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MillimeterIn Living Surround
Feb 1, 2006 1:15 PM, By Gary Eskow
This year, for its 31st season, Saturday Night Live added full 5.1 surround sound as it started broadcasting in HD, precipitating several changes in how the show captures and plays back sound. Marty Brumbach, SNL's music editor, describes the show's dynamic workflow.
“Lots of times, we're fighting against one another due to the fact that so much is happening in realtime,” Brumbach says. “I'm essentially the DJ, dealing with pre-recorded playbacks. I'm surrounded with samplers, a set of ENCO (DAD audio workstations), library music, and any pre-records the band may have created. Dialogue and effects might bump against me, but I often find that the live dynamic of our competition makes for exciting television audio. We'll be yelling at each other over the intercoms to give some space. Mixing in 5.1 has definitely helped in this area.
“We mix simultaneously in 5.1 and stereo, and all audio editors have access to the folddown. I switch back and forth between the two occasionally. Let's say I'm providing ambient music — cocktail piano, for example — for a sketch, and music is only there for atmosphere. I could be on the edge of a level problem, and I'll check both the stereo and 5.1 feeds to make sure I'm not overdoing things. Generally, however, I'm finding that once you settle into the environment, there's not a big difference between what's going on in the two mixes.”
The SNL studios went through a major revision last year in preparation for HD, adding a larger Pro Tools system and switching to M&K six-channel speaker systems, as well as adding the ENCO workstatsions.
“ENCO is a hard-disk playback device that we use in place of [multiple digital cart systems],” Brumbach says. “Digicart wasn't going to work for us as we moved forward because its proprietary format doesn't offer the flexibility we needed. Our typical workflow is such that I'll get a multi-channel session from the music room, do some editing on my Mac in Pro Tools, and then ship that work via Ethernet to a drop box in the ENCO system. Surround sound is clearly here to stay, and every tool we use has to make transmission of multichannel audio as simple as possible.”
