expands facility

mcclear Pathe is expanding its Mutual Street facilities with a new tapeless studio that will be set up primarily to service advertising commercial work.

This room complements McClear’s tape-based Studio 2, revamped for this purpose earlier this year.

The studios are particularly suited to handle large commercial pools, and will specialize in dialogue and multitrack commercials.

This expansion of McClear facilities will accommodate the business that the company has picked up since its acquisition earlier this year of Mastertrack, a Toronto advertising post-production company.

The move demonstrates McClear’s renewed commitment to advertising, and in particular the advertising post-production business, says McClear president Bob Richards.

When McClear acquired Mastertrack, the company also picked up the services of Jim McBride, one of Toronto’s top dialogue sound mixers.

McBride has, however, left McClear to join Manta Eastern Sound.

Paul Seeley, a post-production sound mixer who has made his way up the engineering ranks at McClear, will be the prime engineer in the new room. Ex-Mastertrack employee Paul Hopkins will take over the engineering duties in Studio 2.

McClear has added a new Waveframe digital hard-disk suite primarily for long-form editing, and expanded its audio transfer department to handle the new digital facilities.

In other news from McClear, Richards says his Studioasis facility, located in Scarborough, Ont., has just opened a full digital video studio, which Richards describes as the first of its kind in Canada.

Most of the studio’s time has already been booked by its major tenant, tvontario.

The studio is equipped with three Sony Betacams and a Grass Valley GVG 4000 switcher.