In this week’s podcast, Mike is joined by Reid Caulfield and Kevin Dallas to discuss what the future might hold for post production sound.

Mike Thornton

Mike Thornton has been working in the broadcast audio industry for all his working life, some 44 years. Mike has worked with Pro Tools since the mid-90s growing up with it when it was 4 tracks on a good day with a following wind! He has been recording, editing and mixing documentaries, comedy and drama for both radio and TV as well as doing the occasional music project. He was the co-founder of Pro Tools Expert and is now COO of Production Expert Ltd.

Reid Caulfield

Reid is Re-Recording Mixer & VP of Operations at Central Post in L.A. He has merged decades of creative sound and video work with his technical expertise designing appropriate infrastructure for large & small facilities alike.

Kevin Dallas

Kevin Dallas is a dubbing mixer and sound designer working remotely from his custom-built garden studio "The Dubshakk”. With 20 years of experience in the film and TV industry, he provides sound design, mixing, recording and editing to complement storytelling. His credits span all genres; from feature films and Documentaries to Specialist Factual, Comedy, Formatted Entertainment and Children’s.

Talking Points

• Let’s start with Covid. How has working around COVID and maintaining social distancing affected the way you work?

• How do you see things we have had to do because of Covid affecting workflows in the future?

• Moving away from Covid, what tech changes do you see on the horizon and how will they after workflows in audio post-production?

Find Of The Week

• Kevin - SessionLinkPRO

• Reid - Liquidsonics Cinematic Rooms

• Mike - Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes

Transcript of the Show

MT: So in today's podcast, we're going to look at the future of audio post-production. A sort of crystal ball over-the-horizon look, but before we go over the horizon, can we roll back a bit and look at the impact that we've experienced with regard to COVID? So how has working around COVID and maintaining social distancing affected the way each of you works?

RC: Up until this past November of 2020, I had my own multi-room facility in Los Angeles, and we were very lucky. We were lucky enough to be subscribed from the moment COVID hit until November or December. As a mixer and as a facility owner, I didn't really have a chance to look up from what was going on because how I was mixing multiple series at the same time, dozens of episodes. I want to say that typically I'm a hermit anyway; in our business, we go into a room at the beginning of the day, and there are people there, we come out at the end of the day, and everybody's gone and, no one really has an inkling of what we've done while we've been in the room, but we just keep on ploughing forward that way.

If I'd been in a box and I hadn't known about COVID, I probably wouldn't have known about it until November because my routine day-to-day didn't change, but at our facility, it did. We found ourselves, in terms of COVID and keeping things clean. What we did is we just adopted a seven-day 24-hour clock for these projects we were working on. Not because we needed 28 shifts a day, 16 shifts a day, or 12 shifts a day, but because it allowed us to take six, eight, ten people and spread them out through the week and through the days so that no one really ran into each other. We all coordinated via phone and email and all of that.

As a facility owner, it was costly. It's costly to have that much cleaning going on and having rooms down when you really don't want them down. It's costly to put remote workflows, especially voice recording workflows, into place, but we may manage through all of that. As I say in November, I sold the facility. That was my experience with COVID. It probably didn't affect me day-to-day so much, but it did affect the facility a great deal.

MT:Kevin, what about you?

KD: Slightly different from Reid in that I work from my own facility most of the time, which is at home in my garden and the only time I ever really went out before was to record voice or for reviews. Just before we went into lockdown in the UK, so that was March 2020; just before then, I was doing a couple of weeks mixing in a facility, which is quite unusual for me, and it was clear that things were ramping up and that we were going to hit lockdown soon. I just said to the facility, 'I'm sorry, I'm just, I'm quite happy to work from home from no one, I don't really want to come in anymore.' And they said, 'yeah, that's fine half our people are now working from home, and that's how it is.' Since then, I haven't been into a facility since February 2020. and I don't imagine I'll be rushing back to one anytime soon. I'm not sure what the rules are, where Reid is, but certainly, here, you should still work from home if you can. So I did start working from home full-time, and what I had to do was adapt my workflow instead to be able to do things like record voice remotely and do remote reviews. This was always possible before, but it wasn't something clients were keen on, but everyone's had to adapt and move into that way of working, and I have to say it's worked incredibly well. And I think what will come out of this is that we have had to be more flexible, and production has had to be more flexible in how we all work. There are definitely some pluses there.

