Sumsound at Trackdown was recently booked by Pete Purcell to premix “A Heartbeat Away”, a local film. Pete’s preference when mixing is to have PT screens outside his immediate line of site so they dont pull him away from the picture and story onscreen. Prior to PEte mixing in there, Will Ward was doing sound design for the film and spent many weeks searching SFX databases. The screens were too far away for him.
SO, I invested in some new 16:9 samsungs and mounted them on Spacedec arms, as used on the Digidesign D-Controls…
Take a peek! A very flexible arrangement now, allowing for 3 primary positions depending on who is using the room for what…

The arms allow the screens to be positioned out wide, so they dont get between the mixer and the projection screen:

Or can be moved closer to the operator for editing/sound design:

Or lastly, my own preference, in the line of sight for mixing:

Since the inception of a plan to build Sumsound, two technologies have always been at the forefront of my mind…

The Satellite technology from Avid Audio foremost, which led me to invest in the video satellite rig, running both Media composer and PTLE with a decklink card. IMHO, any way we can both save time and improve picture quality on the mix screen is a good thing for everyone. It saves having “that discussion” with directors/producers about “pixels/image quality/why???”.

Secondly, I was always aware that the video editing house above my room, Cutting Edge, ran Avid Media Composers and centrally stored all their media on an EditShare system. I’d hoped to collaborate with them once the business started and in turn hoped having a Media Composer video satellite rig might come in handy…Sure enough, on a picture we are about to work together on, the SFX editor will be based in my room and need regular picture updates from editorial upstairs, so this past week, Rob Peru the Tech Manager from Cutting Edge Sydney and myself got the Editshare connection in place and tested it out.

Worked like a charm! They are cutting with the Avid HD video codec DNxHD36 for their offline upstairs, so that’s what I wanted to open on the video satellite rig, and stream via the 1000bT connection from their editshare. It turns out it was a straightforward affair.

Editshare have a snow leopard client, its free to install, as you pay for the storage unit, not for client seats on it, unlike some other companies…So since they had a spare port, it didn’t cost anyone a cent to add my room to their existing network.

The Editshare client software is simple to use, and once you’ve mounted the volumes you want, you can save that as a preset and it loads them automatically next time you log on.

So my vid sat mac pro has two ethernet ports, one is connected full time to the Editshare directly, and the second goes to my 1000bT switch that connects to my PTHD rig, ICON and local network for the audio team.

The one issue we are left with is that the rest of the audio team are not connected to the editshare, so they will need DV Pal QT movies to work to. I’m curious to test if I can open the sequence in MC, export a QT Ref movie for PTLE to open on my deckink card, open THAT, then start rendering the QT movies in the background while running PTLE in the foreground as my video VTR…Hoping to test that this week coming. Hopefully the 8 core Xeon and the bandwidth from the Editshare will cope with the demands of both tasks simulaneously, which would be awesome. I think this will have benefits when it comes to consistency of the materials that we need.

The only trick we needed to configure on the Editshare, was that I wasnt streaming picture from my Media composer onto my projector, rather I was using a QT ref pointing at the media and opening that on my Decklink card. To make that work, we needed to turn on “QT Reference mode” on those volumes on the Editshare. Seemed logical, we didnt even bother to test it without that mode switched on. It just worked, looked fantastic on the 3.5m projection screen and scrubbed and updated smooth as all get out, just like local SD video, but looking far, far sexier.

A happy engineer here – love it when a good plan comes together!

Hi all,

Shameless plug here, Ive been working on a new flash website for sumsound and its gone live in the last few days.

Visit it at www.sumsound.com.au

So, in my records of the build, we’ve looked at the room analysis, tailoring bass traps, using rockwool of specific thicknesses to deal with higher frequencies.

The final piece of acoustic treatment was a ceiling cloud, as the ceiling and floor over the mix position were the only parallel surfaces in the room. I turned to Bradford Ultratel, a fibreglass insulation board of 75mm thickness. By putting two of these boards together and joining them with small quanitities of spray adhesive and wire, I made the ceiling cloud. This was then covered in Japarra, a breathable cotton based material that has a sufficiently tight weave not to let any glass fibre through, and it was suspended from the roof, on a slight angle, over the mix position.

You can see from the photo above that a few other surfaces, like the bass traps and doors and skylines have all been painted to match the walls as well. Lastly we have some nice chairs in front and behind the desk.

Looking to the front of the room, I took this picture with my olympus camera on “night mode” – supposedly a longer exposure type filter. The thing that blew me away was the definition on the projection screen! It looks like Ive cut and paste a picture onto it as it’s so sharp and clear!

The front of Sumsound

So now the missions is somewhat different – using the ears and learning the room. And lastly, but most importantly, putting the gear and all that behind me to concentrate on tapping into creativity!

A good friend and amazing mentor of mine, Simon Leadley, always made the point that the newest and flashest gear doesnt make the movie, the people make the film – which reminded me that equipment doesnt gift you with skills or creativity, that has to come from within.

I’m so grateful to him for his constant inspiration and support to get Sumsound to where it is today and to have supported me to chase my dreams. He was an incredibly talented, generous guy and I’ll miss him dearly – those of you who weren’t aware, he passed away recently.

Having a mentor like Simon was a life changing experience for me. I guess we all have people who inspire us, who push us to do more than settle for mediocrity. Simon was one of those key inspirations for me and I can’t help but think about his legacy when I work at Sumsound. Memories of our many chats help me to focus on what’s really important and to take a step back and remember the big picture – people, loyalties, doing a good job, and giving freely of yourself where you can to help those around you in your community, be it your local audio community or your family or where you live.

So, getting on with the visual diary of the build of the new room.
The front of the room was looking good and we had the desk in place – giving us a feel for how much space we had. As budgets shrink and premixing is becoming more prevelant, I felt strongly that I needed to make the room dual operator friendly, hence the big desk as discussed in the first build diary post. Due to it’s size (3 x 1.2m) I really didnt want to committ to the back wall until it was in the room and I could get a feel for it – and where the clients were going to sit!

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

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

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

Frame went up easily…

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

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

Then came the paint!

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

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

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

So this topic may be a bit long due to photographic evidence, but if you’re interested read on!

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

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

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

Speaker stand construction

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

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

The frame from floor to ceiling

The 3.5m wide 16:9 screen in place

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

The desk prior to “brassing” and french polishing

The Desk in place with the DCommand dropped in

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

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

Hello to everyone out there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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