A recent six-month construction and commissioning process has seen Gold Tree Studios arriving on the Hollywood film-industry scene with the idea that its clients should have access to whatever post platforms they need or want, with seamless rentals of major industry hardware and software built into its business plan.
Located on Sunset Blvd, Gold Tree Studios offers two main rooms, Studio 1 (Color Grading & Screening Room) and Studio 6 (Sound Mixing & ADR Room), both equipped with Genelec 8351B monitors for their front LCR arrays and 8331As for surround and overheads, with 7370A and 7380A subwoofers in a dual-sub configuration in each space.
Four further Junior and Executive Editing Suites each have a pair of Genelec 4430AM desktop speakers, as does the Video Village room adjacent to the facility’s sound stage.
The facility’s thinking was shaped by the reduced scope of film production brought about by the Covid pandemic. ‘We sought to make this a true rental facility – our equipment, your equipment, our engineers, your engineers, whatever you prefer – to better reflect the way the post-production business needs to operate in this new climate in Hollywood,’ explains Gold Tree Studios’ CEO Tim Chonacas, himself a veteran indie film producer.
Chonacas built the new facility with associate Bill Immerman, a film legend who as an EVP at Twentieth Century Fox was part of the team that greenlit Star Wars and Young Frankenstein. With an equipment list that reflects the state of the art, Chonacas says that the monitoring also had to meet that standard. ‘There are very few brands in the top tier of speakers, and Genelec is always at the top of that list,’ he says. ‘The crispest, clearest, most dynamic sound is Genelec. You just don’t hear that depth in other brands.’
Chonacas says they decided to go with a dual-subwoofer configuration for the two largest rooms, a reflection of Hollywood’s demand for big LFE, including for television. ‘We wanted the dual subs for mixing to feel that low end and those low mids,’ he says. ‘We wanted deep, impactful bass that really thumps, for film and television, but also for music. You can really feel the 7370A and 7380A while you’re in the chair mixing, and that gives us the low end we need to work on today’s blockbuster film and TV projects.’
He adds that they relied heavily on a combination of GLM loudspeaker manager software, which is compatible with all Genelec Smart Active Monitors and Subwoofers, and next-generation AutoCal 2 automatic room-calibration.
‘AutoCal was very important since we were doing much of the setup work ourselves and because we wanted to be up and running as quickly as possible,’ he says, noting that Gold Tree Studios’ Dolby Atmos certification process is already under way. ‘Genelec pretty much provided everything we needed to make our monitoring state-of-the-art right at the beginning.’
More: www.genelec.com