MT: Starting to look forward, you may well have already implied some of this, but how do you see things that we've had to do because of COVID affecting how we choose to do things in the future?

KD: As I said, the workflows have changed, and I think that some of that will remain. I've just worked on a series with the series producer geographically near me, and all the offline editors were spread out across the UK. I've never worked on a show like that before; people have always been in a facility somewhere, regardless of whether I was still mixing remotely. Now people have a broader range of talent to choose from because they can have anyone working on the show because if everyone is working from home or just spread out a bit. I think that's the significant changes, you don't have to take the people who are geographically in one place anymore you can pick the best people you want to work with.

MT: So in terms of working, you would perceive that you will continue doing remote voiceover recording, remote reviews?

KD: Personally, I think I will probably continue to do a lot of that; I'm not saying that every job will continue. There will still be some things, I'm sure, and that'll be driven by production and talent where I will go out somewhere to record voice and to do reviews. But I generally think to my clients. Certainly, ones that were reticent before to be fully remote have now embraced that. I have one client, in particular, I do lots of voice recording for, and two weeks into the pandemic, I said to them, 'I found a solution for this. We can do this from home.' And they said, 'no, we can't. It's fine; in a few weeks, we'll be back in the studio.' And then a few weeks passed, and they called me back and said, 'okay, what do you have? Then let's try this, and we've recorded with them; I can't even think how many days and weeks over the last year remotely and continue to mix it and get programs out the door, and they're extremely happy and quite comfortable with it.

MT: So looking at the remote recording of voiceovers, what was the discovery you made and how has it changed over time as you've, I guess, refined it?

KD: So the discovery for me was Session Link Pro; I started using that a couple of weeks into March 2020. Started out testing it with other mixers who were all looking for solutions. I decided that was the product that fitted me. There are other things available, but what's great about it is over the last year is Session Link Pro have fine-tuned the product. Originally you had to use two products to do what I wanted to do, which is lip sync video. I do lots of revoicing cartoons and animation. The voice actor has to see the video to lip-sync to it, and we obviously have to have low latency and clean recording and talk back. There's generally three or four of us on the call, so we need all that to work in, and originally the Session Link Pro, there were two products. There was recording to do the record, and then there was conferencing for the video playback. But they've now made a new product called Dubbing which does everything under one lid, and it runs in a Chrome browser. The bit that needed more work than anything else was getting voice actors who didn't have a booth at home, to build something, and there was lots of buying mic online, and that a lot of the time came down to availability. What was available, what could we get within two days? What could I talk them through over a video call and show them how to plug it in. Then buying other sound isolation products and things and teaching them how to turn their cupboard, or whatever they had, into some sort of sound booth.

MT: Looking at those sorts of things, can you give us some indications of the sorts of solutions that you're able to help your voice talents put in place?

KD: My first stipulation was that you had to have a Mac because I'm not a windows person at all, and I couldn't troubleshoot a Windows machine from afar. Then we would send them a mic. First, it was a USB mic because that was the simplest solution, but as things progressed, we moved on to interfaces and better quality microphones. One of them has bought an Aston and a PreSonus interface. I can't specifically remember, but that's the kind of readily available products, are not extremely expensive. Certainly, the voice actors that I'm working with who previously would always have come to the studio are really happy working from home. It's also allowed them to pick up other work because they now have their own facility.

MT: Reid, what about you? How do you perceive things that we learned with COVID will continue when we choose not to continue with these new workflows.

