Scaling up operations while streamlining workflows has seen successive Hollywood postproduction firms adopting Dante networking – a move that has also prompted the uptake of Focusrite’s RedNet range of Dante-networked audio converters and interfaces, as well as units from the Focusrite Red line.
In the past few years, Twentyfourseven Sound has provided its services for high-profile films including The Hateful Eight, Snowden and Life Itself, as well as Godless for TV, for which the firm was nominated for a 2018 Emmy.
‘Focusrite has been a long-time partner for us, and so it was a natural fit for us to look to Focusrite to give us the kind of Dante connectivity and headphone monitoring systems [that we needed], and out-of-the-box simplicity for creating networked stations that would work on projects from large feature films, where we need hundreds of tracks of audio, down to small projects or a VR project that requires just that level of minute detail,’ says Wylie Stateman, Sound Designer at Twentyfourseven Sound.
‘Collaboration for our team is critical, and to do that we need a robust network, and specifically an audio network such as RedNet that can link our systems together and back-up that collaboration,’ Eric Hoehn, Sound Designer/Re-recording Mixer at Twentyfourseven, agrees. ‘When we build out a room, we’re focused on portability and mobility. So what really attracted us to Focusrite Red 4 Pre was that it took a whole machine room full of equipment and simplified it down to one piece of hardware that fit in one rack unit space. We appreciate the Dante capabilities, the ability to connect to our HDX cards via Digilink, the Thunderbolt capabilities that allow us to even work off of a laptop – all we need are speakers, the Focusrite Red 4 Pre, and a Mac Pro system.’
Offering its postproduction services to TV since 2000, Westwind Media is another Focusrite aopter: ‘We have four two-man dub stages, one one-man dub stage, an ADR stage and a Foley stage,’ says Craig Holbrook, Chief Engineer at Westwind Studios. ‘What attracted me to Dante and RedNet over other IP protocols basically was the simplicity of the Dante controller and the plug-and-play nature of it. My rack size went from a 20U rack to a 6U rack. So the footprint is lower, the cost is lower and it’s also much easier to install.
‘In postproduction set-ups such as Atmos, there are hundreds of signals being routed. Dante and RedNet make it much simpler to see hundreds of signals on one screen, where they’re coming from and where they’re going to – and being able to save that configuration is something you can’t do with a traditional patchbay.’
Formosa Group Chief Engineer and Director of Operations, Dan Shimiaei, notes: ‘This facility has three recording stages in it, all the facilities built exactly the same. Each one of the rooms has five Pro Tools systems in it – three of the Pro Tools are used for playback, one of them for video, the other one for the recorder. The playback machines consist of two HDX 2s and both of those are interfaced through RedNet HD32R’s [32-channel HD Dante network bridges]. These allow us to interface directly from VHDX cards into the RedNet environment, and we also use the same interface boxes for the recorder.
‘The simplicity of the Dante and RedNet environment is the ability that we have to scale it as we need it. The switches are very reliable, and we have expandability within the switches to be able to interface more devices. Because the networked allows self-discovery, all we have to do is use a Cat5 cable and patch it into the network. As soon as the device is discovered it pops onto the software, and we can wrap audio in and out of it. We’re proud to be a part of an industry that is providing a lot of entertainment value, and big part of that is using technology like this, to expand our abilities and capabilities.’
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