BURBANK — Audio post house RH Factor (www.rhfactorsound.com), here, recently completed the mix for the one-hour Wonder Woman TV series pilot. Written by David E. Kelley and produced by Warner Bros. Television, the series updates the story of CEO, Diana Prince, who is a super hero by night. Adrienne Palicki stars in the role, though the pilot has yet to be picked up by a network.
Studio co-owner Dave Rawlinson says the two-room facility used Pro Tools|HD Native and its Euphonix System 5-MC console to handle the film-style mix of the show. “Originally, our 5-MC in Stage A was configured with Nuendo as the mix engine,” he notes. “We changed the system over during a weekend to work with HD Native and then mixed Wonder Woman.”
RH Factor is now an all-Pro Tools facility. Rawlinson handles effects and Foley mixing from Room A’s left-hand seat, while Peter Kelsey oversees dialogue, ADR and music from the right-hand side of the 5-MC console.
“In the past, we replayed most elements from Pro Tools, and mixed within Nuendo,” Rawlinson notes. “Now we use Pro Tools|HD Native as the DSP engine, with Pro Tools 9 as a multichannel stem recorder, so that we can leave the room with all stems and mix downs on a hard drive.”
The Wonder Women pilot features a dense, effects-heavy mix, with a driving, high-energy music track.
“We had just two days to complete the initial mixes for client review and notes — we were pretty busy,” says Rawlinson. “Having instant access to the Pro Tools elements from the 5-MC surface under fast EuCon control was a major benefit. We need that flexibility of reaching into individual sound elements, making small changes and then getting back to mixing. Working totally ‘in-the-box’ is a major time saver.”
EuCon operates over standard Gigabit Ethernet and offers simultaneous, high-resolution fader, switch and knob control of multiple workstations. And adding new Apple Mac Pro eight-core/2.4MHz systems to Stage A allowed the mixing team to take advantage of the low latency — courtesy of a high-speed PCIe core card — and enhanced feature set offered by Pro Tools|HD Native.
“On a typical segment for Wonder Woman, I was running up to 128 voices, yet only used some 36 percent of the CPU power,” Rawlinson recalls.
Kelsey adds, “On my side, I had some 100 channels on the surface but used just 33 percent of CPU with lots of plug-ins in place, including CEDAR DNS One, iZotope RX, [Pro Audio DSP] Dynamic Spectrum Mapper and [Universal Audio SPL] Transient Designer, plus a Waves Q10 [parametric graphic EQ] and seven-band V-EQ3.”
RH Factor handles post production for a number of popular TV series, including Harry’s Law, Raising Hope, The Middle and
Breakout Kings.The facility’s Stage B features a dual-operator Avid ICON D-Control integrated console and Pro Tools|HD systems.
IMAGE: RH Factor co-owners Dave Rawlinson and Craig Hunter.