of sound coming at the listener, much like watching an orchestra in a concert hall.  There are primarily two schools of thought for creating surround mixes, the first mimics the concert hall setting by placing the music in the front channels, and using the rear channels for
ambience, essentially to recreate the acoustics of the space.   The second method, which I personally prefer, immerses the listener in a 360 degree surround with the musicians spread across the sound field.  However, Bhatia and Morrone chose to use a style which combines both methods, and fits extremely well with the cinematic theme of the music.  The surround mix places the synthesized orchestral instruments up front, in a traditional concert hall environment.  To add depth they placed choral lines in the rear channels as if from a choir loft. Much like a movie soundtrack, they spun sound effects around the surround space, and with the use of multi-channel reverb enhanced the ambient space with dramatic effect.  Thus, the stereo mix, while powerful, lacks the depth and spacious ambience found on the 5.1 version.

Listening to the 5.1 version, as Interstellar Suite begins, an impressive fireball emanates from the rear channels, rapidly moving to the front and crescendos in the center channel.  The orchestra begins the theme with horns seemingly blowing from the top of a mountain and echoing across a valley into the rear channels.   There is a rich bass note throbbing from the center and subs which defines the lows and pushes the piece along.

Dynamics are extraordinary, with a range of about 90db.  Unlike popular music, and even many progressive albums, Interstellar Suite takes advantage of dynamics found commonly in classical compositions.   These extremes lend very well to the excitement of the Suite, riveting the listener to their seat, instead of lulling them to sleep.    The third track “Launch” is an amazing example of these dynamics, from the thunderous locking sound of latches, to the liftoff itself, this piece provides the aural imagery of launching into space.  What ensues after liftoff is a speedy piece of orchestration with embellishments rising from the rear channels, and effects swirling left to right and even penetrating the listener with movement from the back to the front channels.

It is likely to be “Hostility” that will become any surround sound enthusiasts pick.  Not only does this piece once again exhibit the incredible dynamic range, it also incorporates an awesome use of the 5.1 channels in surround sound.  As the piece quietly begins with the discovery of a hostile ship, this is an example of where I found the silence and lack of tape hiss to be astounding, considering it was originally recorded on analog tape, which often has traces of tape noise.  As the piece builds, secondary instrumentation responds from the rear channels, and the orchestral parts from the front slowly build in volume.  The final shots are scattered across the soundstage, with
jets zipping across the back from right to left.

“Rescue Fleet” continues in a similar line, with jets flying in from the rear and crossing through to the front channels.  Towering horns are delayed into the rears with a depth wide enough to spread across the distance of space.    As Interstellar Suite nears its end, the “Finale” re-introduces the theme, and wraps up the Suite, as if the credits were rolling on a film.  I have long since forgotten that all these instruments are synthesized, and other than a crash cymbal, there is no part that is from an actual orchestra.   Interstellar Suite is not only an incredible surround sound journey, but an amazing use of electronic keyboards that create a vibrant piece of music that tells an engaging story.

This is a must have for an audiophile 5.1 surround sound enthusiast, along with required listening for any fan of cinematic pieces. The high resolution download (24-bit / 96kHz FLAC file) will playback via listener supplied USB stick in a FLAC compatible home theatre system, or weight a bit for the Blu-ray to be released.
 Emmy-Winning Re-Recording Mixer Frank Morrone Joins Technicolor 
Hollywood Reporter (Exclusive) by Carolyn Giardina

Re-recording mixer Frank Morrone -- who has won Emmys for Lost and The Kennedys -- is joining Technicolor. His first project at the company will be Justin Bieber's Believe.

Morrone bring an extensive list of TV credits including Sex and the City and  the recent pilot of The Blacklist and features including Ransom, Sleepy Hollow and the Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings.

An active member of the community, Morrone serves as president of Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE), a Sound Governor with the Television Academy, and board member of Motion Picture Editors Guild. He is a past board member of the Cinema Audio Society.

Morrone will be available at Hollywood's Technicolor at Paramount and Technicolor Toronto. He joins the company's roster of re-recording mixers which includes Scott Millan, Greg P. Russell, Anna Behlmer and Terry Porter.

"I’m proud be a part of an innovative company that has so much great talent," Morrone told The Hollywood Reporter. "And their state of the art facilities are as good as it gets."

Skywalker Sound’s Randy Thom To Receive MPSE Lifetime Award
by Deadline Hollywood

The Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) today announces that it will be honoring Randy Thom, Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound, with its prestigious MPSE Career Achievement Award. Thom is a two-time Academy Award-winner (The Right Stuff, The Incredibles) and a 14-time Oscar nominee. He has contributed to more than 100 films as a sound designer and re-recording mixer. He will receive the award at the 61ST MPSE Golden Reel Awards ceremony held on February 16, 2014, at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites, Los Angeles, CA.

“I am pleased and excited that the MPSE will be honoring Randy Thom with our Career Achievement Award,” says MPSE President, Frank Morrone. “His creative skills and dedication to the importance of sound in the filmmaking process is inspiring. Please join us in recognizing and celebrating Randy for excellence in the craft and his impressive achievements.”

“I am humbled, and deeply gratified to be receiving the MPSE Career Achievement Award,” stated Randy Thom. “It goes without saying that a very large part of the honor is shared with the wonderful sound editors, mixers, designers, assistants, and others with whom I’ve collaborated. They’ve often made me look, and sound, better than I was. Part of the honor goes to Skywalker Sound, as well. There is no better place to work in our industry.”

The Career Achievement Award recognizes those that have distinguished themselves by meritorious works as both an individual and fellow contributor with outstanding achievements in ‘the art of sound’ for feature film and television as well as setting an example of excellence for others to follow. Randy’s diverse works and his incredible tenacity in championing the craft merit this recognition. The prestigious company of this honor, most recently include Ben Burtt, Larry Singer, Walter Murch, George Watters II, and John Roesch, 2013’s recipient.

Randy Thom is Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound, but still spends most of his time working on movies. Randy began his astonishing career in 1979 walking-in on the re-mix sessions of American Graffiti when he introduced himself to Walter Murch, Ben Burt and Mark Berger. This event turned into his first film work when he was hired as a sound effects recordist on Apocalypse Now. Randy moved on to work in a wide variety of creative capacities within the sound department spanning over one hundred films. Randy’s approach to designing and turning motion picture sound into art begins before the film has started shooting by helping the director open doors to sound in the script. He is the foremost advocate for the idea that sound ideas should affect creative decisions in the other crafts, just as they affect sound.

Additional credits include Return of the Jedi, Never Cry Wolf, Wild at Heart, Forrest Gump, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Thin Blue Line, War of the Worlds, Coraline, How To Train Your Dragon, Ghost in the Shell, and Ratatouille.

He has worked with a diverse list of directors, including Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Bob Zemeckis, David Lynch, John Waters, Errol Morris, Henry Seleck, Peter Jackson, Brad Bird, and Chris Wedge.

Randy has been nominated for fourteen Oscars, an Emmy, and a Grammy. He has received two Oscars: one for The Right Stuff, and one for The Incredibles.

Frank Morrone to Succeed Bobbi Banks as President of Motion Picture Sound Editors
Hollywood Reporter by Carolyn Giardina

Frank Morrone has been elected to succeed Bobbi Banks as president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE). Banks resigned as president and a board member of the non-profit, citing personal reasons.  She held both positions since 2006.  Morrone was the organization's vice president.  The board also elected Mark Lanza as vice president and Chris Reeves as secretary.

“The MPSE board of directors extends its sincere thanks to Banks for her contributions over the last eight years and wishes her the best. Under her leadership, the MPSE has experienced significant growth in its mission and the scope of its annual Golden Reel Awards show,” the organization said in a statement.

"I am forever grateful to have had the invaluable experience of serving this exceptional group of professionals,” said Banks in a statement. “I am very proud of the work our board and our members have done to improve this organization and earn it renewed awareness and prestige.” Morrone is a re-recording sound mixer whose credits include Lost. He is the recipient of multiple MPSE Golden Reel Awards and nominations, alongside two Primetime Emmy Awards and an additional five Emmy nominations.

He said in a statement: "I look forward to working with the MPSE board in continuing to grow our organization. Our mission is to pursue greater recognition for our members and to educate the entertainment community and general audience regarding the importance and artistic merit of the sound track.”

A One-Stop Shop for Audio Repair - iZotope’s New RX 3
Editors Guild Magazine by Mel Lambert

Targeted directly at dialogue editors, sound designers and re-recording mixers working in film and TV post-production, iZotope’s flagship Audio Repair Suite now offers a number of innovative features. Powerful new tools for RX 3 Advanced include a Dereverb module that dramatically reduces and/or eliminates reverb within a sound file, while a real-time Dialogueue Denoiser mode cleans up material suffering from unwanted background noise.

The stand-alone application and companion array of workstation plug-ins both feature a new, redesigned user interface and improved workflow for enhanced precision; new internal enhancements are said to provide faster processing and repair capabilities. Usefully, an unlimited Undo history, which is saved automatically with audio data in a new RX document format, means that all file changes can be recalled instantly and corrected, if necessary. The new RX 3 Audio Repair Suite is available for both Apple OSX and Windows platforms. During a special introductory period that runs until September 27, RX3 costs $249, while RX 3 Advanced sells for $749. After that date, prices will be $349 and $1,199, respectively. Users who purchased RX 2 after July 1, 2013, will receive a free upgrade to RX 3. More details are available at www.izotope.com/rx3.

RX 3 is described as being able to eliminate tonal and broadband noise, hum, clicks and crackle, as well as clipping distortion and unwanted sounds from a dialogue or sound effects track. As with iZotope’s RX 1 (introduced in 2008) and RX 2 (which followed in 2010), the new RX 3 is offered as a stand-alone application, in addition to individual DAW plug-ins in Audio Unit/AU format for Apple Logic Pro, RTAS/AudioSuite for Avid Pro Tools 7.4 thru X, VST, VST3 and the new 64-bit AAX format for Avid’s Pro Tools 11. In addition to the new Dereverb and Denoise specialized tools, RX 3 Advanced also includes iZotope’s Insight metering suite, bundled as an additional plug-in; a Deconstruct module that separates audio into tonal and noisy components, allowing independent control of each; Asymmetric Declip, which reduces clipping with enhanced accuracy; Advanced Declick parameters that target and repair discontinuities; and a Center-Channel Extraction feature. Also provided are third-party plug-in support, 64-bit sample rate conversion and MBIT+ dithering.

The Dereverb module includes a multi-band section that helps target frequency-specific offending reverberation or ambience; the program can also be used to add a specific reverb signature, if necessary. The Dialogueue Denoiser module removes broadband or atonal noise from dialogue tacks, with a reported zero latency and low DSP load. The Asymmetrical DeClip module is described as being more musical sounding, while sharper filter shapes for the Remove Hum module offer enhanced precision. An updated Batch Processor chains together modules that operate on multiple files, and is optimized for use on multiple CPUs.

Familiar Spectral Audio Editor and Optimized Workflow

The program’s familiar spectral audio editor lets users visually select and suppress unwanted sounds, in addition to resynthesizing missing audio segments. The redesigned RX 3 user interface features easy-to-read screen legends against neutral gray backgrounds, similar in overall look and feel to graphic editors such as Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, as well as a number of contemporary audio and video workstations. RX 3’s visual-editing paradigm uses both visual and aural information to let users identify and repair sonic anomalies via a unique spectrogram display with familiar lasso, brush, magic wand, invert selection and select harmonics tools for making freehand selections around problem sound sections. The Spectral Repair tool seamlessly resynthesizes sound while the user removes unwanted elements, or fills gaps in a dialogue recording, for example, based on room-tone selections.

A new, optimized workflow was designed specifically for audio restoration and track repair, while Undo History stores every change for complete tracking of undo sequences; a Compare Settings mode lets users process and audition multiple settings side by side. All session states are saved, even between system restarts. Because RX 3 can take full advantage of multi-core processing, it is said to run some six times faster; AAX-format plug-ins for Pro Tools 11 also run in full 64-bit mode with zero latency in native environments.


