ProSound News - December 2008 - (Page 42)

[42] Creative (continued from page 41) soundbroadcast servers, and we can all be working simultaneously. As soon as it’s finished and output from the hi-def room, I’m able to layback to the tape.” In fact, there’s no shortage of talent or technology at Creative Group, explains president/CEO Joe Avallone. “We probably have a $35 million investment in technology. We were very early adopters of HD; we were heavily involved in HD in 1999. We invest heavily in technology, because if the creative has everything at its fingertips, it can be far more creative.” The company had been in existence about four years when Avallone acquired it in 1997. There was a lot of consolidation going on at that time on both coasts, but Avallone went one better: “Creative Group is a hybrid of many companies. Not of assets, but we targeted the very best creatives at different companies—National Video, Moxy Video, Image Group, Broadway Video—and took the best of the best and brought them over. Our nickname internally is Cooperstown, because we have Hall of Famers in every position! So our clients have all their creatives under one roof.” Pelino and Kassie Caffiero, Creative Group’s general manager/senior VP, were formerly at Sony Music Studios, which closed a couple of years ago. “I’d been friends with them for about 20 years, so we brought over their whole team; Sue brought her entire audio department with her,” says Avallone. Headquarters is a 25,000-squarefoot facility at 1601 Broadway, at 48th Street, that houses the company’s audio department. There is also Mantra, a de- sign house, on 19th Street. A facility in Bristol, CT, exclusively servicing the needs of ESPN, also houses a 5.1 audio room. “We handle about 90 percent of the on-air promotion for ESPN,” reports Avallone. There is also an animation facility in Beijing, China and an office in Dublin, Ireland. “I had three 5.1 rooms, so we built a fourth room, and we’re currently constructing a fifth,” he continues. “We’re tricked out with Dolby in every room. They’re really nice rooms, tuned identically, built for 5.1 from the ground up and wired for 7.1.” The central machine room, which houses all the video equipment plus all the Pro Tools systems and Dolby gear, also handles DVD authoring and duplication, including Blu-ray Disc. As Pelino observes, nearly every project on which she works is multi-platform. “An example is Great Performances,” she says. “David Foster had a show; it’s kind of a musical tribute to him, that they shot in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay. I mixed the show first for DVD, which is going to be released on Warner Brothers. Then the editor did a cutdown, and we remixed it for Great Performances, which airs on PBS.” Pelino is also mixing a new music performance/talk show series hosted by Elvis Costello, Spectacles, featuring guests such as Elton John, James Taylor, Norah Jones and Diana Krall. An upcoming Unplugged will feature Pearl Jam. An episode of Storytellers for VH1 featured Kid Rock. “Everything that airs on VH1 and MTV also airs on their high-definition channel, Palladia,” she notes. “WNET [New York’s PBS station] does air in HD and 5.1. I’m mixing in 5.1 75 percent of the time. Most of these shows we’re mixing in 5.1 are for high-definition video programming.” Creative Group www.creativegroup.tv AWS-SOME: Having had 20 years experience with analog consoles, Mary Gaffney, audio supervisor for WBEZ, recently replaced an aging digital console in the Chicago public radio station’s music performance studio with a Solid State Logic AWS 900+. This is the first radio application for the system, which was also chosen for its close integration with Pro Tools and was purchased from GC Pro Chicago’s Dan Scalpone. Reality TV (continued from page 41) Record in Nashville It's as easy as 123 www.naprs.org We’ll then break them out and send them to different locations—to our audio mixing board to record all of the mics, and also to an audio-follows-video router, so that ‘story’ can pull up any mic or picture, and we’ll send them to the director’s table so they can pot up any mic they want as well.” He continues, “We do the same thing with our RF mics. We use all Sennheiser—SK5212 transmitters, MKE Platinum lavs and the EM3235 rack receivers. We’ll mic up, on average, 16 to 25 people with wireless lavs. We’ll set up an RF rack and an antenna system, and we’ll put all the RF channels into either a Gregg Kita (pictured), whose RGear Worldwide spemic pre or input module cializes in reality TV location services, uses Aviom and run those to the A-Net products to streamline audio distribution. control room as well. Each will have two or three output mod- ly, he says, “We’re doing a new one for ules and go to the mixing board, the MTV, Starmaker, which is like Rock Star. router and the director’s station.” The We just did I Love Money, a VH1 show. digital mixing console is usually a Yama- We did G’s to Gents and Secrets of Magic. We did another 50 Cent show, in ha DM1000 or DM2000. It isn’t just a one-way signal flow, New York. And we do Food Network’s Gieither: “Sometimes we’ll send audio ada at Home and Everyday Italian, plus back to the stage, for playback. The Supernanny and It’s Me or the Dog.” “Typically, we can do four or five at a Pro16 has an output card, so we can use the expansion slot to send it the time,” he says. “It’s our specialty.” —Steve Harvey other way. Sometimes we feed camAviom eras the same way. It depends how the www.aviom.com show is set up.” Up to 32 tracks are recorded to Gallery’s MetaCorder running on a Mac- Crown Book. “It’s meant for field production,” www.crownaudio.com shares Kita. Show producers hope to latch onto a compelling storyline at any Sennheiser time, of course, which means that the www.sennheiser.com recorder is running almost nonstop. “Some shows we record 16 to 20 hours Shure a day. When we’re in a house we’re www.shure.com recording 80 gigs a day.” It’s an improvement over the old tape-based methods, he says, “Post has been extremely happy with the digital files we’ve been giving them.” Kita’s company has found quite a niche for itself, also servicing shows such as ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, VH-1’s Rock of Love and I Love New York, MTV’s Making the Band 4, TV Land’s She’s Got the Look and Nick at Nite’s Funniest Mom in America. Current- prosoundnews.com December 2008 http://www.creativegroup.tv http://www.aviom.com http://www.naprs.org http://www.crownaudio.com http://www.sennheiser.com http://www.naprs.org http://www.shure.com http://www.prosoundnews.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ProSound News - December 2008

ProSound News - December 2008 Sound Business Contents Hank’s Best Yet Sound Recording Studio Showcase: Great City Productions Software Tech Tracks Sessions Anticipating Post’s Future Post Showcase: Eargasm HD Audio Post The Business of Being Creative Sound Innovations: VRsonics VibeStudio Spatial Design Suites Field Reports: Product Profiles Yes We Can Hear Obama Live Sound Showcase: Stone Temple Pilots Centerstage Soundcheck Sound People View From the Top Product Spotlight Classifieds Advertiser Index Company Index Music, etc

ProSound News - December 2008

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