RC: My experience is basically the same, but very different. This is really a function of Los Angeles, which is an old school set-in-their-ways situation. First of all, I want to give an overarching idea. Finally, after decades of seeing this on the horizon, I think we can almost all agree that voice recording as a sector for commercial facilities is almost gone. I have voiced friends, professional voiceover friends, and as Kevin says, people who record animation, who've had studios in their homes for 10 years or eight years or whatever it is. It was always the problem was always with the facilities. It was always with contracted facilities. It was with clients like coming in the morning and being catered to and having bagels, and then these very same facilities started to have to accommodate remote workflows. But I must say that in Los Angeles, there has been, in fact, when COVID started in the middle of it and up to now, there has been a drive here for people in our business to get back into the studio.

Now I understand that when it comes to mixing, I do not understand that when it comes to voice recording. Kevin's right; there are challenges, we went through this. What interfaces are they going to be able to deal with? What Mac and macOS do they have, and look Focusrite did really well in this pandemic because you don't need a driver if you've got a small interface and you just need to be able to be walked through it, then you get to the more complicated stuff. Our problem as a facility when COVID started was that we had a multitude of clients, and all of them wanted to do it a different way. Some of them did Source Connect; we're used to Source Connect, some of them were on something called IPD TL and various other schemes. As a facility that had been built from the ground up for asset security, meaning our rooms were specifically designed to prevent access from the outside, that took a little bit of work, and we got there. I was on the phone with talent building pillow forts. The more upscale the talent and the more successful, the talent the bigger the walk-in closet they had! That would work beautifully. I was dealing with talent who literally lived in a condominium that was concrete. Everything was concrete.

I just don't see a return to facilities. I think it was diminishing anyway, but I see people wanting to stay home for an awful lot of the creative endeavours that happen; I'll come around to this a bit later. In conclusion, a lot of the slices of business that facilities have become used to; voice recording for animation is a huge one in Los Angeles and New York. Those people are at home now, and I don't think they're going to want to really go back into the studios. There is a question going forward regarding mixing, but we can get to that later. I would say this voice revolution that we've seen in the last 15 months is going to continue.

MT: I'm going to guess again, you're looking at the voice talent; they can actually probably be more productive because they no longer have to travel from facility one to facility two and settle in and all the rest of it. They could actually almost do sessions back-to-back. I suspect that will be another very good reason for them to choose to continue in this sort of remote working?

RC: It's how voiceover people here have been doing it for decades, actually, and that was the impetus decades ago. And when I say voice talent, I'm talking about the very high end, I have had full recording studios for a long time, and now everybody does. Yeah.

MT: Putting COVID to one side, technology has changed significantly in the past few years. Reid, what sort of tech changes are you now perceiving, obviously, especially with your hats on in terms of designing and installing infrastructure?