Re-Recording Mixer Frank Morrone, Working on Copper TV Series and Feature Films

  A two-time Emmy Award-winning mixer, Frank Morrone CAS, MPSE, has worked on such landmark productions as Lost, Last Resort, Copper, The Kennedys, Boss, Sleepy Hollow, Ransom and When We Were Kings; he was recently named as President of the Motion Picture Sound Editors. “I use iZotope RX Series plug-ins on just about everything I mix,” he says. “For BBC America’s Copper, which is a period piece set in New York during the 1860s, exteriors are shot close to a busy highway. Extraneous noise and passing trucks are always a problem; a huge transformer on the outside of the sound stage often causes hum during interior scenes, which I eliminate with the Remove Hum module.

“To remove the sound of passing cars and noisy Mack trucks, I first make a pass with the RX 3 Denoiser using samples of the actual noise from the highway, which gets rid of a lot of the unwanted material,” Morrone continues. “I then use some Massenburg parametric EQ to remove the rumble, and then a light pass using the WNS Noise Suppressor plug-in from Waves. The RX 3 Denoiser includes clever adaptive technology that is more effective than previous RX offerings; it now learns the ever-changing noise pattern and its frequency range. RX 3 is a great life-saver!”

Morrone acknowledges that the new version of iZotope RX has some great improvements and additional tools. “The most apparent change is the new GUI, which gives you quicker access to menu items that previously were hard to reach, such as the Declicker module, which now offers a number of options to remove clicks, thumps or discontinuities,” he explains. “I also notice there is now zero latency on the RX 3 Denoiser. With RX2 there used to be an up to three-frame latency, which meant that you either had to slip the entire track [back into sync] or render the file in place, all of which takes time.”

The option in RX 3 of selecting the regular Denoiser or the new Dialogue Denoiser “gives you manual control over different frequency bands of the noise that the plug-in captures,” the re-recording mixer adds. “With previous versions, in Auto mode you had no control of the different bands of noise. But now you can target the noise in specific bands and, as a result, do not lose top-end frequencies, if that is what you are after.

“On the Spectral Repair app, the magic wand has tighter algorithms for highlighting the unwanted noise you want to remove; double-click the section and RX 3 gets all of the harmonics with tighter precision than before,” he continues. “You also have unlimited amount of undo on all of the RX 3 plug-ins.”

But the best new feature of RX 3 to Morrone tell it is the Dereverb reverb-removal plug-in.  It is fast and effective,” he relates. “I have used Unveil from Usikmesse [a German plug-in developer], which I think is a slightly better reverb remover that RX 3, but there is always room for improvement!”

Morrone cites an example of the use of RX 3’s Denoiser module while working on the mix for Copper: “I remember there was a scene with a 30-piece choir that had been recorded close to a noisy fog machine. Since we were able to save the track with RX 3, the producers did not have to re-record the choir.”

Re-Recording Mixer Bob Bronow, Working on a Range of Reality Shows

A winner of two Emmy Awards and four Cinema Audio Society Awards for his work on Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, as well as mixer such TV reality shows as Axe Men, 1,000 Ways to Die and The Legend of Shelby the Swamp Man, Bob Bronow, CAS, needs all the help he can get to clean up dialogue tracks that are often captured under less-than-perfect conditions. “Making sure that the dialogue can be heard has always been a continuing challenge,” he says. “On Catch, I normally only receive production sound from on-camera and lavaliere mics, and need to make it as intelligible as possible. Nearly every piece of dialogue in these shows has been through some kind of noise processing; iZotope makes some amazing tools.”

As a member, like Morrone, of iZotope’s Beta Community during final development of the new RX 3 Audio Suite, Bronow recalls that he “provided feedback on what the interface should look like and how we wanted to see the controls displayed. I had a long list of what I wanted RX 3 to do; RX2 was a true game-changer — it did things that I could never do before. We were expecting a lot from RX 3, and iZotope didn’t disappoint! The app makes everything sound as good as possible; it has become my first line of attack. I sometimes use the stand-alone application for tracks that need a lot of very fine work; otherwise the plug-ins work extremely well from my Avid D-Command control surface.”

The new Dialogue Denoiser for RX 3 was “one of my biggest surprises,” Bronow says. “In the Auto/Adaptive Mode it works really well and removes a lot of troublesome background noise; pretty much everything I touch goes through RX 3, which now handles most of my heavy lifting. The Dialogue Denoiser can take an average track and make it sound very good; it can make a bad-sounding track useable. And those processed tracks can then be used with RX 3’s other noise-fixing tools for even more impressive results.”

But noise isn’t the only problem with reality-show tracks. “There is often a signature hum or rumble in the wheel room [during Deadliest Catch], as well as computer beeps, sea gulls, squeals, clicks and other anomalies that I can take out quickly and easily with RX 3’s Spectral Repair, Dehum and Declick modules; it’s like Photoshop for sound,” Bronow continues. “I can also remove wind noise across lavaliere-mic tracks using the Decrackle and Spectral Repair modules; it’s like the noise was never there, with no added distortion. I also use the Declip module to recover tracks that obviously have overloaded with flat-topped peaks, but which [after processing] sound pretty normal.”

The RX 3 Dereverb module also comes in handy, according to Bronow, for “removing obvious reverb from tracks recorded, for example, inside the wheel house, to match those recorded on the open deck.”

The re-recording mixer also cites an interesting example from Discovery Channel’s The Colony reality series, during which an ice-cream truck had parked outside the 10-acre lot used to film a group of people in a simulated post-apocalyptic environment. “Music from the truck had leaked into the mics but, using RX 3’s Spectral Repair tool, I was able to remove individual notes without affecting the dialogue tracks,” he explains. “I could see exactly where the music was and just ‘painted’ it out [using the plug-in’s graphic tools]. I could also set the program to blend the deletions with material either before or after the section being targeted, or equally before and after [dependent upon the sequence]. It’s the closest thing I have seen to magic!”

 Mel Lambert has been intimately involved with production industries on both sides of the Atlantic for more years than he cares to remember. He is principal of Media&Marketing, a Los Angeles-based consulting service, and can be reached at mel.lambert@mediaandmarketingcom.


IZOTOPE @ THE NAMM SHOW, 2013
Tips from a Pro Live - Frank Morrone

Picture
Mixing it up on the set of 'Copper' 
CNET by Steve Guttenberg 

The Audiophiliac talks with Frank Morrone about mixing sound for BBC America's new show "Copper."

"Copper," the new BBC America crime drama, is set in NYC in 1864, while the Civil War was still raging. I was intrigued because the 10-part series was created by Tom Fontana, who did "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Oz," and on a more personal level, my old friend Frank Morrone is a sound mixer for the show. We met in 1999 when I was writing a feature story on mixing sound for Ron Howard's film "Edtv," and more recently, Morrone shared some of his experiences about mixing sound for the "Lost" TV series. You might be surprised to learn that only a small portion of the sound on movies and TV shows is actually recorded when the film or video is shot; most of the sound is added in later stages of production. It's the job of the sound designers and mixers to make it all sound completely natural, as if there were no mix at all.

The biggest difference between mixing sound for movies and TV is time. A major Hollywood film like "Public Enemies" can take many months to mix, mostly because of the number of ongoing changes and reshoots involved. The "Lost" sound crew wrapped up each episode in four days, and now with "Copper," just two days. Morrone loved working on "Lost," but I can still hear the fatigue in his voice when he says that no TV show will ever be harder to mix. For the finale, the crew was dealing with 450 tracks, so everything he's worked on after that was easy. Feature film mixes progress at a relative snail's pace, but each film has an original sound design, and the level of sonic detail in a big-budget film is much higher than on a TV show. So yes, the best-sounding movies sound better than the best TV series.

All of the "Copper" sound elements are recorded in 48kHz/24-bit uncompressed audio. The use of surround channels and LFE/subwoofer tracks are pretty subtle on "Copper."

The primary mix for "Copper" is the 5.1 channel version for the HD broadcast, Blu-ray, and DVD releases; there's a separate stereo mix for standard-definition TV broadcasts and streaming. That mix has reduced soft-to-loud dynamic range, compared with the 5.1 version. The engineers monitor the sound on a professional JBL multichannel speaker system, with JBL 18-inch subwoofers in a studio at Deluxe Laboratories in Toronto. Morrone continues to mix feature films and other TV shows, including the upcoming ABC series, "Last Resort."

With period shows like "Copper," the mixers are trying to make everything sound authentic and natural. Morrone has to devote a lot of time to eliminating 21st-century sounds -- like the buzz of lighting systems or trucks whizzing by on the highway near the set -- from making their way onto the soundtrack. For "Copper," the only sound that's recorded live on the set is the actors' dialogue; the street sounds, gunshots, horses, and background sounds are all created after the fact by a team of sound designers and mixers. Morrone and the crew work with up to 60 dialogue tracks, 48 music tracks, and 212 sound effects tracks.

When I asked Frank about why there are so many dialogue tracks, he explained that in outdoor scenes with crowds and street vendors, each voice may be on a separate track. When the original dialogue recordings have too much noise or quality issues, the engineers rerecord the actors in a quiet studio, and those replacement bits wind up on separate tracks. Morrone later adds ambiance and "room sound" to the original and replacement dialogue tracks to give the illusion that each actor is in the appropriate acoustic setting you see on screen.

BAG END Offers Mix Studio Low End
by Post Magazine

Sound mixer Frank Morrone (www.frankmorrone.com) makes the most of his compact studio, where he works on film, television and music projects.  Designed by Anthony Grimani and tuned by Dolby, the 12 x 15 foot space is equipped with Avid Pro Tools 10 with two HDX cards, a Euphonix control surface and Westlake BBSM6s for 5.1 Dolby mixing.

Carrying the low end is a Bag End single 18-inch subwoofer.  "I need that low end to be especially complete and tight," he notes.

The first project Morrone worked on using the new Bag End subwoofer was a 5.1 re-mix of Bhatia's famous "Interstellar Suite," originally created using only analog synthesizers, for its 25th anniversary release.  Morrone's TV credits include work on Lost, The Kennedys, Boss, The L Word and Sex & the City.  His film credits include Ransom, Sleepy Hollow, Shaft, Lost Souls, The Cider House Rules ad the Oscar-winning doc, When We Were Kings.

Award-Winning Sound Mixer Frank Morrone Uses Bag End Single 18 Subwoofer
by ProSoundWeb

Frank Morrone’s studio is the high-quality professional recording space you would expect to see used by an award-winning recording mixer for film, television or sound mixing.

Designed by Anthony Grimani and tuned by Dolby, the space is equipped with only superior mixing equipment, from a Euphonix control surface and Pro Tools 10 with two HDX cards to AVID I/O and Westlake BBSM6s for 5.1 Dolby mixing.

And carrying the low end that Morrone insists is essential to great mixing is the Bag End Single 18-inch subwoofer.

“It’s a compact space,” he points out, “only 12 by 15 feet. There were a few little nodes that the low end I heard from other subs couldn’t fill, and I need that low end to be especially complete and tight. Only the Bag End was able to give me that.”

In a long and distinguished career, Morrone says he had tried as many as 20 subs, and until he heard the Bag Ends he was not impressed. When he did, it was a “Wow” moment. Now, when the composers and producers he works with who hear their work in the studio after a mix, like composer Amin Bhatia, often comment on the low end first.

“At first, I thought Bag End was doing something with the harmonics in the processor to get that sound quality,” he says, “but they told me, ‘No, you’re just hearing what’s there.’ “

The first project Morrone mixed using the new Bag End subwoofer was a 5.1 re-mix of Bhatia’s famous “Interstellar Suite,” originally created using only analog synthesizers, for its 25th anniversary release.

