Damages First Person

Sound Lounge designed an offsite playback system for the show Damages.

When Damages came to Sound Lounge with the prospect of providing postproduction for its third season, it presented an unusual challenge. The show's creators were excited and eager to work at Sound Lounge's Fifth Avenue facility, but the they couldn't be available for playback in Manhattan while they were shooting and editing picture at their facility in Brooklyn. Essentially, they needed us to be in two places at once.

One thought was to burn DVDs to be reviewed after hours. Another was to create QuickTime files to be transported via assistants back and forth to each facility. (Hour-long episodes with little compression are nearly 10 gigs.) Ultimately, none of these solutions proved both cost-effective and reliable. In the end, we leaned heavily on Sound Lounge's own Steve Giammaria, one of our talented technicians, who, through a series of hardware- and software-based solutions, devised an offsite playback system that addresses the client concerns of cost and our own quality of output and reliability issues.

Giammaria worked for months developing and testing this system. The offsite playback system is comprised of the same television and speaker setup that we have in our studio, so the show's creators are able to hear the mix the same way we hear it in the studio. While we are mixing, a feed is sent to the offsite location, where the show's producers can drop in at any time and hear the mix while we work. They can contact us, request changes, and hear those changes happening in realtime.

Damages, like many dramatic television shows, is shot episodically. After production, each episode moves into postproduction, where picture and sound are edited, and clean-up work is done to both video and audio. Postproduction sound happens here at Sound Lounge. Once an episode is locked, meaning the writers and directors have the picture edited to their liking, the show is then handed off to the postproduction sound house and we have about five days to finish the sound work. A dialog editor begins his work on the production sound, the audio which is captured on set. His job is to make sure he chooses the best microphones for the final mix and to replace any bad audio, such as microphone bumps, interference, someone dropping a hammer on set. Simultaneously, a foley sound-design editor will begin adding additional sound to fill up the soundscape, and an ADR editor will prepare for recording new dialog. The ADR editor will have to record new dialog to fulfill required plot points and to replace bad audio. (Remember that guy who dropped the hammer? It turns out that happened on the perfect take!)

Film and TV shoots require silence during the shoot. For instance, if you have a restaurant scene, the characters will be walking, talking, and sipping their wine in silence. Postproduction sound is the step in the process at which all of the audio is added to fill up that busy restaurant you hear in the final mix. The foley editor will add specific sounds such as chair squeaks, footsteps, and forks digging into ceramic plates. Other sound-design editors are needed to add bigger sounds such as helicopters flying by, car crashes, and airplanes taking off, sounds that can't easily be recorded on a foley stage. I and the other sound editor, Sean Garnhart, take care of this editing step together. Because we also are the final mixers, we share the duties of sound editing so that we can design the effects and mix the episode all within five days. We start the process all over again the next week.

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Dialog, foley, and ADR editing is accomplished across two Digidesign Pro Tools HD3 systems and five Pro Tools LE systems using DV Toolkit. Other processor-heavy sound-design editing happens on a Pro Tools HD5 Accel, Apple Mac Pro with two dual-core 2.66GHz processors with 5GB of RAM, and a Pro Tools HD3 Accel Mac Pro eight-core with 10GB of RAM, both using Digidesign ICON D-Command consoles. Final mix happens on a dual-position 48-fader Digidesign Icon D-Control console, the first Pro Tools dual-position console in New York City. Powered by two dual-processor 3.2GHz quad-core Intel Xeon Mac Pro computers, each system is an HD5 configuration running Pro Tools 8. The Pro Tools computers are linked via Ethernet to both each other and the ICON control surface. Each of the two positions can be used as a control surface for up to four separate Pro Tools systems, making it possible to run a total of eight Pro Tools systems from two mix positions simultaneously. Theoretically, there could be nearly 1600 separate tracks running with no plug-ins. Whoa! We use plug-ins from the Waves Diamond bundle, TL Space, and ReVibe. Hardware gear includes the Cedar DNS2000 and Grace Design m906 monitor control. The main speaker array is JBL 4000 Cinema Sound series with a dbx DriveRack crossover and delay. All speakers are powered with QSC amps. Nearfields are 5.1 Genelec 1030As. Video is projected onto a 15ft. screen by a Sanyo HD LCD projector. A 32 in. Sony LCD display is also available for playback.

The system we have put together for this season is impressive. I can see that as time marches on and budgets recede, active and creative processes will surely be required to meet clients' needs. An offsite playback system has really opened up the realm of possibilities for clients. Coupled with our two-person mix arrangement, we have been able to speed up the process while maintaining the ability for a creative mix.

Producer: Lori Jo Nemhauser

Re-Recording Mixer/Sound Effects Editor: Sean Garnhart

Re-Recording Mixer/Sound Effects Editor: Cory Melious

Supervising Sound Editor: Fred Rosenberg

Dialogue Editor: Dave Ellinwood

Foley Editor: Steve Visscher

Assistant Sound Editor: Billy Orrico

Audio Postproduction Coordinator (Sound Lounge): Travis Call

Facility: Sound Lounge