AMERICAN
ZOETROPE
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The sound transfer room, where you can take audio to or from any format
- and live to tell the tale.
Old and New: Non-linear editing is re-catagorized at American Zoetrope - are you pulling reels or pushing buttons?
Taming Chaos: "Ultimately, we end up not just working between digital formats," said Stein, "but also finding ways to bridge between different analog film and video formats."
Taking Technology
Outside
Step outside the sentinel building to a building next door and you are
into the other half of American Zoetrope, which houses all of the technology
for the studio.
Rather than try to bring the Sentinel buildings historic (but archaic) specifications up to the power and technology requirements of a major facility, the company decided to just move all technology next door to a more modern building. Taking up the entire floor above an international bank office building, this is where you'll find the many editing rooms, sound transfer rooms, telecine, and the American Zoetrope DVD lab.
The Sound Transfer room is where they do everything from transfer 1/4" tape to 35mm Mag footage for syncing up film dailies, to some pretty esoteric audio production work. "For example, recently on the Bicentennial Man project we tried a new process," said Stein.
"At the same time that we transferred the audio from 1/4" to 35mm Mag, we also transferred the audio to an Akai DD-8 digital disc recorder. We had the sound living on a digital format on a hard drive. When we were doing the telecine for the films dailies, we would recapture this digital sound from the hard drives and output it to a Tascam DA-88 digital tape recorder."
This allowed the assistant editor on the Bicentennial Man production to take the Betacam analog picture from the telecine, which was a low-resolution image and at the same time take the clean digital audio from the DA-88 straight into the Avid.
Ultimately the editor would output the sound as an OMF file for the sound editors to work with, which saved the sound editors the chore of getting the original audio from the 1/4" production audio to use for their final sound mix. "Ultimately we compressed [the sound editors] schedule by accelerating things by adding this extra step in the sound transfer process," notes Stein.