 
Emmy Winner Frank Morrone: "Pro Tools is the lifeblood of our industry."
AVID Buzz by Mark Williams

Frank Morrone is a Los Angeles based dialog and music re-recording mixer who who has mixed high profile television and movies including LOST, Boss, Sleepy Hollow, Ransom and the Oscar winning When We Were Kings. Frank has been nominated for six Emmy awards and recently brought home his second, for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Miniseries or Movie for his work on The Kennedys.


We had the opportunity to catch up with Frank and talk about his work on the project, and about how important Pro Tools has been to his workflow and to his professional development.


Congratulations on the recent Emmy! Can you share a few thoughts on what it feels like to be recognized at such a level for your work on The Kennedys?


It is very exciting to win for The Kennedys.  The competition was very strong, so you are on the edge of your seat waiting for the winner to be read.  I was thrilled when our names were called.  It was a project that I was very passionate about so it is very rewarding to be recognized with such a talented team.

You’ve witnessed a revolution in audio mixing during your career. How do you feel the technological developments have impacted your creativity?


I started editing music and dialog on 1/4" tape and never take for granted the advances in technology.  It has allowed me and my teams to meet tighter scheduling requirements while dealing with larger track counts than we would ever have imagined possible before.  Pro Tools is a huge part of our process.  It has allowed us to work faster and more efficiently while delivering quality 5.1 mixes in a fraction of the time that it would have taken before.   Pro Tools lets us keep the creative momentum going and is the lifeblood of our industry.  
 
Can you describe the workflow you used while working on The Kennedys?

I mixed The Kennedys on a Control 24. Dialog and Music were on one Pro Tools system while backgrounds, effects and foley were on a second system. I did the premixes within Pro Tools and printed stems and print mastered to a third system. I used several plug-ins during my mixing process.  I used the Massenburg EQ on all my dialog and music elements.  The narrative on the archival footage was all redone except for Walter Cronkite so I used McDSP Futzbox to simulate that very distinct sound of the Movietone news reels. I also used the McDSP ML4000 multi band compressor limiter on my dial chain and the Izotope RX Advanced to clean the dial. Revibe and Altiverb were also used for the music and dialogue.

Can you talk about how cloud-based solutions made their way into your day-to-day workflow?

I've been using cloud based systems to get my elements and updates since mixing LOST.  On that project, all our source material and updates were coming from editors off the Disney lot.  On the project I'm working on currently,  we use a cloud to get locked picture for review before sessions.  I am also currently using it on a feature film I'm mixing to stream all picture updates as they are available and give feedback to the editors.

What project are you currently working on?

Currently working on a new drama series called BOSS with Kelsey Grammer.  Kelsey is the lead and executive producer on the show. Gus Van Sant directed the pilot and is overseeing the mixes.  I really like the show and the cast and scripts are excellent.

Many thanks to Frank for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk with us. Check out www.frankmorrrone.com to learn more about him and his incredible career. We wish him continued success!

Frank Morrone
We'd always end up back on the MK's!
by MKSound

In detailing the accomplishments of independent re-recording mixer Frank Morrone, we could probably fill this article with just a list of his major film, television and music credits and awards, including his 2011 Emmy for Outstanding Sound Mixing on the popular and controversial mini-series, The Kennedys.

Other television projects include Lost, Boss, The L Word and Sex and the City. He has worked with directors Sydney Lumet, Gus Van Sant, J.J. Abrams, Jim Henson, Ron Howard, Tim Burton, Taylor Hackford, John Singleton, Janusz Kaminski and Lasse Hallstrom on projects including Ransom, Shaft, Lost Souls, Cider House Rules and the Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings. He also mixed the Jonas Brothers’ Camp Rock, earning a platinum album for the soundtrack.

Frank’s award-winning body of work also includes an Emmy for the worldwide cult hit series Lost and a Best Sound Satellite Award for Tim Burton’s film Sleepy Hollow, as well as four additional Emmy nominations and multiple CAS, Golden Reel and Gemini nominations.

Frank Morrone is pleased to note a growing appreciation of sound among film makers, “For directors like Ron Howard and Tim Burton, sound is 50% of the entire film. I’ve been very lucky that way. Budgets may be getting tighter, but there is still awareness of the importance of sound.”

Frank’s own personal journey in audio began as a musician.“I’ve been a drummer for so long, I don’t even remember when I started playing as a kid. I was in a lot of bands. I got into sound when I was working in a music store and one day the owner couldn’t pay me. Instead, he gave me a Teac four-track recorder and that’s what started me off in my career.”

“I absolutely loved it and couldn’t stop. I still have that recorder because of its sentimental value and I still keep it in my studio beside me. It was the first piece of equipment I ever owned.”

After earning a degree in electronic engineering, Frank honed his craft under the mentorship and tutelage of experienced recording professionals.

“Back then, we really didn’t have the academic training available that they do now. There are so many good schools now. I do lectures for AVID and I get to see what some of the courses are all about and what they encompass.”

“When I got into it, the only way you could get in was through apprenticing and mentorship.”

Frank began his career mixing music for film scores as well as jazz, rock and country albums. From there, he moved to film and television post production. In 1995, he joined Todd AO in New York. While in New York, he also did some lecturing for New York University Film School. He moved to Los Angeles in 2004 to work on Lost, and has since mixed several projects for Disney as well as freelance projects for other studios.

Looking back on his time in the industry, Frank sees one major game-changer: “Digital has made a huge difference. Without it, we couldn’t do the work we do today with the schedules and the budgets that are dictated. Our track counts keep getting bigger all the time. And in television now, we’re expected to deliver a 5.1 mix that is just as good as any feature film in a fraction of the time, usually three days. We just couldn’t do that without digital.”

Frank Morrone’s most widely known work was an innovative six-year run on the television series, Lost, a unique J.J. Abrams concept that combined edgy human drama with off-the-wall science fiction.

Unlike most conventional TV fare where background music consists of the same recycled cues week after week, an original score was composed by Michael Giacchino (Star Trek, Mission Impossible) for every episode of Lost and recorded with a 40 piece orchestra. For a typical episode, there could be 60 dialogue tracks; 12 music tracks and 140 or more effects tracks.

Frank explains enthusiastically, “I’ve been very fortunate in that almost everybody that I have worked with professionally, most notably the people behind Lost, executive producer Bryan Burk and J.J. Abrams, are so into sound that they would participate tremendously in getting the final sound of the show. We also had a very talented team of editors that provided us with great material to mix. They delivered exceptional tracks every show.”

Lost was shot on location in Hawaii, but editing and mixing took place at Disney’s Buena Vista Sound in Burbank, California.

“I first encountered MK Sound at Disney. All of their DVD authoring rooms and all of their near-field set-ups are MK S150’s. So my first exposure to them was more than six years ago when we started on Lost. We had a free hand in choosing our monitors. Disney was willing to let us use anything that we felt comfortable with, so we did a lot of testing with a lot of reference material that I knew very well.”

“With the MK’s, it doesn’t matter what you put through them, whether it’s classical music, a big score, dialogue or sound effects. Listeners are blown away. They just can’t believe what we’re putting these speakers through and they handle it beautifully.”

“And the subwoofers - Before discovering MK, I had a subwoofer that really did seem to work, except when you got into higher SPL levels. It couldn’t handle the really low bottom end, so I started looking at various other options. Working at Disney, I heard the MK’s and it was a no-brainer. I was really, really impressed. The subs are just fantastic.”

“Once the popularity of Lost was apparent, we had a lot of manufacturers approaching us and dropping speakers off for us to audition. We’d listen to a lot of other speakers, but we’d always end up back on the MK’s. They translate very well to the broadcast side of things and to the DVD side as well. They can handle an incredible amount of level and have a wide dynamic range.”

“A lot of it has to do with what you’re hearing in the midrange. In film and television, you really want a high level of accuracy especially there, because you’re dealing with dialogue and ADR.”

“When you’re working in television, your work gets broadcast just days after you’vedone it. It’s vital to have accurate reference monitors for both on-air broadcasts and DVDs. The MK’s always delivered the most reliable reference for us.”

Frank Morrone just finished the pilot for yet another J.J. Abrams project, the new TV drama Alcatraz, shot on location at the shuttered penitentiary. The sound team spent nights there capturing the haunting atmosphere of the historic prison in the San Francisco Bay to be put to dramatic use as the series unfolds. He is currently working with Gus Van Sant on Boss.

Despite his increasingly busy schedule, Frank Morrone takes the time to stay active in industry organizations, as well as contributing to the education of future generations.

“I am very fortunate to be in an industry that I love and enjoy and I feel that giving back to the community is very important. I always give as much of my time as I can.” Frank currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Cinema Audio Society and is also vice-president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors and a sound governor for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“Every year, I do a lecture tour for AVID, talking about workflow at film and technical schools all over the country, mainly because I wish I had had those avenues open to me when I was learning. It gives you valuable insight into how professionals work.”

“This is the least that I can do for an industry that has given me so much.”
Stories From A Pro:  Frank Morrone on RX 2
iZotope Post Production News by Vikki Kane

When I made plans for a lunch with Emmy Award-winning sound mixer Frank Morrone, I was in for quite a surprise with where the afternoon would take us. Our lunch in Hollywood quickly led to a tour of his sound stage in Burbank and a private sneak peek into the place of TV commercial legend: The Disney Vault.

Talking about audio over lunch, I asked Frank to give me a background on his musical tastes, specifically what sparked his love interest with sound. He explained that audio wasn't what drew him into his line of work, but rather his love for recording, with a TEAC 3340 four track serving as his first object of infatuation.

"I was working at a music store and one week the owner couldn't pay me—I took the 4-track and we called things even. I still have it to this day."

Frank has come a long way from that four track recorder, having worked with directors the likes of Ron Howard, Tim Burton, John Singleton, Janusz Kaminski, and Lasse Hallstrom on projects like Ransom, Sleepy Hollow, Shaft, Lost Souls, Cider House Rules, and When We Were Kings. Frank also recently signed on as re-recording mixer for yet another project with J.J. Abrams, the new FOX TV drama Alcatraz. In typical JJ Abrams fashion, the first season was shot on location at the actual jail, with special attention to detail in capturing the eeriness of the space. Frank wanted to make sure the sound team did exactly the same: "We went there at night and recorded everything: the jail doors, the ambiance of the space, the reverb of the solitary cell, the exterior of the jail on the water... We got it all."

Translating those recordings into goose bumps for the viewers is definitely not an easy task, especially when JJ Abrams only gives you three days to do it. Once the material is delivered, Frank and his mixing partner are expected to churn out a movie-quality mix for printing within 72 hours. There's dialogue to clean up, reverb to add, fan noise to remove and that's just the beginning. Frank's go-to tool to get the job done: iZotope RX. Frank has been using RX for years on many successful projects like LOST to make sure the soundscape is just right.

"RX is an invaluable tool that I use on every single session I do. If a studio doesn't have it, I make sure it gets installed before the session starts. It is one of those plug-ins that has become a standard in post-production."

Whether he's working on the mini-series The Kennedys, or Kelsey Grammer's new TV show Boss, Frank has favorite modules in RX that he works with most often. When cleaning up audio, his go-to module is the Denoiser, followed by Spectral Repair, Declipper and Declicker. For example, Frank has found that he can actually eliminate ADR and save the production sound on scenes because of Spectral Repair. On Boss, the lav mics picked up a lot of static, but the De-clicker and De-crackle worked really well to clean them up.

As we made the short trip to his soundstage in Burbank, we were soon surrounded by some impressive sound toys. With the number of tracks that each episode requires, Frank keeps each element of the soundtrack separate. Of the seven Pro Tools systems he uses, six are for playback of Dialogue, ADR (automated dialogue replacement), Music, Hard Effects, Backgrounds and Foley, respectively. The seventh system is used as a stem recorder. The two main Pro Tools playback systems are HD5's, while the other five are HD3's . He uses a Soundmaster ION for PEC/Direct monitoring and to sync all seven systems, as well as a two position ICON with 36 faders on one side and 16 on the other. Finally, for screening the video, he uses Virtual VTR for HD picture.

