Margarita Mix Installs Fourth Fairlight EVO

Audio post firm Margarita Mix of Santa Monica recently installed a fourth Fairlight EVO integrated audio production system for its team of sound designers, mixers and composers.

Sound mixers Paul Hurtubise (pictured), Jimmy Hite, Nathan Dubin and Jeff Levy are now working on identical audio post platforms in their HD mixing suites.

"The EVO workstation is very ergonomic and easy to operate," said Mr Hurtubise, who joined Margarita Mix in late 2012 with over 20 years of experience in commercial audio post. "I feel like I'm on a system that's been developed for humans to work on. EVO's jogger fits my hand, and its keyboard fits my fingers. I'm running sessions more efficiently because I'm not as focused on all the clicking."

The team likes that the picture has a home in the system, as opposed to floating around the screen. "The picture's right there when I want it – I love the Pyxis," Hurtubise says of the dual-channel HD video recorder, integrated into EVO as standard. "I also like the streaming Pyxis video frames along the bottom of the timeline display, and being able to see the picture frames before and after the playhead. This way, I can see how many frames I have until my next edit."

When the mixers need to face the voiceover booth with a script in front of them rather than face the EVO surface, they've created a macro that puts 'Record' on different sides of the controller so it's ergonomically easier. Fairlight's one-button record function also helps in VO sessions when the talent starts to speak.

"We don't want to interrupt them; if we press our 'Record' macro button, the disk recorder immediately stops one take and goes right into another one in the span of a 1/10th of a second," Hurtubise explains.

Custom fader sets are another attribute of the system. "I've never been on a system where I can so easily lay out faders to my liking," says Hurtubise. "Sometimes I'm knee deep into a session and I really wish I had my beeps next to my mic, right next to my music stem, right next to my sound effects stem, next to the dialog stem next to my headphone send – then I can mute and level them very easily. I can create that quickly with Fairlight."

Several features are included on the Fairlight that the Margarita Mix team did not have on previous DAWs. "For example, I like the way Fairlight solos tracks: I can solo a set of tracks, un-solo them by holding control and pressing one button, and then re-solo that same set by pressing one button," Hurtubise reports. "I like being able to memorize zooms. Say I have 128 tracks with 70 music stems and 40 sound effects stems. I can zoom to the music tracks and store it in U1; I can go to the sound effects tracks and store that in U2. If I hear something in the music I just press U1, and instantly I'm looking at the music stems. It is super easy."

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(IT/JP)