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MillimeterBeta Sight: Audio Production SAN from SAN Solutions
Jul 20, 2009 3:02 PM, By Steve Morris, director of engineering, Skywalker Sound
Built by a filmmaker for filmmakers, Skywalker Sound is one of the largest, most versatile full-service postproduction facilities in the world. While the greatest asset at Skywalker Sound is the caliber and creativity of our highly skilled artists, the technology that supports their work is critically important in developing the quality and type of sound design desired by each client. Housed within the 155,000-square-foot Technical Building at Skywalker Ranch, we offer six fully equipped mixing studios, a large variety of both picture and sound editing rooms, impressive foley/ADR stages, and complete audio and video transfer services.
We work on more than 30 feature films a year, and current projects inhouse at Skywalker Sound include Avatar, Where the Wild Things Are, How to Train Your Dragon, and A Christmas Carol. Most of the directors we work with are heavily involved in the sound editing process. Therefore, it’s vital that we can respond to their particular requirements quickly and produce a creative soundtrack very efficiently. A robust centralized media storage system, architected and implemented by SAN Solutions, helps us to achieve that level of service, even for our most challenging projects.
In a typical project, we start by ingesting all film material onto our SAN Solutions audio production SAN, which supports 110 Digidesign Pro Tools digital audio editing seats—very likely the largest ProTools SAN dedicated to audio postproduction and audio tracks. The SAN provides our operations with 60TB of production storage and another 30 TB of nearline storage. By centralizing all project audio on this network storage infrastructure, we eliminate the need to move media physically on drives or over a network to different areas of the facility. As a result, if the system is configured to allow it, anyone working on the project can access every bit of project data from any workstation.
Our 36 edit suites, equipped with Apple workstations running Pro Tools HD, are complemented by six mix rooms standardized on a hybrid system we engineered ourselves. To give our creative staff flexibility in how they work, we have modified our AMS Neve DFC Gemini digital mixing consoles to incorporate Digidesign Icon controllers for any or all of the mixers (dialogue, music, effects) that work together as one system, despite the fact that they’re two distinct platforms. We began nonlinear mixing a decade ago, and today we use a virtual VTR in the mix room to provide random access to media for playout on Christie2K-resolution projectors.
The editors working on the project prepare dialogue, perform initial edits, and record foley to set up against the picture. After premixing for effects and dialog to get it tidied up and in shape, the team tailors material to the client brief. Audio often is recorded here on site on our scoring stage, which can be adapted for everything from a solo performance to a 125-piece orchestra, and on our new foley and ADR stages. If necessary, we’ll send staff out to record sound effects specifically for the film.
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