As we were walking through the entryway to get to the studio, a vintage photo of a sound effects artist climbing a ladder happened to catch my eye. He was perched upside a wall with tons of tiny boxes, each labeled with different objects: a saw, metal sticks, marbles, etc. Mentioning the changes in sound editing technologies since that photo to Frank, he remarked:

"Nowadays, we have better tools, but the better the tools get, the shorter the schedules get and the smaller the budgets get. Workflow is everything."

It was clear that everything in Frank's studio has a purpose, and a good one at that, for being there. If something isn't up to snuff, it gets replaced quickly with a better alternative. Having RX be such an integral part of Frank's workflow is a proud milestone for us. Having RX stay in Frank's workflow makes us even prouder.

As we finished up at the studio, Frank mentioned that the "Disney Archives" were right around the corner, but my ears immediately heard the "Disney Vault." A vault it was: rows upon stacks of film canisters and the faint smell of acetate rushed out as the door opened. Everything from Steamboat Willie to Snow White to Dumbo... it was all there and in its original form. As we walked out of the vault and back to my car, Frank pointed out another vintage photo picturing a two sound guys in front of a "board" during a movie screening. He noted:

"This one is my favorite. These guys are working sound at a screening and each of them only has one knob. Those were the days."
Frank Morrone LOST sound mix
HT Talks To . . . Lost's Sound Crew
Home Theatre Magazine By Steve Guttenberg

Scott Weber, Tom de Gorter, and Frank Morrone talk with HT about mixing ABC TV's Hit series, Lost.

ABC TV's Lost is a phenomenon recalling the best of The X-Files or Twin Peaks' mind-warping weirdness as it slips between edgy drama and scintillating sci-fi. The show's creators, J.J. Abrams (Alias) and Damon Lindelof (Crossing Jordan), set Lost on a mysterious tropical island in the Pacific Ocean, populated it with an ever-expanding cast of survivors, and pepper the episodes with flashback scenes that add depth and complexity to the show's epic story arc. The episodes are shot on location in Hawaii, but they're edited and mixed at Buena Vista Sound at Disney Studios in Burbank, California. To learn more about how Lost's incredible soundtrack shapes up every week, I spoke with the show's supervising sound editor Tom de Gorter and rerecording mixers Frank Morrone and Scott Weber. Lost is currently in its third season; seasons one and two are available on DVD from Buena Vista.

I'm a bit of a movie snob and rarely watch network TV, but Lost hooked me from the first episode.

TdG: The producers want this show to be different from everything else on the air. They want people to argue about the show around the water cooler the next day and wonder about what's going on.

SW: The writers play off of some of the things people are talking about on the message boards and put them in their story lines.


A feedback loop between the show and its fans—that's so cool. Your sound mix is the very last stage of production; how long after you're finished does the show air?

TdG: On this last show, we were mixing 16-hour days for four days, and the episode we finish on Monday airs on Wednesday. Our challenge on a week-to-week basis is to mix the show in a fraction of the time we would get to do a feature film and still achieve the same detail in sound.

Lost is also unusual in that it's not shot within the controlled environment of a soundstage. How much of the dialogue recorded on location is usable?

FM: We try to use as much as possible to maintain the feel of the original performance. But there are all sorts of on-location problems—they might be running a noisy rain machine on the set, and the mikes are cutting out. In those instances, we'll have the actors replace their original dialogue, rerecording it in a studio.

So, when Sawyer and Kate do, say, a beach scene, and the pounding surf obscures their lines...

FM: They have to go into a studio, look at a monitor, and re-create the same performance they did on the set. Then I have to match the studio sound to the location recording's sound.

How do you do that?

FM: I just keep going back and forth, comparing one to the other, matching the original's sound, getting closer and closer to a seamless match. The editors also provide me with a sample of the original background sound—the surf, in this example—which I mix in with the new dialogue to match it with the original.

You make the quiet studio dialogue sound exactly like the dialogue recorded on the beach or wherever. that's amazing. What about the original sound of the surf and jungle scenes?

TdG: It depends. We might get lucky and use the location recording, but it's usually a combination of that and sound that we design and create.

That reminds me—what's up with the Smoke Monster? That thing looks like an angry black tornado and sounds, well, Weird.

SW: Since there's nothing in our sound-effects library called "Smoke Monster," we had to create it from scratch. The producers weren't looking for a Jurassic dinosaur effect—they wanted some type of mechanical element with an organic quality. The challenge for the sound designers was to make it neither or both. It's also a work in progress. Each time we use the sound, we add something to it, so the monster's sound continues to evolve. There are hidden messages in its sound.

Wow, I'll have to listen more closely. and do the sound designers create the less fantastical stuff?

TdG: Sure, the doors in the hatch [an underground bunker] are an example of that. They're actually made of wood, but, to make them sound metallic, big, and heavy, our sound designers might use five or six elements: metallic impacts, creaks, a latch, and maybe a heavy boom. It's the combination of those elements that make up the sound of the doors. The hatch also has an electromagnetic buzz happening all the time, and the computer room has retro-sounding Apple IIe computers. One of our techno geeks had some of these computers, so we fired them up and recorded them.

The scenes with rain always sound amazing.

SW: When it's raining, the sound changes all the time.

It gets lighter and heavier; it moves with the wind. The sound we use involves several layers of effects with specific elements—rain hitting the leaves, the actors' clothing, and other things. [Producer] Ra'uf Glasgow is very adamant about getting the details right. Rain can very easily turn into a mush of noise.

Mixing is a finely tuned balancing act—it's all about aligning the various elements to sound natural.

TdG: We have to make choices about what's going to play and what's not. On a beach scene, for instance, the surf might be so loud, we have to back off of the effects to let the dialogue come through. Or, if the scene has music, we have to leave room for it and back up on other things. Then we listen to everything together—sound effects, music, and dialogue—because they sometimes compete with each other. The producers might even decide to pull the music out if it's ruining the moment for the sound effects, or we might have to pull back on the sound effects for a musical moment.


Composer Michael Giacchino's score is incredibly cinematic.

FM: Most network shows do a few scoring sessions and then library the cues and reuse them every week. Lost has an original score every week, recorded with an orchestra. They're all live sessions with, I think, 40 string players.

So, There are No synths—it's all real string players. No wonder it sounds so good. how many tracks are you mixing?

FM: There are 60 dialogue tracks; 12 tracks are for music, and the 140 or more effects tracks can run the total to over 200. We use the Digidesign Pro Tools editing system; that allows us to handle even more virtual tracks.

What sort of speakers are you listening through when you make all of these mixing decisions? Some Home Theater readers might want to duplicate your system so they can hear exactly what you heard when you did the mix.

FM: We have a big JBL THX theatrical monitoring system in our studio, but, for the most part, we use a home theater–type 5.1 system with THX-approved M&K MPS-150 speakers and the MPS-350 subwoofer. It's the same system Skywalker, Sony, Warner, and, of course, Disney use. We monitor our stereo mix on Genelec 1029A speakers.

Do you guys have any inside dope about where Lost is headed?

TdG: They do give us advance knowledge on certain story lines we need to know about, but we can't talk about them. I will say there are sound effects in some episodes that provide clues about stuff that will be revealed later on. You could call them Easter eggs for very careful listeners.

Last question: Do you have a favorite episode?

TdG: The episode ["One of Them"] from season two when Sayid was in Iraq was a lot of fun to mix. There's a lot going on in the surrounds, and there are explosions in the subwoofer. The pilot has always been a favorite of mine, and we spent the most time mixing that one. Scott and Frank were nominated for Emmys both years; I was nominated the first year. We won awards from the Motion Picture Sound Editors guild for the pilot episode. It's great to be recognized by our peers, and that's very gratifying for us.


Under Pressure
Mix Magazine By Maureen Droney

SOUND FOR ABC'S LOST

Consistently scoring in the Top 10 on the weekly ratings lists, the hit show Lost is, along with Desperate Housewives, a major component of ABC Television's prime-time resurgence. Developed by Alias creator J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof (Crossing Jordan), Lost is an eerie offspring of Survivor and Twin Peaks that's both sucking in viewers and awards, including two 2005 MPSE (Motion Picture Sound Editors) Awards for Sound Editing.

The plot? Action, quirky characters and interpersonal conflict coalesce when a plane crash strands 48 survivors on a tropical island. There, threatened by mysterious forces, they have to learn to work with each other to survive.

Wait a minute. That sounds kinda like what's been happening with the sound crew: The production mixers in Hawaii — recording in muddy jungles and on a beach next to roaring surf, a highway and an airport — and the multiple editors and mixers back in L.A. who, ensconced on a computer-filled dub stage, turn out feature film-quality sound on an abbreviated TV schedule.

“Because there are so many flashback sequences, the show goes everywhere: from the outback of Australia to a Kmart parking lot in Los Angeles,” says sound supervisor Trevor Jolly, sitting behind his Pro Tools screen at Buena Vista Post Production Room 6, the Burbank, Calif., dub stage where, during a three-day period, Lost's weekly episodes are mixed. “There's always a new location to deal with. We never know where it will be and it's mostly all exteriors; no controlled interior sets for us!”


The music department, headed by composer Michael Giacchino (The Incredibles), has the same frantic time frame. Notoriously tight scoring schedules are the norm for a TV series. What's not the norm is using live orchestra. On the day I visited Room 6, the crew was working with orchestral music recorded the day before at Hollywood's Capitol Studios. “The show's creators are impressively knowledgeable about sound and music,” says music editor Mike Andreas. “They really care about having live orchestra, which they also use on Alias. They understand the difference it makes. It's been 10 years since the live TV score went away; now, these guys are making it happen every week.”

Ultimately, six stereo music pairs end up on the dub stage: generally one each for orchestra, harp, live percussion, synthesizer keyboards, percussion and “scary noises”; end credits and main title music; and source cues and “big boomy stuff.” The stereo score is adapted for 5.1 using Dolby's Surround Tools plug-in, as are the backgrounds.

Music, monsters, waves, jungles, detailed flashback backgrounds and 40 to 45 scenes per hour-long episode — no doubt about it, Lost is acoustically dense. “We use everything we get from Foley, ADR, SFX and production,” says SFX/Foley mixer Frank Morrone. “We're creating everything from scratch and each sound moment has a lot going on. Our SFX editor, Marc Glassman, may be the hardest-working sound editor I've worked with on a show. He's constantly updating and has a room next to the dub stage where the executive producers can audition sounds.”

Production sound for Lost (see sidebar below) battles numerous elements that sound editors in general hate (e.g., surf), including the fact that the main beach location is adjacent to an airstrip and a highway. “My new best friend is my CEDAR DNS 2000 Pro Tools plug-in,” asserts Weber. “I can automate the parameters and it's amazing for taking out rumbles, waves and, even in rain sequences, 60 to 80 percent of the noise. It's a credit to [executive producer] Bryan Burk that he wants to use as much of the production [dialog] as possible, so we spend extra time making it intelligible.”

“In most cases, however, we still have to cover it with ADR,” adds Jolly. “It takes quite a long time to get the dialog in shape, which is our base for everything else.”

Lost sounds and looks sharp. Original footage is shot on 35 mm and the show is broadcast HD in 5.1. “Our producers, especially J.J. and Bryan Burk, really love sound,” says supervising sound editor Tom de Gorter. “Back as far as the pre-production meeting for the pilot, J.J. mentioned that they'd designed specific shots just for sound — for example, in the pilot, when one of the characters runs past the downed still running, jet engine of the crashed plane.”

Four Pro Tools systems — one each for dialog, music, Foley and SFX — distribute approximately 100 tracks to the AMS-Neve Logic 2 console. There's no time for predubs or submixes. Onstage, the editors and mixers can access each other's computer systems and a common network. According to de Gorter, the team strives to improve communication efficiency, using, among other tools, iChat and Instant Messaging. “It's fast, it's free, you can drag-and-drop files without compressing them,” he points out about Instant Messenger, “and it doesn't choke on large files like e-mail can.”

