PORTADRIVE: Perfect For Film Production

While film production is undergoing a fast transition with the adoption of digital recording and computer based post-production, the requirement to maintain the highest quality remains paramount. On locations around the world, there’s a growing pressure to record multiple audio channels – due in part to the emergence of new surround sound formats – but also to the desire to capture more tracks of discrete dialogue for each actor. Importantly, by capturing discrete microphones feeds in high resolution, time and cost can be saved in post-production by virtually eliminating the need for studio based ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement). Audio equipment must be able to lock to various timecode rates and offer the standard and various ‘pull up’ and ‘pull down’ sampling rates. As projects are often on location and can last several months, robustness of equipment is essential. Equally important is an established method for reviewing ‘dailies’ and transferring material into editorial.

PORTADRIVE has been specifically designed for audio recording on Film and TV projects and has a host of features that can improve quality and workflow efficiency.

Nelson Stoll comments on using PORTADRIVE on the Movie Version Of ‘Rent’

“The most important thing in the new digital world is being able to accurately interface with other external digital devices; timing is everything and the PORTADRIVE handles that perfectly. One of the main reasons is that it has a word clock I/O that functions - really important because we were using outboard digital processors. It also has a very stable timecode clock” - read more

Tony Dawe on using PORTADRIVE on Charlie And The Chocolate Factory

“For all production dialogue, I used eight Audio Developments’ 2020 wireless microphones and recorded everyone on a separate track on the PortaDrive. Since it’s hard disk, not DVD, it’s very quick, indeed. One day on Charlie, we did 96 minutes of rushes, multitrack throughout, I took it over to the Avid station and the transfer took five-and-a-half minutes!” - read more