One of the most requested recording studios on the US West Coast, Fantasy Studios serves music, film, TV and video games with three recording and mixing rooms that have produced platinum recordings by Green Day, Journey, Aerosmith, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Santana among others.
The Fantasy Film Center mix theatre is the latest addition to the facility, refurbished and now centred on Avid Pro Tools S6 mixing and Meyer Sound cinema monitoring.
Opened in 1981 as The Saul Zaentz Film Center, the1,820-sq-ft theatre was designed by screening room designer Jeff Cooper. Clients range from major studios such as MGM, Dreamworks and NBCUniversal, to filmmakers George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola. Among the 200 films mixed here, are Amadeus, The English Patient, Blue Velvet and Boogie Nights. The renovation was overseen by Bay Area engineer Jim Austin, along with Fantasy staff members Alberto Hernandez and James Gangwer. The refurbished mix theatre seats 50 guests and now boasts the latest technologies from Meyer Sound and Avid.
Powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform, Fantasy Studios selected Pro Tools S6 as its mixing console. ‘Pro Tools S6 marks a new level of communication between a console and its operator,’ says Fantasy Studios’ Director, Jeffrey Wood. ‘The amount of visual information and control is beautiful and very well thought out. This amounts to a much more productive and elegant workflow, allowing the engineer more speed and less fatigue. Its modular integration allows us to expand in just a few minutes to accommodate different kinds of projects.’
The Pro Tools S6 modular control surface calls on Avid’s Icon and System 5 product families, providing intelligent studio control: ‘Pro Tools S6 perfectly complements the sound clarity and build quality of the Fantasy Film Center, enabling Fantasy Studios to uphold its industry-leading heritage and reputation,’ says Avid’s Jeff Rosica. ‘With its modular design, Pro Tools S6 enables Fantasy Studios to quickly scale to meet the demands of any kind of film, television or video game production, while delivering efficient workflows for fast, precision mixing.’
The refurbished theatre also has a new 5.1/7.1 monitoring system comprised of three Meyer Sound Acheron 80 screen channel loudspeakers, ten HMS-12 surround loudspeakers, two 650-P subwoofers, and a Galileo loudspeaker management system – a Galileo 408 and a Galileo 616 for system drive and optimisation.
‘Fantasy Film Center was constructed like a musical instrument,’ Wood says. ‘The clarity and detail of the room is beautiful, and it’s perfect for precision mixing.’
‘The stage has solid bones acoustically, so it was a delight to upgrade the monitoring to a reference quality Meyer Sound cinema system,’ adds Steve Shurtz, Meyer Sound Cinema Group Director. ‘The room has a great mixing history and now a great future. Sonically, it has never sounded better in the league of world-class dubbing stages.
Part of the Zaentz Media Center, Fantasy Studios supports its extensive equipment and facilities with ISDN to links to studios worldwide, comprehensive media transfer servives, editing and on-site mastering. Additionally, the facility is available for video and photo shoots, live streaming, conferences and special events. It has also installed a Pro Tools S6 control surface in the revived mix theatre.