Lost's hybrid mix setup was facilitated by Buena Vista VP of post-production Gil Gagnon, who also assembled the mix team. “Normally, you get all of your sources from Pro Tools and use a Pro Tools control surface,” explains Morrone. “Or you mix in the traditional way, taking your Pro Tools sources through a large-format film console. We're mixing on a digital film console, but we're using two Pro Tools systems — set up on the console's sends, returns and master faders — for all of our plug-ins.”

“Both Frank and I have 32-channel HD systems loaded with every conceivable plug-in that serve as outboard gear,” continues Weber. “It's the only way to fully automate all the parameters. But we've also got the horsepower of a traditional console for monitoring, routing and machine control, with EQ and sends on every channel at our fingertips so we can work really quickly.”

Re-recording is to multiple machines: 24-track stems to a Tascam MX-2424 and 5.1 and 2-track mixes to a Tascam MMR-8, with duplicate machines running as backup.

Broadcast transmission processing is often the downfall of what was, on the dub stage, a great mix. Determined to avoid problems, Lost's mixers and editors took a field trip to ABC's engineering department where they reviewed the components of the compression chain and debated how to optimize their mixes for transmission.

Now, with an official ABC stereo broadcast meter on the stage, they apply their own final compression to the mixes, a combination, according to Weber, of “the container on the Dolby DMU [Digital Mastering Unit], which slows it down, and a Waves L2 as our brickwall limiter. It's not just level. They also use pre-emphasis/de-emphasis frequency compression that affects the high end. A high spike can crush the whole signal so we've modified our chains, using a de-esser like you would on voices to roll things off at certain frequencies on the Foley and sound effects.”

“We had to make sure,” points out Morrone, “that what the producers hear on the stage is exactly what they hear on air. I think we've achieved that. [Co-producer] Ra'uf Glasgow, who's very detail-oriented, screens every show on air and agrees that it's translating very well. We've also heard from other mixers, asking how we manage to get so much dynamic range on the program. Coming from peers, that's a real compliment. In television, it's traditional to mix for 5.1 and to accept whatever happens to the stereo fold-down. But we work very hard to get the 2-track sounding as dynamic as possible.

“Gil Gagnon was instrumental in bringing Scott and I together as a mix team,” Morrone concludes. “He and his team also provided us with a top-notch facility and gave all the tools and support we need to deliver a great quality product under a tight schedule.”

[Richard Lightstone served as production sound mixer on location for the first 14 episodes after the pilot. — Eds.]

LOST ON LOCATION
By David Barr-Yaffe, C.A.S.

Without a doubt, these were the most challenging shows — physically and mentally — that I've faced in my 25 years in production sound. Although we had the luxury of an extended schedule and budget (26 days at a [reported] cost of about $12 million, unheard of for a TV pilot), Mother Nature threw as many curves at us as she could.

The first weeks of shooting were on jungle sets. My crew — Joe Michalsky, Chris Wieking — and I stepped out of the van into pouring rain and knee-deep mud. We had to get our gear out of the trucks and down into a ravine below the roads where we shot our big chase scenes with our unseen monster, along with interiors and exteriors of the plane's cockpit. The script called for pouring rain, so on top of the natural jungle rain, the special effects teams ran arrays of water towers and fire hoses as soon as J.J. [Abrams] called “Action!” The tremendous sound of all this water hitting the trees and the water already on the ground — plus the water trucks running at full speed to pump the water to the hoses — precluded using boom mics, except in situations where actors would yell loud enough to be heard.

We'd brought a selection of several different lavaliers (Sennheiser MKs, Sankens, Countryman, Trams) to use with our Lectrosonics MM400A miniature digital water-resistant (to a point!) transmitters and our Lectro UM400 digital transmitters. After some experimentation, we decided on Sennheiser MK Platinum lavaliers wrapped in acousti-foam with a layer of fur over them. They gave us the best protection from the elements and better sound with less clothing noise.

Then it was on to the Coconut Palm farm as the survivors searched for the cockpit, where the cast wove through many years of dead palm fronds, crunching with every step. Fortunately, the rain had stopped and we could expose the lavaliers for a more natural presence. Finally, we reached the beautiful beach at Mokuleia, on the northwestern shore, where we filmed most of the rest of the first few episodes. Ocean on one side, rolling jungle on the other: We sighed with relief that we no longer had to carry our gear in the mud and rain.

There were, however, new challenges. The beach was only long enough to place the fuselage and a little bit of scattered luggage and body parts. We were no more than a few feet from the water line and, in fact, the tide came in and washed over about half the set.

Everything we recorded had the sound of surf crashing on the beach in the background, along with the occasional sounds of light aircraft landing at Dillingham Airfield, just on the other side of the road. The North Shore waves were big and loud, making it difficult to match ambience from shot to shot. We had to be careful not to make drastic movements on the booms (Sennheiser 816s) or we'd hear a dramatic shift in background. We often used radio mics along with the booms and put them on separate tracks of the Deva to give our post team the option of pulling what they needed to drop in.

Finally, the payoff: We packed up and went to one of the most beautiful places on Earth, Kualoa Ranch, where Jurassic Park was shot: beautiful, green valleys surrounded by jagged mountains, all overlooking the picturesque Pacific. We buried the generator in a ravine below us and enjoyed almost perfect recording conditions. Winds were calm and we were half-a-mile from the ocean, able to point the shotguns in any direction and hear our actors from more than 10 feet away with no problem. We only had to use our radios for the wide establishing shots.

All in all, we were able to use about 95 percent of the production tracks on the pilot episodes, quite a feat considering the environment in which we shot. Still, I wouldn't trade that environment for any other shooting location in the world!


Lost, The Final Chapter
Mix Magazine By Mel Lambert

MIXING MOVIE-STYLE SOUND AT DISNEY POST PRODUCTION

It's mid-morning in Walt Disney Post Production Service's Room Six, and the sound editorial team for ABC-TV's Lost is taking notes from executive producer Bryan Burk on an opening episode from Season 6. “We need to make the traffic sounds more frantic, with more horns,” they hear over a Polycom Internet link from Burk's office in Santa Monica, Calif. “When the cab leaves, I need a lot more car horns.”

The hour-long drama series first came to TV in September 2004 and was an instant success for co-creators Damon Lindelof, J.J. Abrams and Jeffrey Lieber. Produced by ABC Studios, Bad Robot Productions and Grass Skirt Productions, Lost has now reached its final season, as it follows the lives of plane-crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island somewhere in the South Pacific. The series has developed a large cult following and earned a well-deserved reputation for intricate sound editorial. The crew is now focusing on Season 6 — including the two-hour opening to air on February 2.

“We'll cut some alternatives,” agrees Lost supervising sound editor Tom de Gorter in response to a quick glance from Scott Weber, sound effects re-recording mixer, currently seated at the Avid Digidesign ICON D-Control console that dominates Room Six. “Let's move on to audition some of the music cues,” offers music editor Alex Levy. Composer Michael Giacchino's music cues are recorded weekly using a 20-piece orchestra.

Under de Gorter's supervision, sound effects are edited by Paula Fairfield and Carla Murray at MHz Sound Design; both sound designers joined the show at the beginning of Season 3 and have worked together for 12 years. “Lost is an extremely busy TV show,” Murray says, “with sound-designed moods and signature textures,” including The Island disappearing at the end of Season 4 and the flash-forward sequences initiated in Season 5.


Fairfield works primarily on backgrounds, vehicles and ambiences, while Murray looks after hard effects; they both work on sound design elements. “The show is wall-to-wall effects,” Fairfield stresses. “We like to offer lots of options for the re-recording stage; we put together everything we can think of, although they may be dropped later. We also carefully catalog everything so that the same sound signature will be used.”

The sound designers deliver two Pro Tools sessions: one of mono/stereo (and occasionally 5.1-channel) hard effects; and backgrounds in 4, 5.1 and 3-channel/L/C/R formats. “We have standard templates that we worked out with Scott [Weber],” Fairfield offers, “so that the materials are delivered in a consistent format for each show. For most episodes we might deliver up to 150 tracks; for the Season 5 two-hour finale” — and the opening episode for Season 6 — “we produced close to 500 tracks; there were a lot of late decisions on those shows!”

ICON Control Surfaces Weber is joined by dialog/music re-recording mixer Frank Morrone at the D-Control console, which features 16 on-surface faders for dialog/music and 32 for FX/backgrounds/Foley. Each section has custom faders that can be used in one of three modes: Custom Groups, for which faders can be arranged and built in any order and configurations recalled with a single button push; VCA Master and Spill, in which the VCA group masters can be spilled into the slaves within a defined section; and Custom Fader Plug-In for mapping controls of favorite plug-ins onto faders.

Each D-Control section can control up to four Pro Tools HD systems from each surface, bank-switched one at a time. “We run 72-channel HD6 systems for the effects and mix systems,” Weber explains, “plus 32-channel HD2s for Foley, BG, music and ADR/group playback, a 32-channel HD1 for music playback and a 56-channel HD2 as stem recorder, all running on Mac Pro [computers].” Playback monitors comprise three M&K MPS-150 active cabinets on stands in front of the mixers for L/C/R, plus the room's subwoofers and surround units.


“Our overall stem masters are actually multichannel aux faders that are used to build an entire submix,” Weber explains. “For instance, on my section I have an aux fader as a 6-channel effects master that receives the effects mix before it routes to the recorder. Here I put a brick-wall limiter set at -2 dB to keep the input from clipping on loud effects; this also gives me a trim on every channel. That is followed by a 3-band Massenburg EQ and then an ML4000 compressor/limiter. I start the mix with only the limiter active, and insert EQ and compression as I need them” to minimize the DSP load. “I do the same with reverb and sub sends.

“On a typical session,” Weber continues, “all effects are routed through a 5-channel master chain that has an L1 limiter, Massenburg EQ and sends, set to a ceiling of +18 dB for the effects stem. As well as a 5-channel chain, I also have a stereo chain to spread things into 5.1 using a combination of Dolby Surround Tools, Waves PS22 Spreader, delays and some stereo reverbs. I can call up the stem masters on a custom fader bank, just as I would my reverb returns or guide tracks. The VCA-style faders control groups of pre-assign tracks from the [Pro Tools] editor. For example, my basic 64 effects tracks are controlled by eight VCA masters in groups of eight tracks. ”

One of the effects mixer's biggest challenges is maintaining detail within a very dense and complicated soundtrack. “When we are asked to make the scene be music-driven, have the effects play at a ‘10’ and still be able to clearly hear every line of dialog that is a tall task! It's a dance, and we are getting better at taking things out to make room for other things to play.”

“My dialog processing chain within Pro Tools,” Morrone says, “comprises a McDSP ML4000 routed into a Massenburg EQ, followed by a McDSP de-esser and then into a NJ575 Notch Filter, as necessary, and finally into a Waves LZ limiter to hold everything back to the ABC/Disney delivery-reference level. I set up the custom faders as dialog master, ADR master, group master, music master and overall master for dialog, ADR, group and music, and finally reverb return master. That way I can easily control the submix stems on a single fader or then spill them out across the same 8-channel bank to refine individual front-channel and surrounds for the 5.1-channel submixes and final. We print stems of music, dialog, foreign dialog, ADR, Futz and principal effects, plus a group stem, which streamlines the preparation of M&Es for foreign-language versions, which we develop after print mastering.

“Although I try not to EQ the music tracks, I have a Massenburg [Pro Tools] plug-in across the music master that I use to roll-off or brighten the tracks; I sometimes use a McDSP Futz filter to mimic a source cue being replayed on a radio, for example.

“Since we don't get the luxury of a premix on dialog,” Morrone continues, “while Scott [Weber] does a pass on effects — or vice versa — I am premixing tracks via headphones.” The mixer's biggest challenge is cleaning up production sound and eliminating noise on the tracks. “Our production mixers do a great job,” he concedes, “but, unfortunately, they can only do so much with some of the locations they have to work with. Getting the production to work on the beach is always a challenge because certain characters don't project, and then dialog is tough to pull out of the backgrounds.”

