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Reader SurveySound of Tarzan
Jul 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
Todd-AO, Hollywood, added a unique digital sound mix to complement the panoramic "deep canvas" animation style Disney created for its new release, Tarzan. The project represents the first time Todd-AO has mixed an animated feature. More important, the job allowed the company to "make progress with file exchanges between multiple formats," according to Bill Ridder, Todd-AO's supervising engineer.
Ridder and Todd-AO president Chris Jenkins, who co-mixed the film along with Mark Smith and Ron Bartlett, say that the company's AMS Neve Digital Film Console (DFC) presented an opportunity for an entirely digital mix. The DFC, combined with timely networking and file exchange assistance from Akai Electric of Yokohama, Japan, let Todd-AO network a wide range of tools to manipulate audio source material created in different digital formats. As the company received music, dialogue, and effects from Disney and audio design house Soundelux, Hollywood, it was able to efficiently combine audio native to digital file types as wide ranging as Waveframe, Pro Tools, Tascam, Akai, Fairlight, and some others.
"The Akai people gave us 25 new machines, both digital recorders and playback machines, and backups for both, which was a big factor in making all this possible," says Ridder. "Among them, they gave us two of their new digital players with a card that permits the output of 16 tracks. They were still prototypes when we got them, brand new."
Akai also helped Todd-AO create two separate networks, one for the effects' mixer and one for the music and dialogue mixers, and provided engineers to write software that allowed Todd-AO to use 24-bit input technology for the final mix.
The complex Tarzan mix required hundreds of separate elements just to create the complex animal voices and Tarzan yell, designed by Soundelux, not to mention an entire musical score sung by Phil Collins that was eventually re-mixed into five separate languages for international distribution. The DFC and the vast digital network that supported it, permitted Todd-AO artists to easily segregate and move around voices from music, animal grunts from dialogue, and so on.
Ridder says the overall experience let the company solve a major problem it had faced on complex mixes: "We now can do a 40-bus mix to create international versions and segregate a wide range of elements quickly and efficiently," he says. "This was probably our biggest breakthrough on the project. This is our first mix with 40 record buses. Until this type of technology came along, there was no way to do something like this and keep track of it all for a feature film."
