Netflix hosted a 2 day Post Production Summit at Darling Harbour in Sydney on August 17 & 18. The Summit was held at the ARA Darling Quarter Theatre and covered all areas of post production including on-set data capture, post production supervising & budgeting, sound, colour grading, delivery & QC and mental health in post production, along with a deep dive into some of the products and tech from AVID, Dolby and Adobe. Presenters included Adam Scott, Andrew Mason, Colleen Clarke, Livia Hanich, Kevin Kang, Ozzie Sutherland, Mark Wareham, Will Files, Sam Hayward and Luke Mynott.

Some of the sound focused highlights:

– Adobe talked about Adobe Firefly – create images, vectors, videos, and 3D from text with Adobe’s AI art generator.
– Wave and Fab Filters plugins now work in AVID Media Composer.
– AVID Media Composer now has the ability to exporting Pro Tools sessions directly.
– New Marker functionality in Pro Tools that allows track based markers.
– AVID AI functionality to generate a written script from the audio.
– The Rebel fleet (on-set data capture) unveiled Sidecar, their data collection tool that allows them to collect all relevant data/metadata from the shoot (from continuity notes to camera/lens info to Dailies QC notes) and hold it in one database that can be flexibly shared throughout the post process.
– Neflix shared a breakdown on how Netlfix streaming is watched, dominated by Television sets at 72% but in Australia that is even higher at 77%. The 2 other categories were Phone/iPad or Laptop. Atmos currently a very small share of listening.
– Dolby presentation stated that commercially, Dolby ATMOS capable products are selling more than traditional 5.1 capable products.
– Dolby Atmos Room Design Tool – software to help design room setups for Dolby ATMOS monitoring.

In conjunction with the summit, Soundfirm Sydney and Unison Sound hosted Dolby Atmos Presentations by sound designer and re-recording mixer Will Files. Will played a few scenes from the award winning series “Stranger Things” to demonstrate some of the shows scope and use of sound. Will was happy to answer questions about his work on the series and experiences working on feature films in Hollywood. Thanks to Michaal Monk at Neflix Australia for making this happen.