As the review session continues in Room Six, Burk is commenting on sound effects for a critical scene within a large temple and pool. “We need deeper bubbles,” he offers. “And can we take out the low end so that it doesn't sound so much like a Jacuzzi?” Weber makes a note and huddles with de Gorter. “We have three stereo pairs of water sounds,” the supervising sound editor advises. “Can you make the drips louder?” Burk queries. They hear the result. “It sounds better,” Burk agrees, “but keep out the rumble. And it sounds too ‘drippy’ — maybe we can back off the drips?” The team concludes that the material they have will need to be recut to offer more options, so a call goes out from de Gorter to the sound designers to prepare some alternates that will be available the next day for review. “We need separate elements to fulfill the producer's requirements,” de Gorter confirms. The mix continues.
In Search of the “Lost” ICON
Editors Guild Magazine By Michael Kunkes

On August 4, a standing-room-only group of TV sound professionals crowded onto Disney’s Victory Stage 6 in Burbank to view a practical demonstration of the power of Digidesign’s ICON Integrated Console System by re-recording mixers Scott Weber and Frank Morrone, CAS, who together produce the acoustically complex mix for ABC’s hit series Lost, now finishing its fourth season. The event, presented jointly by Digidesign and the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE), proved such an enthusiastic success that Morrone and Weber repeated the presentation for three straight evenings.

Morrone and Weber just received their third Emmy nomination for Lost and have been mixing the show on Stage 6 since the first episode in 2004. After finishing seasons one and two on a Neve Logic 2 console, they acquired the dual ICON console in time for season three. The two linked systems each have 72 channels of I/O, necessary for feeding 24 channels from each system into the 48-channel ProTools recorder. There are also four additional edit playback and auxiliary input systems, with up to 32 additional channels, and a Soundmaster ION system is used to synchronize four ProTools/HD Accel rigs, ProTools recorder and both mix systems––a total of seven systems. The room also features three stations for music, dialogue or sound editors, any of whom can access any of the ProTools machines or the ProTools recorder via a KVM switcher, do any needed editorial work, and return it to the system.

One of the most unique things about the Lost ICON is a custom shelf at the rear of the console that houses a bank of monitors arranged left to right, displaying Weber’s ProTools rigs for backgrounds, Foley and hard effects, then moving over to Morrone’s music score, ADR, group and production dialogue, various plug-ins and the main mix. “The great thing about this setup [which is unique even for an ICON room] for both of us is that it acts as one big, elongated cue sheet,” says Morrone. “At a glance, I can view when a music cue or an ADR line is coming up and can see all my principal dialogue. On most systems, you are constantly scrolling up and down to see what your tracks are and what’s coming up, but on this ICON, we are spreading the horsepower out among a lot of systems with a lot of visual feedback. It helps us run a lot faster and smoother.”

A typical mix on Lost takes four days, although for the two-hour finale, they were awarded a generous six days to mix a show that was twice as long. “On a normal episode, the first day and a half is dedicated to roughing out the show,” Weber explains. “Then the producer screens the show and provides notes, and we will run off DVDs for the writers, executive producers and picture editors. It’s a complicated show, and we have quite a lot of creative input coming in––more than on most series.” Music is scored weekly by composer Michael Giacchino (Ratatouille) with live orchestra recording (a rarity these days for a weekly series) and arrives at the mix in stereo pairs split in elements such as percussion, melody instruments, woods and harp.

During the mix, Morrone and Weber work closely with the editorial team (not to be known as “The Others” as a Lost fanatic might say), which includes sound effects editors Paula Fairfield, MPSE, and Carla Murray, MPSE; Foley artist Doug Reed; Foley mixer Geordy Sincavage; and supervising sound editor Tom de Gorter, MPSE. That’s important on a show such as Lost, where Weber alone has128 tracks of effects, Foley and backgrounds on his side of the board.

“All the editors on Lost work on ProTools, and we have it worked out ahead of time what tracks to put their edits on so we can easily put them into our template,” Weber explains. “The way we’ve laid things out, certain effects must go onto certain tracks, so I subdivide my effects tracks in groups of eight faders––which correspond to a VCA master fader. For example, we just finished the two-hour season finale, and I had 112 effects tracks; you can imagine trying to toggle through all that. By creating VCA masters to subdivide all those tracks to a custom fader bank, I was able to have all those tracks controlled by only 14 faders. The effects editors cut all their background and volume graphing automation roughly into where it should be, so when I go in to do the mix, I can immediately get a relative level and present it the way they cut it, with all their volume automation maintained.”

Though as a rule they like to work together on a scene through a near field (left>center>right) speaker setup on the stage, Morrone or Weber will on many occasions go to headphones in certain situations in order to mix more efficiently. Says Weber, “If Frank is working on dialogue, I can be on headphones pre-dubbing the next scene, using M-Audio Q-40s. Sometimes he needs to isolate and doesn’t want to hear what I am doing, so I will put on the headphones and go do the next scene, setting up my tracks and rough balances. Or Frank will do the same with his dialogue, and that comes in handy when working with ADR. Producers just aren’t that patient listening to ADR; you get a couple of passes, and that’s it.” “The biggest mistake you can make is playing an ADR line barenaked and letting the producers hear it. That is sheer suicide,” adds Morrone.

“That’s again why ICON’s preview mode is so great; I can sweep through the EQs, comparing the ADR against the production line, but I am doing it on the headphones,” Morrone continues. Additional plug-ins employed by the Lost team include Massenburg EQs, McDSP’s ML4000, DP575 and Futzbox, Digidesign’s ReVibe, convolution reverbs from TL Space (a Digidesign company), Dolby Surround Tools and Waves L.1and L.2 Brickwall Limiters.

To conform to ABC broadcast standards, Morrone and Weber apply final compression to the mix, employing a Dolby DMU (Digital Mastering Unit) and the Waves L2 to contain the two-track levels below +10db. The end deliverables are a 5.1 mix and a two-track stereo “LtRt.” “We lay down both the 5.1 and the two-track at the same time, but don’t listen to the stereo mix until the final pass, then make adjustments to compensate for any loss in dynamics,” Weber relates. “We supply our 5.1 HD deliver on D5, as well as a stereo composite and stereo M&E for the SD delivery.

Production sound, both dialogue and effects, are a huge part of the mix process on Lost. The show’s executive producers, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Bryan Burk, Jack Bender and Carlton Cuse, believe strongly in salvaging and using as much production dialogue and effects as possible, and Morrone and Weber have risen to the challenge––to the point where ADR accounts for only a small percentage of Lost’s performances. “We’re cursed in a way, because a lot of scenes take place on the beach,” says Morrone. “When you point the mic toward the ocean, you have the surf noise, and you can’t point it the other way because there’s a highway there and its supposed to be a deserted island.”

To reduce noise and preserve the integrity of the production tracks, the team utilizes a Cedar DNS2000 Dialogue Noise Suppressor, as well as a McDSP notch filter, part of a suite of powerful McDSP plug-ins (including EQs, de-esser, FutzBox, etc.), that the two have been utilizing during this fourth season. “What I love about the Cedar box [the only outboard signal processing used on the console] is that you can bring the controls up to custom faders,” says Morrone. “I can look at the waveforms as they come up and constantly ride them and simultaneously automate my rides.

“The custom faders on the ICON are wonderful for that,” he continues. “I can be balancing my dialogue against ADR, or switch to dialogue against music or the loop group, and the custom faders can be in any order you want or as deep as you want. You just keep creating different configurations, and that feature gives me a lot of flexibility. Not only that, I can go into preview mode on the ICON, go through different ranges on the Cedar, and see if and how it is affecting the integrity of the dialogue. That mapping ability is one of the strongest features of ICON. Most of the plug-ins map out really well.”

“We are essentially mixing a feature film in a fraction of the time, and that’s the quality that is expected of us, especially for the DVD releases,” summarizes Weber. “It’s important for us to have a highly efficient automated system and the ICON has made our lives much easier. That reliability is critical on Lost.”

Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.

McDSP User stories - LOST

Frank Morrone meets us outdoors in the harsh light of sunset, having already put in more than twelve hours of work mixing dialog and music for the season finale of ABC's sensational hit television show Lost.  His eyes adjust quickly to the bright light after having spent his day pouring over the soft glow of nine LCD monitors that display the seven Pro Tools rigs used to mix down audio for the series.  Time is of the essence in this one hour break before the midnight hard deadline, so we join his teammate, effects mixer Scott Weber, and sit down to talk about their use of the McDSP plug-ins, including the newest products FutzBox Lo-Fi Distortion Effects and NF575 Noise Filter.


Morrone is a thinking man with many years of mixing experience and a great knowledge of history.  He is not one to blindly grab for plug-ins attempting to solve a difficult problem, but rather one that attempts to meticulously preserve the original performance; even if that means painstakingly hand writing the necessary automation.  It is all the more noteworthy then, that when he does reach for a software solution he often reaches for McDSP.  Having used the acclaimed ML4000 limiter for several seasons already, he states, "It was not until ML4000 came along that I was really able to take full advantage of compression, because you have to be extremely careful about what can happen to dialog in noisy situations."  With the multi-band gate, and expanders in addition to the final brick wall limiter he is able to keep the noise floor at bay while eliminating some of the peaky-ness of the performance.  But not only is ML4000 a great utilitarian product, Morrone also speaks very highly of its sonic character saying that "using the ML4000 compressors in conjunction with the limiter I can obtain the smoothest, most transparent results imaginable; and I have tried nearly every EQ, compressor and limiter on the market!"  In a series like Lost where 90% of the dialog does not come from ADR [Automated Dialog Replacement], "ML4000 has truly been a lifesaver."  

After contributing some design suggestions late in the development of FutzBox, Morrone was very pleased with the end result.  While it used to take him a chain of three different plug-ins to get an authentic sounding futz for all the wireless communications in the series, he now has a one-stop shop.  He adds, "There are so many great presets that I can quickly flip through them all and get most of the way there."  The time savings realized by this simplification is huge for a jam-packed weekly serial, and yet there is no room for compromise on quality.  Morrone says, "The producers are adamant that each radio sound unique, and with FutzBox I can easily provide a realistic SIM [Synthetic Impulse Model] quickly."  In the finale alone, FutzBox was used in several phone calls (both cell-phones and land-lines) and in a key scene where a character is watching an old video on television.  In a previous episode, Weber futzed the sound effect of a helicopter needed to accompany a radio dialog from Morrone's system.  In fact, the interface is so intuitive that Weber states "even though I wasn't familiar with the FutzBox product initially, I was able to jump in and start using it in the middle of the show."

Scene changes and production alterations that affect the dialog and effects during mix-down are an expected part of the Lost workflow.  The four to five days spent mixing an episode is nearly double most other television shows, but the efforts of this tightly coupled team pays off in the quality of the finished product.  Some scenes are heavily reworked three or four times in order to meet the producers' desired creative vision.  Weber recounts, "When our editorial staff is pulling their hair out putting in new effects, I'm pulling my hair out because I already have 60 tracks of effects and I need to add 30 more--so I have to add another machine, or mute existing tracks, or delete stuff to make room for the new.  It can be a nightmare, and then you have to trust that plug-in automation on the same track is still going to follow exactly in the scenes after that one."  In this kind of rapidly evolving production environment, a plug-in must respond to automation predictably and reliably.  While some competing products have been pulled from the systems for erratic behavior, Weber says that "We have had none of these problems with McDSP." 

