Everyone who has seen the new high-profile Infiniti EX campaign has surely come across the talent of POP sound mixer Stephen Dickson, who was tapped by agency creatives at TBWA/Chiat/Day to complete the final mix for the four-spot campaign introducing the all-new personal luxury crossover. As Stephen told P3, the spots, shot on location in Athens and Santorini, Greece, presented Dickson with several audio challenges.

“There were no production audio tracks, which isn’t unusual for a commercial, and Amber Music provided a lot of different musical splits for this, which allowed me to work with the creatives in session and do any additional fine tweaks to the music mix,” he said. “A lot of times you have a great piece of music that’s well-mixed, but it can need subtle changes to make it really work with the voice-over. That’s because often you get into session and start putting all the elements together, and the voice-over timing isn’t always the same as it was in the rough track that the composers worked to. You’ll have musical swells or hits in places you now have voice-over in, so that needs attention, and Amber was very helpful in giving us a big array of their splits and separate elements.”

Dickson, whose credits include two Super Bowl commercials for Taco Bell and Bud Light, did the mix at POP Sound’s newly upgraded Studio C, which features the new Digidesign Icon mixing console, capable of mixing up to 7.1-channel surround.
“I used a Pro Tools HD5 Accel system,” he said. “It’s a very powerful system and it’s teamed up with the Icon. The beauty of the Icon is that I can get my hands onto any track we need, and it also makes it faster and easier to do multiple versions of the same spot. So, as with this job, you can have multiple music splits, voice-over and sound effects, and it can all be folded down and accessed very quickly through different layers in the Icon system. And it has a dedicated center section so I don’t have to move out of the main listening area. I can just call a track into that section that gives me access directly to dynamics and EQ. That’s the key benefit to the Icon system.”

Dickson is also a fan of his URS Pro plug in. “I use that a lot. It has dedicated filters, compression and EQ, and it falls really nicely onto the Icon control surface.”   

“Considering the scope of the job, and that we had to do many versions, it went very smoothly,” he beamed. “The Pro Tools system and its flexibility were ideal for dealing with all those versions.”

He went on to tell P3 that for the Studio C upgrade, the first in a series of major refurbishments to the five commercial postproduction studios at POP Sound, the engineering team installed a Digidesign Icon D Control 32-fader console with Surround Panner and Pro Tools HD5 Accel. Plug ins by Digidesign, Waves and TC Electronics providing dynamics, equalization, reverb, pitch correction, spatial imaging and up conversion from stereo to 5.1 are included. Also installed was an auxillary Digidesign Protools HD2 Accel with Command 8 control surface; Neve 8801 Producer’s Channel Strips for top quality voice over recording capability; and a sophisticated multi-format surround sound audio monitoring system based on Adam S3A and A7 active loudspeakers, Bag End Subwoofer and BSS Soundweb London DSP technology.

The studio also features new video ingest and playback systems utilizing Miranda and Apple hardware. Apple Final Cut Studio 2 allows video capture and editing, as well as QuickTime and DVD creation. Sony HD and SD video display systems provide video. “It’s just an amazing studio to work in,” he told P3. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
   
CONTACTS

Apple
www.apple.com 

BSS Audio
www.bssaudio.com

Digidesign Icon
www.digidesign.com

Neve
www.ams-neve.com

Sony
www.sony.com/professional

TC Electronic
www.tcelectronic.com

Waves
www.waves.com