RC: I'm doing a lot more work for individual artists, a lot more consulting now that I'm out of my own facilities business. I obviously have a studio at home that I work in, but there are two things. If we look at what's propping up most of the television business, I won't say in the United Kingdom, but certainly in the United States, what we basically have is 95% of the content, or 90% of the content is what we would call non-fiction unscripted or lightly scripted. That is, it's not Peaky Blinders; it's various reality shows; that's what most of the work is, cause that's most of what fills the broadcast pipe. I would say that it's less and less likely that those shows, and in fact, it's been happening for a while, but they're not coming to a mix room anymore. Final mixes are coming off of the video editors Media Composer or Premiere, certainly for promotion promos and commercials and things like that. But localization, specifically because of Netflix and Amazon and so much content in the pipe and 30 languages, localization is a very big business. But, all the localization facilities here, as you can imagine there are a lot of them like they are there are in London probably, and they've been empty. These facilities are 20,000 square feet or whatever that is in meters and employ a hundred people on an open plan floor. Then they're surrounded by four or five or six audio dubbing studios where we can record voice and all of that. I've been making the rounds, and I've been working in those facilities the last couple of months, and it's pretty shocking how much everything has changed there. They are wastelands, there's no one there, very often I'm the only person there. Other people are doing whatever they're doing, and maybe they're working from home, and these are busy places. But technologically, there seems to be a drive now towards lessening the amount of voice talent used in localization. And I won't go into that, but there's a lot of A.I. Floating around and there's software that I'm sure all three of us have on our Pro Tools computers that we use that are probably about to come out and say here's a new module for this and basically it's a voice input module that basically, maybe it's a voiceprint module, or maybe it lets you type in a sentence and say it in that person's voice. There's all sorts of stuff on the horizon. So again, it seems to me that you've heard from Kevin; we all have our experiences. The creative part of a lot of this business seems to be going to people's homes. You still need to mix in theatre, but do you? And this is the last thing that I actually want to say here, Sony, about a month and a half ago. I haven't figured out if it was a mistake, but Sony came out in the press and said they had prior to COVID, but the step that up during COVID, they had Sony engineering in Japan find a way to do IRs of their biggest mix stage, and I believe since then all of their mix stages. So very much like you and I, and Kevin can do, and we can buy various Waves plugins, and things like that let us simulate in headphones being in a given room, Sony had modelled their biggest mix theatre. It turned it into a private plugin to give to all their sound editors and their mixers. The thought is that you're working in headphones, not everybody likes to do that for too long every day, but this is a situation you don't have to come into the Cary Grant Theatre to mix. You can get 80% of the work done by using the full Atmos IR model of the Cary Grant Theatre, and at that point, using binaural headphones. Again, I think mixing is probably the last pillar to fall, but there are large companies here working on turning out into a situation where you can get most of the work done outside of a large mixing theatre, which of course, is a huge economic change for our business in Los Angeles.

MT: I think we've seen more and more mixers, again, improving. They might have had a laptop on a shelf or whatever at home, and they would do odd bits or prep deliverables or stuff, rather than having to go into the studio. Certainly here in the UK, we've seen more and more mixers who were mixing in facilities, setting themselves up with a perfectly satisfactory setup to continue mixing the same sorts of shows but doing it at home. Kevin, what are you seeing over the horizon in terms of how tech will change the way we work?

KD: I think the biggest one for all of us is always internet speed. Isn't it? I suppose Reid probably has no issues with his, but in the UK, we have ups and downs at times. I certainly had one day when I was recording voice all day, and mine just went off halfway through the day, but what did surprise me was that I managed to tether to the 4g on my phone and keep working and record for the rest of the day and that really surprised me. But I was quite pleased that I had that backup, but I think in the future is certainly a case is we need to better broadband speeds. I knew a couple of Avid editors that I know are have signed up to Tesla's Starlink and are hoping to join that program, because obviously once you get that dish, you can get super fast speed anywhere on the planet. Although the whole scheme sort of reeks of Bond villain, doesn't it? This belt of satellites controlled by one man, anyway, but it's going to bring amazing internet, so I think that's the thing we need better speeds everywhere, and especially in the UK and more rural areas, so that we can all keep working. I think that people who have lost out during COVID are the ones who didn't have great internet at home to start with.

MT: Obviously, 5g will be a significant improvement as it's rolled out. Also, here in the UK, we are now seeing a significant push by British Telecom, but more importantly, their side part Openreach, which effectively provides a lot of the inf internet infrastructure for all the different companies to get internet from. And they are on a significant push to move across to fibre, not just to the cabinet, but actually, fibre to the premises, because here in the UK, copper has a finite endpoint, and it's only a couple of years away, so there is a major push.

RC: I want to say this about Los Angeles, I don't have fibre in my house, but I have a one gig wired connection. I can actually squeeze almost a gig out of it down and 40 megabytes up, which isn't great, but it's okay. We've had fibre to the premises for more than a decade here, but what has stopped its widespread adoption is that the carriers realized that they could charge insane amounts of money. So in Los Angeles city, one strand of one gig fibre into your premises is about $2,000 a month. In Burbank, just down the road, it's 6,000 a month. What kind of costs is it going to trigger and following on from what Kevin said about Starlink and certainly everyone's right in terms of 5g, I think that's going to change a lot. Still, in terms of Starlink, I don't know what its up and down bandwidth is or what its latency is going to be, and everyone's on the fence right now.