Weber is a long time Disney veteran, a self described gear-guru, with a breadth of experience ranging from music recording, to sound design, and restoration work.  His enthusiasm towards trying new things is evidenced by the fact that he has been innovating time-saving workflows with Pro Tools since it only recorded two channels at a time; in fact he was responsible for conceiving and architecting the technical specifications of their current seven system configuration used for Lost in Stage 6.  With this very skilled technical background, he is very discerning when choosing plug-ins; often doing detailed shootouts with Morrone to choose between competing products. Weber speaks highly of McDSP's limiter saying, "I just love all the meters in ML4000 multi-band ML4 configuration!  Seeing how all the individual bands are gating, expanding, and compressing is very useful information."  It was these same properties of ML4000 that first caught Weber's attention during a convention a few years back.  He finds the multi-band noise gate to be extremely useful in the restoration process of updating older mono composite tracks to more modern multi-channel formats.  "I lean pretty heavy on the ML4000 for that kind of stuff."  Weber states, "The integration of all these capabilities in conjunction with the separate limiter, is like combining several plug-ins into one."   "We're always looking for plug-ins and different things that are going to help to make our job easier or better, and we're excited about the McDSP products." The tight page table integration with Digidesign D-Control is essential to their application. "I have been very impressed by how nicely they map, it's obvious McDSP has taken the time to make it user friendly on the surface" says Weber.  Whether on a large format D-Control center section or in multi-fader mode, or even a smaller control surface, the page table layouts are logical and usable.  Weber explains that criteria number one is sound quality, but number two is ease of use with their dual-operator, 48-fader D-Control. Morrone seconds that opinion, further clarifying that it is important to be able to maneuver the tools as needed while still maintaining the utmost quality.  On both criteria, McDSP is quickly becoming a favorite because not only is there no compromise on sound quality, but also the tight control surface integration yields intuitive and swift results.

Case in point, "I just put it in and started using it" states Morrone of the new NF575 Flexible Noise Filter, employing it to remove a low frequency tone and a single harmonic from a series of dialog tracks filmed on the deck of a freighter in the finale.  It is important to salvage good dialog when you can, and NF575 adds another finely tuned surgical tool to handle many problem situations.  The 36 dB per octave high and low pass filters can quickly eliminate problems at the ends of the spectrum, and the five notches are adept at handling many production noises, such as humming in backgrounds.  Given that he too has been working an extremely long day, Weber gets noticeably enthusiastic about the NF575 frequency linking control saying, "Having harmonic frequency linking is the key to the whole thing!  I've had numerous occasions where I'm going through trying to find the noise, and I remove the first one only to realize there are more to come.  With NF575 I can just hone right in on the problem and it’s done."   And just like that, the interview is over as well.  Morrone and Weber both head back to their respective stations piloting the course of the Lost season finale.  They are the hard working hands and ears that endlessly innovate to realize the producers’ vision, and with McDSP plug-ins in their arsenal they have sonically superior and reliable tools to get the job done.

Frank Morrone Unveils the Sonic Secrets of Lost
Tribeca Flashpoint by Tom Blakemore, MPSE, Recording Arts

On January 23rd, award-winning Los Angeles-based recording mixer Frank Morrone (Lost, Boss, Sideways) visited Tribeca Flashpoint Academy with film editor Chris Nelson (Lost, Mad Men, House M.D.) for a Q&A and all-day workshops with second-year TFA students. Morrone's workshop, presented by Avid Technologies and open to Sound Design for Film students, covered the sound design for Lost and the unique challenges presented by this unusual and iconic production.

For those unfamiliar with the show, Lost represents to many one of the brightest spots in television history. Its wildly-popular six-year run garnered critical acclaim season after season, and was nominated 260 times for various television awards. In addition to its compelling characters and captivating plotline, the world of Lost was brought to life by some of television’s most memorable sound effects and orchestral arrangements.

To achieve Lost’s eerie and suspenseful aesthetic, the sound team detailed an overarching audio vision before the cameras ever rolled. As the team worked on concepts for various elements of the environment and sound signatures for various characters, their discussions informed and often changed the scripting and shooting of scenes from the original story ideas.

This sonic consistency gave Lost an identity that set it apart from the majority of episodic television, resulting in a very cinematic production value. However, where the audio process of most major theatrical films can take anywhere from six months to well over a year to complete, each hour-long episode of Lost was taken from beginning to end in just six days (including original music composition and recording with a sixty piece orchestra). 

It took no small amount of skill and creativity to elevate the sound design of Lost to the award-winning level it achieved. Naturally, our students had a lot of questions. So after a morning panel discussion and Q&A session with both Morrone and Nelson, audio students joined Morrone in one of our Post-Production audio suites where he set up his Pro Tools sessions to shed some light on how Lost’s award-winning sound was achieved.

Morrone began by playing through a complete scene from an episode of Lost, letting the students hear each individual layer of sound that went into the final mix. From sound effects design to the Foley process, dialogue editing to music composition, he showed in detail how the show came together from sound standpoint.

One major sound challenge the class discussed was the one posed by the show’s many outdoor locations. Lost takes place on a mysterious tropical island, very much in contrast to the show’s less-than-deserted Hawaiian shooting locales. 

To give an idea of what the sound design team was up against, Morrone played one particular scene in which three characters have an intimate conversation in the jungle, surrounded by only the sounds of wind in the trees and birds lightly chirping in the background.  But when he played the original recordings for that scene, it became immediately apparent that there was a major highway right behind the camera.

With this challenge as a jumping-off point, the students discussed possible solutions.  After hearing their suggestions, Morrone opened iZotope RX Advanced, a noise-reduction program that has been designed for exactly these types of problems. The students were amazed at the result – clean dialogue with no traffic noise left in the recording.  Morrone also demonstrated the software using a scene from the documentary series The Kennedys and showed how it could be used for an incredibly fine edit of problematic and noisy audio.

This demonstration is sure to come in handy at the beginning of spring semester, when iZotope debuts as a part of second year students’ curriculum (just in time for students’ major capstone films).

By the time our students gave him their standing ovation, Morrone had spoken with them for a half hour longer than his allotted time. He later told us faculty that our students were among the best groups he has had the pleasure of presenting to, and looks forward to the opportunity to visiting us again.

Our thanks to Frank Morrone and Avid Technologies for making this day possible.

Avid Hosts Lost Editor and Sound Designers at USC's First Look Film Festival
Avid Buzz by Mark Williams

Last night at USC, Avid was proud to sponsor a panel discussion with the editor and sound designers from ABC’s Lost, now in it’s sixth and final season, as part of the School of Cinematic Arts’ First Look Film Festival. Editor Chris Nelson and sound re-recording mixers Frank Morrone and Scott Weber went through a scene from last season and showed in detail how it was composed – from a primary green screen shot to finished scene complete with CG, scoring, and sound.

Nelson said it wasn’t unheard of to work a 24+ hour day in the run-up to final delivery, and showed time and time again how Media Composer was integral to his workflow  - allowing him to produce results impossible on any other editing platform. He described the workflow as a kind of dance, utilizing Avid storage and workflow solutions to freely pass work across the team, allowing them to creatively sculpt scenes, not just edit static footage.

Frank Morrone and Scott Weber took Nelson’s finished piece and then raised the bar considerably with their innovative audio work. Every episode uses unique original music, requiring the recording of a 50 piece orchestra on a regular basis. Final mixes exceeding 300 tracks are common, requiring multiple synch’d Pro Tools HD systems , resulting in  layers of sound being woven together to create feature film worthy results.

USC School of Cinematic Arts’ First Look Film Festival runs from April 17 to the 27th. The festival concludes this weekend with the winning films being screened for an audience of industry professionals at the Directors Guild of America in Hollywood, CA.

Full Sail University Welcomed AVID Panel Featuring the 
Sound Mixing Team Behind the Television Show LOST
by PRWEB

Full Sail University (fullsail.edu) recently welcomed the sound mixing team behind the award-winning television drama, LOST. Re-recording Mixers Frank Morrone and Scott Weber, along with AVID Application Specialist, Gill Gowing, who moderated the presentation, came to campus for a special presentation and Q&A session for the students, staff, faculty and AVID guests.

Held in the newly opened Full Sail Live venue, Weber and Morrone gave attendees an exclusive look at their two-man mixing console in the Disney Buena Vista Sound Services Room 6 in Burbank, California, where the team worked on LOST for the entirety of the show’s six seasons. The two worked side by side on every episode of the show, with Morrone handling dialogue and music, while Weber mixed the show's sound effects, earning them an Emmy® for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series in Season 4.

“Having the Emmy award-winning sound mixing team from LOST on campus to speak with our students and share their insight was simply remarkable,” said Scott Dansby, Industry Relations for Full Sail University. “Being able to share and converse about real world industry experiences with working professionals in the entertainment field encourages our students to develop their craft and prepare for their future careers.

The Lost Boys
by The South Magazine

It’s not very often that I am able to sit and chat with a group of people who have ultimately changed the lives of millions of viewers throughout the world, and are responsible for helping create a cult that lovingly refer to themselves as “Losties.”  So when I sat in the Lennon Bus today with the video, dialog and sound editors of Lost I was extremely eager to learn how it was all done.Chris Nelson, Scott Weber and Frank Morrone worked on the six seasons of Lost with the job of creating visual and audio suspense every week. If you are familiar with the show, the video and sound created 90 percent of the thrilling sequences viewers yearned for every episode.  Through a complicated web that is more or less seen as a major movie production than a television series, these three worked on enhancing scenes and in turn, the show’s plot, which is by no means an easy feat.

All three agreed that working on Lost was the most challenging job of their career.

“The amount of content was challenging. We had a smoke monster, plane crashes and a deserted island,” Sound Editor Scott Weber said. “Not only that, the environment they were filming was a busy, populated island, O’ Ahu, with a highway nearby, an Airforce base nearby and a lot of that audio had to be worked on in the studio.”

It was funny however, to find out that with all the technology they had at hand  to create, distort and hide sounds and visuals, it turns out that some time old tricks-of-the-trade were still in use. The infamous clicking of the smoke monster was the sound of a New York taxicab printing a receipt that Morrone recorded before he worked on the show.

Here to speak to SCAD students about editing as a profession and the realities they face in the business, I asked each of them what lessons of the profession they wanted to relay and they all had the same ideas: teamwork, observation and most importantly, leaving the ego at the door.

Nelson was quick to respond with a quote from his first boss, Gloria Clark.

“The moment you start loving your work is the moment you stop getting better at your job,” said Nelson. He also stressed if you want to be great in this business you have to be a good student of human nature.

Morrone noted that 50 percent of the job is how well you relate to people, “that and networking! Get out and meet as many people as possible.”

Nelson summed it up well by saying success is an equal combination of “talent, personality and luck.”

52nd Annual MPSE Golden Reel Awards
by Sharon Benoit

 It takes a great deal of passion and energy to catch the attention of one’s peers in the sound mixing and sound-editing arena. When peer recognition surfaces, a great deal of satisfaction emerges. This year, more than 70 men and women in the sound community garnered top honors from the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE). It’s an honor each individual winner relishes in a multitude of ways.
 
Take Paul Menichini, MPSE, for example. He was the big winner of four Golden Reel Awards this year, winning one award in the Best Sound Editing in Television: Short Form–Sound Effects and Foley category as the sound designer on Lost; one as sound effects editor in the Best Sound Editing in Television: Animated category for Jimmy Neutron; one as supervising sound editor on Golden Eye: Rogue Agent; and one of seven sound effects editors honored in the Best Sound Editing: Direct to Video category for Bionicle II: Legends of Metru Nui.
 
“I’m proud of the team that worked on Golden Eye: Rogue Agent, including David Farmer, Ann Scibelli, Tim Nielsen, Roland Thai, Mark Allen, Derek VanderHorst, Sean Rowe, Gordon Hookailo and Thomas Brewer,” Menichini says. “Ann and Tim did most of the ambiences. David and I did a large amount of the cinematics, with contributions from everyone else. The entire team also contributed to in-game sounds,” he notes. Menichini has been in the sound editing field for 12 years. A few months ago, he finished sound editing on Lords of Dogtown and he’s now working on a movie that will be released around the end of the year.
 
