Major refurbishments at Imagem Production Music’s London studios have seen HHB Communications involved in upgrading operation to Pro Tools HD11 and HDX hardware with the new Apple Mac Pro.

‘It is actually ridiculous how fast our studios are with the new Pro Tools HDX systems,’ says Imagem Producer and Studio Engineer, Taz Mattar. ‘We ran some tests and managed to do some offline bounces at 180x real-time.’

Imagem offers a library of more than 200,000 original tracks for licensing to movies, advertising campaigns, TV and corporate video. Working with a team of leading composers, Imagem’s studios are used for mixing and mastering new material and re-purposing library tracks. Both studios are now equipped with Pro Tools 11 and HDX systems running on the new Apple Mac Pro and Magma’s EB3T thunderbolt chassis. As part of the upgrade, HHB also supplied a variety of new hardware and software products, including Neumann microphones, Universal Audio and Neve preamps and plug-ins from Waves, Sonnox and iZotope.

It is the combination of Pro Tools HDX and tnew Mac Pro computers with Intel Xeon E5 processors that has provided Imagem with its speedy operation. The performance of Imagem’s network storage has also been improved using Studio Network Solutions SANmp storage management network software licences.

he majority of music offered by Imagem is recorded offsite, but the supplied Neve 4081 mic preamplifier, UAD LA-610 MK2 channel strip and Neumann microphones provide an extremely high-quality signal path for in-house tracking of small orchestral ensembles, vocals and VOD.

‘Imagem produces over 50 albums of high-quality production music every year,’ says HHB Sales Manager, Andrew Hingley. ‘Features like faster-than-real-time offline bounce provided by Pro Tools 11 and the incredibly fast processing speed of the new Mac Pro are extremely valuable timesaving solutions for this volume of work. The upgrades will afford them an enormous amount of time that can be put back into the creative process.’