LONDON – When top film composer Harry Gregson-Williams took on the task of creating the musical score for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, the anxiously anticipated second installment of Disney’s Narnia series, which took the number one spot in its opening weekend, he turned to Solid State Logic Alpha-Link and Delta-Link I/O to streamline his production workflow. The units provided a reliable and sterling quality interface between Gregson-Williams’ Cubase and GigaStudio systems into the Pro Tools® systems at Abbey Road Studios.
“The first time I used the Alpha & Delta-Link modules was in my own studio in Venice, CA for DreamWorks’ Shrek the Third film, and they immediately became part of my permanent set-up,” says Gregson-Williams. “Some time later I received a call from Andrew Adamson, the director of Prince Caspian, who said he wanted me and my studio over in London to create the score, as that was where post production would take place. Clearly I had to put a mobile rig together that was efficient enough to do the job and yet was compact enough to freight over to the UK. No easy task! My assistant engineer, Costa Kotselas, took care of the interfacing and we decided to base the set up around the SSL units. They turned out to be exactly what we needed to achieve this and performed perfectly.”
Gregson-Williams used his Alpha Link module with Cubase to record live elements and synthesized tracks. The XLogic Alpha-Link Audio I/O range is a family of fully featured multi-channel audio converters for studio, live and broadcast applications. Three different models each feature high quality 24-channel AD/DA converter circuitry. All Alpha-Link units can be used as standalone format converters, when used in combination with a Soundscape Mixpander PCI card, they provide a powerful, highly flexible I/O solution for native PC-based audio workstations.
“I ended up creating over 130 minutes of music for Prince Caspian, explains Gregson-Williams. “Having the rig based around the Alpha & Delta-Link I/O meant that I could bring over more track capability in much less space than if I had used standard digital I/O units, and that became amazingly helpful and leant itself to maximum creativity.”
Kotselas explains, “Once Harry has a cue done inside of Cubase, we then record everything over into Pro Tools, including the GigaStudio Orchestra parts. We have always needed a lot of outputs and inputs to do this. In the past, we never had enough outputs, so we would have to record some tracks, go back and then do a second or even third pass. The Delta-Link offers such a large number of inputs into Pro Tools and now the transfers happen all in one go. This saves us a huge amount of time and expense and is also in a smaller, more compact simpler set up.”
The XLogic Delta-Link MADI HD is a professional MADI to Pro Tools HD converter for studio, live and broadcast applications. With XLogic Delta-Link MADI HD, multichannel audio digital interface audio equipment like routers, digital mixing consoles and converters can now be directly interfaced with Pro Tools HD, providing simplified interconnectivity and significant cost reductions, eliminating the need for complicated format conversion workarounds.
“I found the entire experience with the Alpha & Delta-Link modules to be amazing,” states Gregson-Williams. “The Alpha-Link provided that great SSL analogue sound, too. The Delta-Link has such a massive capacity to deal with all my sounds that come from Cubase and GigaStudio into Pro Tools and all this down a one-wire interface: quick, clean, easy.”
Solid State Logic is the world’s leading manufacturer of analogue and digital audio consoles and provider of creative tools for music, broadcast and post production professionals. For more information about our award-winning products, please visit: www.solid-state-logic.com.