Regularly working alongside some of Hollywood’s top composers, composer, recording engineer and on-set music editor Victor Chaga recently undertook a location recording in Sardinia for a forthcoming Hollywood film – and was presented with an ideal opportunity to test the Prodigy.MC, a modular and highly flexible audio processor and signal router from DirectOut.
‘We knew we’d have a few different issues to overcome,’ he explains. ‘Treacherous terrain, huge distances, inaccessible recording locations, and we’d need to be able to adapt quickly too, because on these location shoots things change all the time.’
‘After talking back and forth with Synthax Audio UK, we managed to devise a system that would be relatively lightweight and mobile. At first I’d planned to use it solely for my set-up – a laptop and an RME Madiface Pro on a camping table – to allow me to send everything I need over to Simon [Hayes] via Madi.’
Chaga worked with renowned Production Sound Mixer Simon Hayes on the project, whose work on Les Misérables won him an Academy Award for Best Sound, using two Prodigy.MCs for their location recording. The shoot presented a variety of unique challenges for the sound crew, including the possibility that locations could be changed around the rugged terrain at any moment.
‘We quickly realised, because of the high channel count of the Madi format, we would be able to have everything running down a single Madi cable,’ Chaga continues. ‘All of my tracks, microphone feeds, comms – all of it – rather than tons of copper. So we started looking for a converter that could manage multiple analogue and digital formats, and also interface with Simon’s equipment.
‘That became the challenge – the number of inputs and outputs we were working with, both analogue and digital, and finding a single converter that coulddo it all,’
‘Thankfully we stumbled on the DirectOut boxes – the Prodigy.MC and Prodigy.MP. The great thing about them is that they’re modular shells, so you can put whatever you want into them – you can stick two Madi cards in them, you can have Dante cards, AES, Ravenna. And then on the analogue side you can do mic preamps as well as line level I/O.’
This solution replaced the requirement for a converter for each format with a single box. They could use an A/D at one end, with all of the radio mics and analogue gear going into it, and a D/A on the other to receive the Madi stream and split it out in AES and analogue.’
‘This set-up allowed us to eliminate, quite literally, racks of gear,’ Chaga says. ‘And it worked out beautifully. Honestly, the Prodigys really go above and beyond. We ran them for six weeks, and every day we were in very poor conditions – outside all day, not in a studio, no temperature-controlled environments, but in 30° or 40° degrees of heat, not to mention the dust. I mean layers and layers of the stuff, and the Prodigys just kept on going.
‘The modular aspect is also incredibly useful for us working in film. Because unlike a recording studio, where once you’ve designed a setup based on long term requirements, for five-to-ten years ahead, the requirements on a film set could vary wildly from day to day.
‘I should also mention that I’ve been using a couple of DirectOut’s ExBox.MDs too for converting Madi streams to Dante, which have been solid.’
