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‘Early in my career, I realised that good-quality soundtracks for films and documentaries was a result of how raw material was handled in post,’ Mr Pookutty says. ‘The sound captured on location is raw material – it is how this material is handled in post and put together that makes a great soundtrack. This is exactly what prompted my friend PM Satheesh to set up his Fireflys studio way back in 2000. My partner Akhilesh and I have merely borrowed from his idea.’
Designed specifically to handle film postproduction, the main room at Canaries Post Sound is used for dialogue edits, ambience edits, sound edits and everything else that goes into sound design work. To handle this, a Pro Tools workstation, 5.1 monitoring and a Dell projection system is used for picture playback. A second smaller room also has a Pro Tools system (but with a smaller track count) and stereo monitoring. All of the workstations run on Apple G5 computers, and there are smaller Pro Tools systems (including the MBox pro) scattered wherever digitising, playout and other routine work is carried out, along with close-field monitors.
Having worked in many post studios, Mr Pookutty and Mr Acharya knew that it was important for work to translate well between small post rooms and big mix rooms. It would be a waste of time, energy and money if EQ and processing done in the small room, had to be redone when the tracks were checked in a big mix room. ‘Today, you have various kinds of mix rooms,’ says Mr Pookutty. ‘We have small room, medium-sized rooms and theatre-sized rooms – and you have extra large rooms. As a sound designer, I have to deal with all these kinds of rooms, depending on the budget of the project I am working on, so I needed a room that would translate perfectly to a Dolby premium room, as well as to small [multiplex type] rooms and also to really large theatre rooms. I have been doing a lot of research, and extensively studying what happens when the listening environment changes from a small room to a big room – how sound changes in a smaller acoustic environment.
‘For work to reflect correctly between small and large mix rooms, I believe that a bass management system is absolutely essential in the small room,’ he continues. ‘Bass frequencies can build up in a small room with five full-range channels and the sixth bass channel. The room is a crucial factor and bass traps become a crucial element. Bass management systems very intelligently control how all these low frequencies are behaving in the room between each channel. Hence, I decided to incorporate a speaker system that has bass management.
‘While scouting around for suitable monitoring speakers, I came across a couple of sound designers from Skywalker Sound in LA. They had designed these beautiful speakers called Blue Sky monitors as part of a fantastic sounding, THX certified chain. After auditioning them in LA, I decided that this was it…’
The big room in Canaries Post has been equipped with a Blue Sky System One, possibly the first such system in India. Without a mixing desk to provide any form of speaker management, Mr Pookutty has opted to use an Audient ASP 510 surround encoder in conjunction with his Pro Tools system. ‘Basically, audio coming out of Pro Tools, goes through a surround encoder decoder, then into the bass management system, and is heard via the Blue Sky speakers,’ Mr Pookutty says. ‘I am, in effect, sitting in a proper mixing theatre environment. That’s the main set-up.’
To get the best from the set-up, the studio needed to have a well-designed acoustic – enter Architectural Acoustics’ Roger D’Arcy and Sound Wizard’s Didier Weiss with ideas, suggestions and drawings. PB Ajayan undertook the main acoustic construction of the studio and Ashish Sompura worked on the architectural re-designing of the space. And the credit for the tasteful interior design goes to Resul Pookutty.
To keep the noise floor inside the control room to a minimum, a separate machine room for the noisy computer towers, HDDs and I/O has been cleverly created under the stairway. All data cables are run under the floor, along with DVI extensions for the Apple Cinema Display screens and computer monitor screens. All of the studios and DAWs are networked with DV PAL picture – now the norm for playback, replacing Betacam tapes. Large windows let in natural sunlight, and care had to been taken in the selection of video projectors and computer monitors so that the luminance levels are matched and do not cause strain on the eyes of the engineers.
In terms of audio, most film work is done in 5.1 but the studio is wired and ready to handle a Dolby EX or Imax 6.1 mix.
Apart from sound design work, the studio is also being used to codify all the sound effects and Foley that Mr Pookutty has recorded over the years. A lot of the material is being transferred from DAT and files on various recorders that have seen use. Once all the material is digitised, catalogued and stored on a central server, it will be available for sound design work in the studio.
DVD authoring of movies and television programmes is another aspect of work that is anticipated here. ‘The studio is ready for DVD mixing – something not being done in the Indian industry,’ Mr Pookutty confirms. ‘In many cases the film mix is put on the DVD, but you actually need to re-mix it to suit television. In the West, popular series like Lost, X Files and Friends have huge DVD sales and I imagine, in the years to come, 5.1 DVD mixes of albums and television programmes will be a similar market here. There is talk of HD transmission taking off here in India. If this happens, it will change things even faster. Canaries Post Sound is ready…’
The first two projects to pass through Canaries Post Sound were the Hindi version of Slumdog Millionaire (the film was a worldwide hit and won Mr Pookutty an Oscar for best sound mixing) and Ghajni, a Hindi film that is India’s biggest blockbuster in terms of revenue. On both movies, Resul Pookutty was the location sound mixer. With a CAS, BAFTA and Oscar winner at the helm, Canaries Post Sound is set for a long and successful innings.
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