It felt like Christmas all over again today in Foster City. Three new Pro Tools HD3 systems and a big box of Accel cards to beef up existing rigs.
For my more normal, non-geek-talk friends, that means more audio processing power.
I love the fact that we need to up the processing power again. It means that we’re working with more high resolution sound and more suround sound now. Great!
Can’t wait work in all the 3D picture stuff that Sony just announced at CES last week too..!
Andrew Buresh doing all the heavy thumb lifting in the photo there for all you people taggers.
I attended Audio Boot Camp today at GDC. Scott Selfon from Microsoft kicked off with a comprehensive “Introduction to Audio for Games” that included some insightful historical components.
Jay Weinland gave a great presentation showing off Bungie’s internal audio tools. They were fantastically impressive albeit, shown in the context of creating audio for Halo… Jay also referenced some cool benefits they got by licensing some plugins from Waves to use in-engine for mixing the game. In particular, setting up Waves plugin presets in Pro Tools and having them translate perfectly in the game engine.
Charles Deenen from EA covered many areas but seemed most passionate about evangelizing better in game mixing. Beyond volume, beyond DSP, we need to reference information from more data points in the game to create “great” adaptive mixes.
Charles made good sense to this enthused mix engineer. Accessing hundreds of points to create a top notch virtual mixing engineer in the game shouldn’t be far off, I hope…
After a few days of use, I’m beginning to think Twitter is pretty cool. It’s a new social network app dsigned for the mobile phone scene by the folks at Odeo. The Baking Fairy turnned me on to it and now we always know what eachother are up to.
My beloved SoundWorkshop console just sold on eBay. More on Jesse in Portland soon… He’s the proud new owner.
We’ve been hanging out in the studio getting sentimental about the board. We’re going to start documenting and packing today. Some clients are getting very sentimental too so they’re stopping by… I hadn’t really expected that.
I’ve been into SoundWorkshop consoles almost as long as I’ve been into recording. I’ve worked in studios all over the world on almost every kind of console. And I always find myself yearning for the ease of good sound on APIs and SoundWorkshops when I’m not on them.
But time has changed recording styles and methodologies. I find having a 10 foot long console in the middle of the room just isn’t efficient anymore. Especially when trying to monitor audio for video and surround formats like 5.1. So out it goes and in I go to exploring new horizons and possibilities once again.
My plan now is to redo the studio as a more compact room with 5.1 and audio for video capability. The console will be replaced by a super high-end, discrete, input set-up. Probably lots of API in there. There are also many great new manufacturers on the scene like Chandler and others that I like. Even less signal path than the well designed SoundWorkshop… Hard to imagine, I know.
We’re launching People Aggregator and it’s going great. Just over 400 people tried it out in the first 24 hours of private invites. More to come as we open it to the public. Officially open today at noon. We’ll be on the launch tour over the next few days…
Roll outs at Marc’s place tonight and then at Gnomedex on Friday.
It’s already been a huge benefit to have feedback from so many users on the UI. I sense it will help accelerate the tweaking process a lot as we move out of Alpha.
