A major repurposing and restoration facility in Burbank, Chace Audio is responsible for repurposing and remastering much of the content seen every day on DVDs, BluRay, and Premium TV channels.
"We've been dealing with Chris at RSPE for a long time, and it's an easy company to do business with."
Click here to hear Chace Productions on RSPE...
What do you like about working with RSPE?
"I interface quite a bit with Chris, and he's very responsive and he's a very good resource as well. He'll always come up with an answer; it's pretty hard to stump the guy. Fortunately he's not really your stereotypical sales guy either, he will tell you if he needs to research something, he then will do that and give me an accurate answer…. We've been dealing with RSPE for a long time, and it's an easy company to do business with."
Tell us about the plug ins you use.
"For mixing we really rely on the Waves plugins, we really like the EQ's and the Compressors."
However, as far as noise reduction, they opt for their old Sonic HD and Audio Cube workstations for two reasons. One being the frequency of working with old formats and secondly they feel that plugins don't reach that level of precision.
"We find the Cedar tools to be very effective for real-time de-crackle during digitization of optical elements and we have used the Cedar azimuth corrector to great effect on many digital elements that contained severe azimuth errors.
"Depending on the project, if we feel that we can keep it in the Protools environment, then we use the Waves Restoration X, the Sonnox and the Wave Arts Master Restoration Suite."
What are you working on?
"We're on season three of Mission Impossible, the original television series where Greg Faust is up-mixing from mono dialog, music, and effects to create 5.1 for every episode."
"We've also been commissioned to do the Close Encounters of the third kind, which is about to come out on Blu-Ray in the late Fall."
How did the new formats, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD affect you?
"On the encoding/authoring end, our workstations are already equipped with Protools HD and Sonic HD, so we already have the sample rate and bit depth capabilities. As far as HD picture support, that's a huge area where it affected us. We had to get some HD video, moving into D5 HD and HD Cam SR, which was the biggest financial investment, but it's paying off, the decks are being used a lot."
Microphones
This post production facility has a dual purpose room, which is their Foley and ADR stage. It's convertible to where it can be configured either as an ADR stage where all the pits and surfaces are covered or it can be opened up to reveal all of its pits and flooring for the Foley stage.
The microphones that are used in the ADR/Foley stage are Sennheiser shotgun mics and the Neumann U87s.
Speakers
Almost everywhere they use the Dynaudio BM Series speakers. They have some JBL Surrounds, but Dynaudio is their chosen and preferred monitor.
"They translate really well, they give us a really detailed picture of the sound, but that's what we want, so we can really pick it apart. Overall they have good low-end, good high-end, they're just good all around."