New York, NY (December 2, 2014)—The creative teams behind Foo Fighters’ Sonic Highways embraced Avid Everywhere to create the HBO documentary series commemorating the band’s 20th anniversary and latest album.
Directed by Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, the eight-part series sees the band travel to music studios across the nation—in Chicago, Austin, Nashville, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and New York—to write and record its latest album, Sonic Highways, which was released on November 10. Each episode features interviews with influential artists, producers and studio owners, from stars like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, to pioneers like Steve Albini and Daniel Lanois.
The editing and sound teams established a collaborative post production environment with the Avid Artist Suite’s Avid Media Composer software and Avid Pro Tools software. According to sound mixer Jeff Fuller, the sound teams used Pro Tools to deal with increasingly tight timescales and give each episode a different style. “We went from having a week-and-a-half to turn around the first episodes to just three or four days by the end, but Pro Tools was amazingly robust,” he said. “We had absolutely no glitches with it throughout the entire production. The workflow didn’t change much, but we changed the mix stylistically for each episode to keep it fresh.”
Six video editors each took the lead on one or two episodes, also collaborating closely with Grohl, and writer Mark Monroe. With an average of 400 hours of footage per episode, Media Composer’s media management and project sharing capabilities was used to handle the sheer volume of footage. Media Composer’s tight integration with Pro Tools reportedly helped boost efficiency and collaboration between the editing and sound teams.
“Using Avid Artist Suite solutions for both the audio and video delivered reliability and stellar results,” said Brian Lazarte, who cut the Seattle episode. “I’ve used this workflow on every major project, and I love and trust it.”
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