Brewer, MPSE, an Golden Reel-winning re-recording mixer, on Golden Eye, started his sound mixing career with 4MC in Burbank, California. He then moved to Complete Post where he helped build the Complete Post Sound Division. “Now I’m working on four or five different movie trailers in a given week,” he says. “It’s very gratifying.” VanderHorst won his first Golden Reel this year. Initially a boom operator on B movies in 1991, he’s currently working on the remake of The Longest Yard.
 
Another big winner this year was Bill Smith, who captured his first Golden Reel in the Best Sound Editing in Television: Long Form category for CSI: Miami as sound effects editor (shared with Edmond Coblentz), foley editor and re-recording mixer (shared with Yuri A. Reese, CAS). He has been a re-recording mixer for over 20 years and is currently working on a continuing contract with CSI: Miami. “I have to thank Brad Katona, MPSE, for his excellent sound effects editorial work. He’s willing to do whatever it takes to make the show sound better,” says Smith.
 
Katona took home two Golden Reel Awards for CSI: Miami as sound designer and sound effects designer. Other CSI: Miami Golden Reel winners included supervising sound editor Ann Hadsell, supervising foley editor Ruth Adelman, MPSE, assistant editors Hugh Murphy and Carrie Lisonbee, foley artists Zane Bruce and Shane Bruce, and foley mixers Don Givens and James Howe.
 
 Adelman works on a weekly basis on all three of the CSI series (Las Vegas, Miami and New York) as ADR supervisor. She also works on “Without a Trace,” as does Smith. “It’s not so much about me and my work as it is about working as a team,” Adelman points out.
 
While she was nominated four times in the past three years, Lisonbee earned her first Golden Reel this year as an assistant editor on CSI: Miami. She works at Todd-AO on all three CSI series, as well as Without a Trace, Blind Justice and Scrubs, among several others. “When all of those shows turn over a new episode each week, I can’t even remember what end is up,” she exclaims, adding, “It’s my favorite part of being an assistant editor for television.”
 
Father and son team Zane and Shane Bruce each landed a Golden Reel for CSI this year. Zane has been a foley artist for 19 years, earning seven MPSE awards, plus two Emmy Awards. Shane started out in 2001 on The Sopranos. He works on all three CSI series. This year’s MPSE award was Shane’s first.
 
Another winner of three Golden Reel Awards this year was Phil Stockton, MPSE. He took home two top honors in the Best Sound Effects/Foley Editing in a Feature Film category as supervising sound editor on The Aviator, and one award in the Best Sound Editing in a Feature Film: Dialogue and ADR category as supervising sound editor/supervising dialogue editor for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
 
Stockton has been in the field 23 years. He started out working in New York as a picture editor in 1982. “A few years later, I jumped over to sound and I’ve been a sound editor ever since,” he says. He’s currently working on the feature Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, to be released in December.
 
Other winners in the same category for Eternal Sunshine were sound designer Eugene Gearty, supervising ADR editor Marissa Littlefield, dialogue editor Fred Rosenberg and ADR editor Hal Levinsohn, MPSE.
 
Gearty also shared the supervising sound editor award for The Aviator with Stockton. Also winning for The Aviator was supervising foley editor Frank Kern, assistant sound editor Larry Wineland, field recordist Patrico Libenson, re-recording mixer Tom Fleischman, CAS, sound effects editor Wyatt Sprague, foley editors Kam Chan and Jacob Ribicoff and foley mixer George Lara. Kern also just finished working on Brokeback Mountain. In regard to his future plans, Kern notes that he’s very content to work in New York. “I work with a great bunch of people at C5,” he noted.
 
Wineland, who won his first MPSE award this year, enjoys working as an assistant to Gearty. “Eugene will often edit effects as if he were composing a musical piece, focusing on the overall shape and emotional character of the effects, as opposed to the literal ‘see a dog, hear a dog’ type of editing,” he says.
 
Twenty-five-year field recordist Libenson has been nominated seven times for Golden Reel Awards. He’s won two other MPSE awards in the past–one for the feature Speed and the other for the TV series I’ll Fly Away. He started out as an apprentice in sound post-production. His first film in Los Angeles was The Water Dance, directed and co-written by Neil Jimenez and Mike Steinberg. Before that, he worked on documentaries on the East Coast.
 
Curt Sobel scored a Golden Reel as music editor in the Best Sound Editing in Feature Film–Musical Feature category for Ray. His big break came in 1980 when he was assigned the film Cutter’s Way, with a score composed by Jack Nitzsche. That relationship led to seven other film projects with Nitzsche, including An Officer and a Gentleman, where he first met director Taylor Hackford. Since then, Sobel has worked on virtually all of Hackford’s films.
 
The award-winning music editor has many memories working on Ray, including “having the chance to work with the genius himself–Ray Charles–and working so closely with actor Jamie Foxx, Taylor Hackford and [editor] Paul Hirsch, ACE; it can’t really be beat, right?”
Along with a Golden Reel, the sound mixing work of Scott Millan, CAS, on Ray also earned him an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award (see related stories, page 13). He got his start in 1974 at KCOP Channel 13 in Los Angeles as a junior engineer, and recently completed a film, Dark Water, directed by Walter Salles, that’s set for release this summer.
 
Zack Davis, MPSE, took home a Golden Reel award in the Best Sound Editing in Television; Long Form–Dialogue and ADR category for the HBO original movie The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. He won as dialogue editor and ADR editor; the latter award was shared with Anna MacKenzie. Also winning for Peter Sellers were Robert Deschaine, CAS, as ADR mixer, and Rick Ash as re-recording mixer. Davis is currently working as the ADR Supervisor on the Paramount comedy The Honeymooners.
 
In the Best Sound Editing in Television: Long Form–Music category, Joanie Diener, MPSE, and Gary Bourgeois, CAS, were honored for their work as supervising music editor/scoring editor, and music re-recording mixer, respectively, for A Christmas Carol: The Musical.
 
Diener fondly recalls working with director Sam Mendes and editor Tarig Anwar on American Beauty, and with the late Elmer Bernstein on the last feature he scored, Far from Heaven. Bourgeois started out in Ottawa, Canada in 1969. One of his first feature film projects was on Janis, a film depicting the musical career of Janis Joplin. He also served as Bob Dylan’s mixer on the road before moving west in 1980.
 
Music editor Allen K. Rosen, MPSE, and re-recording mixer Dean Okrand captured Golden Reel awards this year for their work on The Mystery of Natalie Wood. Rosen was the first music editor to be brought onto the MPSE board. “The most interesting part of working on The Mystery of Natalie Wood was the diversity of music involved,” he says. “It encompassed a wide range of original music and re-recording standards.”
 
Taking home the Best Sound Editing in Feature Film-Music category for Passion of the Christ were supervising music editor Michael T. Ryan, MPSE, scoring mixer Simon Rhodes and music re-recording mixer Kevin O’Connell. Ryan’s been a music editor for 14 years. Prior to music editing he was a dialogue editor.
 
Rhodes was delighted upon learning of his MPSE win. He recorded the orchestra, chorus and various individual soloists for Passion at the famed Abbey Road and Air Lyndhurst Studios in London, and has been with Abbey Road Studios since 1987.
 
O’Connell’s take on the MPSE award was simply: “Winning a Golden Reel is truly appreciated.” He started out as a projectionist in 1977 at 20th Century Fox and switched to the sound department at Samuel Goldwyn Studios in 1978. He began mixing motion pictures in 1982. As for working on Passion, O’Connell says, “Mel Gibson is not an actor pretending to be a director; he’s a full-fledged director. It was wonderful to help bring Gibson’s vision to the screen.”
 
The TV pilot for Lost won in the Best Sound Editing in Television Short Form–Sound Effects and Foley category. In addition to the aforementioned Menichini, those winning top honors for Lost included supervising sound editors Thomas de Gorter, MPSE, and Trevor Jolly; sound effects editors Roland Thai, MPSE, and Marc Glassman; assistant sound editor/ADR editor Dana Olsefsky; foley artist Patrick Cabral; and re-recording mixer Frank Morrone, MPSE, CAS. Also winning for Lost were supervising dialogue editor Christopher Reeves; dialogue editor Gabrielle Reeves; ADR mixer Doc Kane, CAS; and dialogue re-recording mixer Scott Weber.
 
Glassman started in the business 10 years ago as an ADR voice actor in a loop group and continues to work on Lost each week. “Lost is a unique show that is multifaceted and different each week. It stretches my sound effects editing,” he says.
 
Jolly also feels very fortunate to work on this high-profile show. He started out in Brisbane, Australia and eventually ended up in the US as a picture editor. He’s been supervising sound since 1996 and enjoys working with “any directors, producers or editors who have real passion for their projects.”
 
Olsefsky has been working in sound since 2001. She won her first MPSE awards for the Lost pilot. She also currently works on Alias. “I’d love to work on feature films at some point. It would be cool to work on a Tony Scott film since that is where I got my start.” (She started out as an intern for director Scott on Man on Fire.)
 
Lost is not routine, according to award-winner Morrone. “Sound is very important to each episode. We take the same approach to mixing this show as on a mini-feature.” He’d love to work with George Lucas in the future. “Lucas is the reason I got into this business. I saw Star Wars and it made me aware of what sound can do for a film,” he says. Lucas was honored at this year’s MPSE Awards with the inaugural Filmmaker Award and has been known to state, “Sound is 50 percent of a film.” It’s a Lucas quote Morrone can never forget.
 
Winning the MPSE award for Lost was Weber’s first. He started in the music business 17 years ago, at Group IV Recording Studio where he did music scores as a second engineer, then stepped up to sound mixer. Weber agrees that Lost is one of the most challenging jobs he’s worked on. “It’s very gratifying,” he offers.
 
Sex in the City has won countless awards in the past. This year, supervising music editor Dan Lieberstein and music editor Missy Cohen were honored with Golden Reel Awards for the episode entitled “An American Girl in Paris (Part Deux).” “This is my second Golden Reel Award; my first was for Chicago, the movie, as part of the crew,” Cohen explains. “Dan and I did all of the music for Sex in the City, so it is quite an honor to receive this award.” Cohen recently worked with Ron Howard as foley editor on Cinderella Man, set for a June release, and A Beautiful Mind in 2001.
 
Also winning an MPSE Golden Reel Award in the Best Sound Editing: Special Venue Film category for Nascar 3-D: The Imax Experience were music editor Will Kaplan and ADR mixer Paul Aronoff.
 
Other winners in the Best Sound Editing: Direct to Video category for Bionicle II: Legends of Metru Nui were supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer/music editor Timothy J. Borquez, MPSE; supervising dialogue editor/re-recording mixer Eric Freeman, MPSE; supervising ADR editor/re-recording mixer Doug Andorka; sound effects editors Tom Syslo, Jeff Hutchins, Brian Mars, Michael Geisler, MPSE, Daisuke Sawa and Mark Mailand; and foley editor Jason Freedman.

Everyone who took home a top MPSE honor relishes the acknowledgement of this prestigious award in a similar fashion: Peer recognition is truly golden.
The Avid Lecture Series Goes to Hollywood
Avid Buzz by Mark Williams

On Monday, March 7th, Christopher Nelson (editor of LOST and Mad Men),  Frank Morrone and Scott Webber (sound re-recording engineers from LOST) joined over 130 students from The Los Angeles Film and Recording Schools for a two hour discussion on Avid’s essential role in producing one of television’s biggest hits.  Students were taken through 3 clips (rough cut, producers cut, and final cut) and were shown first hand how Chris, Frank, and Scott edit and fine tune video and audio tracks to create the final cut using Media Composer and Pro Tools. 

The following week, the guys were back at The Los Angeles Film and Recording Schools to work with 45 students, in two smaller groups, for specific Avid Student Master Classes.  Chris held a “Video Master Class”, while Scott and Frank held a “Audio Master Class”.  This two hour class allows the students and our guests to talk more in-depth about technique, workflow, and the industry. 
RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE