Check Out The ProTools Rig...
Watching the trailers for the new Lord of the Rings RPG, there was a sequence on sound, and I was impressed by how little equipment they seemed to use.
EA GAMES - Lord of the Rings: The Third Age There and Back Again 2.
It looks like a simple protools rig with something similar to an Oxygen 8. (A year or two ago I probably could have told you exactly what keyboard that was, but it's been a while since I've looked for any gear). It really looks like something you could own, something you could have in your bedroom. A ProTools HD system would cost as much as a car, but a Digi002 system could run you just a couple of thousand dollars.
I know they have a lot more equipment, especially to capture audio from the orchestra, sound effects folks, and actors (or maybe some of these things are stock, and supplied to them?), but while mixing down it looks like a pretty minimal system. I guess that's the difference between doing audio for video games, and doing audio for movies. There are way too many tracks in a movie to use an interface like this, you'd have to use a huge board or you'd get carpal tunnel from moving the virtual faders constantly.
For a video game, you're not really dealing with live sound as much, and you're building from the ground up rather than paring down what already exists.
page first created on Friday, October 29, 2004
© Mark Wieczorek