KD: Products I use quite a lot are Signing and Aspera to send files back and forth to facilities, and they are great, and I'll be on a series using them for a while, and then I'll come off, and I'll be working with another client who doesn't have that sort of thing, because of the price point. Then you're back to Dropbox, Google Drive, We Transfer it, and that becomes painfully slow. So it would be good to see that those other faster products get a bit more affordable for smaller companies.

MT: Yeah. Yeah, cause it obviously is doable because, as you say, Aspira and Signium, which of course is what the BBC use, they're using the same internet connection, but as you say, the speeds are significant. So something somewhere is, not to put too fine a point on it, being throttled.

RC: Oh, it's all being throttled; even Aspera is being throttled. I owned a facility; we had Aspera we had our own server, actually. Basically, the tiers are old throttling tears. If you want to pay $5000 a month, you can go really fast, but I have large network clients who I worked for from home. I have large network clients whose Aspera servers are limited to 20 terabytes and horribly slow speeds because, as a national company, they don't want to pay $80,000 a month. There is a lot of throttling going on, and I will just say that I used to love Dropbox, but for the secure content, for some reason, it's not allowed here. So, if you're a client and you want me to give you something via Dropbox, then everyone has to agree that you are now outside the cloak of asset security.

MT: We had a situation pre-COVID where facilities would be effectively air-gapped from the outside world. You alluded to it earlier Reid, you worked very hard to make sure that your facility was as air-gapped or certainly for elements of it; the studios, etc., were as air-gapped as possible. If you can have such a thing, but of course, the moment we all moved home, it seemed as though all the facilities and all the rules and regulations just went in the bin. "Oh yeah, it's fine. You can use Dropbox. You can do this. You can do it. Yeah. Whatever just make it happen."

RC: We saw that too. We used to rent editorial rooms, so you could come into our facility and rent a room, and it would have either Media Composer or Premiere on it, or Final Cut Pro X. You would hook up to a server and all of that when all of that went to people's homes all of the secure stuff went out the window. They were just sending out RAIDS to editors on things; there were nine copies of the data. You've got to get to air, and so they made the choices.

KD: I was just going to ask Reid there on his point about sending out RAIDS and things. Was his workflow more to send everyone a copy of the data, or did they do any sort of dialling into service or do this remote control of a system from somewhere else? I've seen a mix of approaches; I just wondered what was best for you?

RC: At our facilities, the producers who were renting had 36 out of 41 of our rooms and running 24 hours a day. COVID hit, and it was up to them; we were not the content producer, we were the facility, it was up to content producers, and what they almost all chose was, "Alright, we're not using the servers anymore, so let's go rent a bunch of G RAIDS, and spend two weekends copying all of the data and sending them off to the editors." The remote control issue that you're talking about, that's something we didn't get the chance to talk about.

It's been going on in visual effects for more than a decade, specifically with Disney around the world. Where, if you are an artist in Malaysia and you're working on a Disney product, you actually call into a server sitting in Burbank, and it's really just Go To My PC. You're just controlling someone else's computer. For the sound part of our industry, it's getting there; there's still a latency issue, but I wouldn't be surprised, and I know that Amazon AWS has all sorts of interesting tools coming up to help. So basically, you can co-locate a server that's sitting somewhere in the world and be running Pro Tools? I don't know. Media composer? Yeah, maybe that's something else that people seem to be getting into now, and I think it's just going to be a mixed bag. What I don't know is post -COVID. I know that we're never going to be post-COVID, but we're getting close to a point. There is a real battle between ideologies, keeping people home or sending them back to the facilities. I don't know where; all of that's going to shake out yet.