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20th Century Fox

At the beginning of 1999, the news hit the streets: Hollywood-based film giant 20th Century Fox planned to install a large-scale NEXUS system in their new Post Production Center. Morgan B. Martin writes about the background, the application and the advantage of NEXUS in this environment. Morgan along with Arnie Toshner is the representative of Stage Tec in the USA.

First Night in Hollywood

20th Century Fox is building a new post-production center with three film-dubbing theaters and a number of transfer rooms and audio-edit suites. There will be literally thousands of audio signals to be connected between the consoles and the facility's digital tape machines, 35-mm Mag recorders, audio workstations, audio effects devices, etc. Multiple transfer rooms will also require routing between multiple different-format machines. Edit rooms will need to be connected to all of these destinations as well. Traditionally, the inputs and outputs of all of the hardware in the facility would be connected to patchbays – a rather large number of patchbays for the thousands of ins and outs here! Such a large patchbay installation is expensive to build and install, and can be an ongoing hassle with dirty and intermittent patches.

Add NEXUS to the Game

20th Century Fox engineers wanted a better way to handle signal routing throughout their facility. They wanted a routing system that would provide for the widest possible range of input and output formats, such as AES digital with sample rate converters, analog, MADI, etc. This led them to the NEXUS System from Stage Tec. The decentralized software-controlled NEXUS routing system eliminates the need for patchbays and their costs. NEXUS connects directly to each machine with local I/O racks located throughout the facility, keeping cable runs to a minimum. Fibre-optic cables interconnect all these racks, making for a clean and orderly installation. Each machine makes just one I/O connection to NEXUS and can then be accessed by any console or other machine in the plant. This promised to save 20th Century Fox a significant amount since I/O (AES, analog converters) would not be duplicated for each console. With NEXUS, an operator can access any machine by just one mouse click – with a Windows screen on the stage, in the machine room, wherever!

Forget Re-Patching!

NEXUS can save any routing configuration for any combination of inputs and outputs. When it is necessary to »re-patch« a machine room and stage to resume mixing on a film, just clicking on the saved »status« shown on the NEXUS screen reconnects all of the ins and outs for that project. Re-patch time is cut from dozens of minutes (or an hour or two!) to a few seconds. Plus standard setups make it easy to get started in the first place. For multitrack machines such as digital dubbers and digital dummies (playback only machines), all of the tracks from a machine can be grouped together and switched with a single mouse click.

Pick a Rate – Any Rate

In today's »modern« world of film post production, opportunities for mischief are abound. One of the trickiest involves the sample rate of digitally recorded material that arrives at the stage from the editors. It is usual that material from different sources will be at different sample rates. Further, there is often the need to record at different rates. NEXUS handles this easily by providing sample-rate conversion on all the AES inputs and outputs. SRC's on the AES outputs means that the dubbing engineer can record stems at one rate, perhaps the »house« rate, and still provide recording outputs to editors and others at whatever rate their system wants to record at.

Separating I/O and the Console

In the three dubbing theaters of the Fox PPC, NEXUS is being used to replace the consoles' usual I/O hardware. Fox's new digital dubbing desks are equipped with MADI I/O interfaces between their processors and the world. These console MADI ports are wired to NEXUS to provide the input and output signals to and from the desks. The result: a dramatic reduction in the I/O hardware that must be dedicated to each and every console. This can – and did! – dramatically reduce the cost of I/O since fewer analog converters, AES ins and outs, etc., are needed. NEXUS will even pass the »name« of the inputs and outputs to the console where they could be displayed in the electronic scribbles of the channel faders.

Security First

One studio hour at a major Hollywood post facility like Fox can cost $1,000 U.S. or more. Reason enough to make sure there are no technical breakdowns! Accordingly, the first commandment was: it must be reliable! Error-resistant fiber-optic cable, distributed hardware, changing of boards while the system is on-line, and the provision for redundant PSU's are critical in such an installation. NEXUS provides all this and more. The NEXUS NT multi-user software allows for protection against unauthorized access. The system supervisor can insure that tracks for the new hit movie in post in one theater cannot be »pirated« by someone else in the plant. NEXUS provides much better security than can be had with patch bays, helping to insure that nobody will »hear« their next hit – before it is released!

Compared to European standards, the production facilities of 20th Century Fox are gigantic. Over 2,600 inputs and 2,700 outputs are spread throughout the facilities in 17 fixed and two more mobile NEXUS base devices. Despite the size, it took Stage Tec only 16 weeks to build the system, so Fox could start using the new technology already in June of the same year!

A Trip to Munich

Before the final decision to go with NEXUS, the Fox staff wanted to see the product in operation, so they traveled to Munich and Berlin to see a number of NEXUS systems in broadcast, convention-center, film, and music applications. And it seems that they were very impressed!