Tell us what you think about our technology, and what you do at Audio Mechanics?

First of all, we are specialized in restoration. We mostly work with studios cleaning up old films, as well as a lot of 5.1 upmixing, which is my initial interest in your technology. One of my clients came to me with a Louis Armstrong song and asked me to isolate the voice, I said “it will take forever, let me get back to you on that”. So I contacted Audionamix and I am really excited about the possibilities with the technology for voice isolation and remixing and I hope we can get this to work.

How did you feel when you made the first test?

Initial tests were good and we had a few different composers trying different tests and remixes.
These were  just tests but they proved the point that you can isolate the voice, mask the residual noise and get a mix. The song itself had some recording limitations. I think that’s mostly where my objections were, not to the technology but more to the limitations of the recording itself. Hopefully we can get a better source and work out all of the legal aspects of it, I know that’s a big hurdle but if we can work all that out we can do some pretty cool things.

What about the restoration work you are doing now? How can you see our technology being useful in that field?

There are several hurdles to overcome in that regard: the cost and above all the time factor. For restoration projects, we usually get the time we need without a hard deadline. Upmixes are always constrained by a release date and clients come to us when we’ve got less than a month to do it, sometimes even just two weeks. There are times when we are scrambling and we have to do restoration plus an upmix so I have to pull my whole team off of whatever they are doing and we all work on one show.

Who are your clients?

20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, UCLA Film & Television Archive, Academy Film Archive (the ones who do the Oscars), also Paramount Pictures and I do some work now and then for Disney. I also did some work for Warner Bros. on occasion because they have an in house, Universal also has an in house so I get some of those projects too.
I get a lot of projects through the Film Foundation. For example we’ve just finished The Red Shoes which is a pretty well known movie. Anyway I’ve got a good reputation through them. They find a lot of projects and they will recommend me if the person in restoration doesn’t have anyone in mind. So consequently I’ve done some work for the Museum of Modern Art through that…