SADiE News

Metropolis Studios uses AAF for Live Aid project

AES CONVENTION, San Francisco, CA, Oct 28, 2004 The Metropolis Group, London's Premier Recording and Mastering Facility, recently completed the audio mastering of the soundtrack for the long anticipated DVD release of the historic Live Aid concert. The new SADiE AAF file interchange plug-in was used exclusively throughout the project.

The historic 1985 Live Aid concert is finally to be released on DVD this fall. Warner Vision International has set a Nov.10 release date for the four-disc DVD package. The Live Aid concert, held at London's Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia's JFK Stadium, was organized by Bob Geldof and raised more than $70 million for famine relief in Africa.

Audio mastering of the Live Aid project was undertaken at Metropolis Studios London under the direction of Crispin Murray and his team using SADiE Series 5 DSD8 workstations. Metropolis was able to make full use of the new SADiE AAF plug-in for the project. Audio for the four-DVD Set was supplied as AAF Exports from the Online Edit at the BBC by editor Nick Carroll. Sets of DVD-R's were sent over daily as the project progressed. The source material for the production came from all corners of the world and it was a major achievement to piece together the project without the local presentation announcements that were added by all of the original broadcasters during the live broadcast.

As the assets were sourced from so many varied archives, it is unsurprising that the audio quality varied considerably.

Metropolis' Technology Development Manager Crispin Murray commented, "The SADiE AAF import plug-in allowed a very quick exchange of assets with all of the different audio sources available for the individual artist's performances presented in parallel in the playlist, allowing the cleanest passes of the audio to be used for each song irrespective of which video source used. This process offered us the ultimate flexibility in editing between different audio streams with equalization and compression applied as appropriate."

With its extensive experience at the forefront of interchange technology, SADiE is one of the first professional audio workstation manufacturers to offer the benefits of the Advanced Authoring Format file interchange standard for multimedia. The current version includes the new Edit Protocol standard (AAF V1.1). AAF support is available as an option on SADiE's Series 5 range of digital audio workstations, including the powerful new PCM-H64 post-production multi-track DAW.

For more information about the AAF Association: http://www.aafassociation.org

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