Clean Up Sunday

I started cleaning and moving things around at the studio yesterday and I’m not sure I’m going to finish by the end of today. Not my idea of the perfect Sunday but it’s got be done. With the slowdown of authoring work in both DVD and Blu-ray, I’m shifting some rooms around here at the studio. That means I’m disassembling the authoring room and moving the computers and the peripheral equipment into some revamped space in the fulfillment room. Oh boy!

The storage room that the Astound Sound people rent in the front of the building is being swapped for the former authoring room. It’s time to clear it out and make way for their stuff to move in…including an EMT plate that will come to life soon. It also means that I have another room for a composer/musician to rent in the front. Win-win.

I’ve also made arrangements with a music producer to lease out the iso booth that is located next to the big mixing room. He lost his lease at the facility in Venice and had heard about our building through another tenant. That’s good news for the bottom line but also means that I have to clear out the “Red Room” in order to make room for his equipment. Luckily he’s not moving in until the first of September so I can take another weekend to move “shrink-wrapping central” moved too.

This means that two rooms are being consolidated into the rear portion of a larger room that was previously occupied by several bakers’ racks of boxes. Those have now been pushed out into the hall as I try to figure out a way to 11 pounds of crap into a 10-pound bag. It’s time to throw some stuff away. I can hear my wife cheering me on although she hasn’t yet seen the extent of the changes being implemented.

It turns out another individual (a video editor) is interested in her office…but I don’t think she’ll mind doing the bookkeeping from home.

So what does this mean? It means going through shelves of old discs, equipment and documentation and deciding what stays and what has to go. And it’s hard.

For example, what does one do with three (yes I have three) very old SGI computers? I already know the answer but just hauling them down from their perch on the top shelf brought back memories of their purchase and the personnel that operated them. In 1996 when I was just starting to get involved in the brand new DVD format, the folks at Sonic Solutions and Daikin (a Japanese manufacturer of air conditioning equipment) collaborated on one of the first DVD-Authoring systems. AIX actually authored and released the first four DVD-Video titles in the U.S. back on March 19th of 1997! Sonic made the audio and video tools and Daikin programmed the DVD Creator software to make the discs. They chose to run the software under IRIX (a variant of UNIX), which meant the purchase of an SGI machine (and the other two came as the business ramped up). If my memory serves me right…these machines cost about $10,000 each. Subsequent version of the authoring system for DVDs ran on high-end PCs and thus the SGIs were retired. They will find good homes at the technology-recycling center this next week.

In my effort to update the studio with some needed patch bay additions and because the authoring room is being switched around, I pulled a couple of cables out of the inter room troughs for use in the big studio. That meant going through some of the gear in the machine room racks and pulling some additional equipment out. What’s the current value of three (I guess that my magic number today) SONY Digibeta machines? These were originally over $30,000 each and are probably virtually worthless these days. Everything has shifted to files. I had heard that the Tsunami in Japan was somewhat responsible for accelerating the move away from tape because the plants that made digibeta tapes was damaged. Whatever the reason, I’m going to putting these units up for sale cheap…if you know someone who might be interested, just ping me.

I’ve been at this enough to see equipment (and companies) come and go. The effective age of a computer and all of the software associated with it is getting shorter by the year. Yesterday I talked about the viability of thousands of dollars worth of plug-ins that will need to be replaced as engineers and studios migrate to the new Pro Tools 11. At least software doesn’t require a physical trail behind. There is simply no option to getting the latest technology. Just think of hard drives if you want to experience sticker shock…in reverse. My first two 600 Meg drives were $8000 each and my CD burner was $17,500.

I’m pretty good at multitasking and have been drifting in and out of the studio working on the Christian Jacob jazz session from last week. I’ll give you an update tomorrow. All I can tell you is the 96/24 multitracks that I’ve been playing with sound amazing…as for the analog tape? I’ll let you be the judge in a day to two.

Be sure to ping me with a request for the FTP credentials if you want to hear the files. Later.