744T Portable Field Recorder and MixPre Help Capture Realistic Battlefield Sounds For Award-Winning Video Games
CARY, NC, MARCH 12, 2013 — Audio Director Justin Drust and his team of professionals at Red Storm Entertainment have always prided themselves on recording the clearest, most authentic sounds for their genre-defining, award-winning video games. For Drust, the Sound Devices 744T Recorder and MixPreCompact Field Mixer are the portable audio field devices of choice.
Turned on to Sound Devices gear by expert weapons and sound recordist Charles Maynes, Red Storm Entertainment has used the 744T to capture incredible audio for the critically acclaimed Rainbow Six® and Ghost Recon series of games, including the company’s most recent release, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier®.
“After spending some time with the great Charles Maynes and listening to the amazing audio he captured with the 744T, we went ahead and purchased the Sound Devices gear,” says Drust. “The preamps on the 744T are excellent and the limiters inside them are probably the best I have heard for weapon recording. They are so fast, and very hard to clip, so we have been able to get fantastic source recordings of these incredibly loud sounds.”
Featuring four sound designers and one audio programmer, the Red Storm Entertainment crew is responsible for the sound design, voice recording, casting, music production and implementation of the games it creates. It utilizes Sound Devices gear for all of its field recordings. In addition to voice recording, Red Storm has used its 744T to record an array of battlefield audio, including realistic weapon and vehicle sounds.
With 16- to 18-channels of audio, Drust and his crew use multiple 744Ts to record the required field audio. “Most of the time we aren’t syncing the devices together but instead we will line them up later in post. As long as we capture a quality source recording we aren’t as concerned with time synchronization for asset creation,” adds Drust. “We have done multiple recordings with the 744T and have never had anything fail. When we record with it, we can hit the levels really hard, often times going into the red, and know when we listen back it will still sound great due to the high quality pre-amps and limiters. A lot of additional source recordings we’ve captured involve extremely loud vehicles, such as helicopters and planes, and the 744T consistently performs and stands up well to the high sound pressure levels.”
Drust also incorporates the Sound Devices MixPre Compact Field Mixer into his rig. “If we are recording temporary dialogue for a game, we will always run everything through a MixPre, even if it’s recording straight into the computer, just to get that added level of audio quality from the pre-amp.”
In addition to its powerful recording capabilities, Drust enjoys the flexibility that comes with Sound Devices’ compact, portable gear. “One of the great things about the Sound Devices equipment is that the 744T, like the MixPre, is able to run on small, lightweight batteries,” concludes Drust. “For us it’s the best equipment to use for location recording. It has totally changed our workflow and has allowed us to capture fantastic sounds.”
Sound Devices 744T is a powerful four-input, four-track file-based digital audio recorder. The super-compact 744T records and plays back audio to and from its internal hard drive, Compact Flash cards and external FireWire drives, making field recording simple and fast. The 744T reads uncompressed PCM audio at 16 or 24 bits with sample rates between 32 kHz and 192 kHz. Compressed audio recording and playback from 64 kbps to 320 kbps is also supported.
The time code implementation makes the 744T ready for any double-system recording job—from over-the-shoulder to cart-based production applications. The 744T implements a no-compromise audio path that includes Sound Devices' high-performance microphone preamplifiers. Designed specifically for high-bandwidth, high-bit-rate digital recording, these preamps set the standard for frequency response linearity, low distortion performance and low noise. The 744T, like all Sound Devices products, is versatile and designed to withstand the physical and environmental extremes of field production. It's this durability and functionality that professional sound mixers have come to expect from Sound Devices.
Sound Devices MixPre, like its present successor, the MixPre-D, is a studio-quality two-channel portable stereo microphone mixer. Its impressive audio performance and comprehensive features, including pan switches, a built-in slate microphone, 1-kHz tone oscillator and headphone monitoring, make it ideal for the front end of any studio or field production system. Film production engineers value the compact size and ability to withstand extremes in the field. The MixPre combines rugged mechanical and electrical construction, compact size and high-quality components.
Red Storm Entertainment, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ubisoft Entertainment, founded in 1996, is Ubisoft’s U.S. development studio. With the release of the legendary Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six® in 1998, Red Storm pioneered the squad-based shooter genre by delivering groundbreaking gameplay, stunning realism and the iconic power of ‘one shot, one kill.’ It was the first true tactical first-person shooter (FPS), a game that rewarded patience and planning as well as good aim and a keen eye. Its ground-breaking multiplayer action included a revolutionary form of cooperative gameplay and set the standard for tactical multiplayer.
In 2000, the studio was purchased by Ubisoft. At the time of the sale, Red Storm was already hard at work on what would be the studio’s next genre-defining hit, a game that would take the tactical gameplay of Rainbow Six and turn it loose on the wide-open battlefields of the near future: Ghost Recon. Upon Ghost Recon's large success, Ghost Recon 2®, the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter® series, and Ghost Recon Future Soldier® were developed and released.
Red Storm remains a vital, creative force with Ubisoft. Today the studio’s talented team is developing exciting new content from the Tom Clancy’s brand and beyond. The headquarters for Red Storm is currently located in Cary, North Carolina.
Sound Devices, LLC designs and manufactures portable audio mixers, digital audio recorders, and digital video recorders and related equipment for feature film, episodic television, documentary, news-gathering, and acoustical test and measurement applications. The fourteen-year old company designs and manufactures from their Reedsburg, Wisconsin headquarters with additional offices in Madison, WI and Highland Park, IL. For more information, visit the Sound Devices website, www.sounddevices.com.
