One of the budding areas in Atlantic Canada’s service sector – Nova Scotia’s, in particular – is the realm of video and audio post-production.

For years, foreign and Canadian producers assumed that even when a production was to be shot east of Montreal, the video and audio post would be bounced west again to one of the larger cities where facilities, engineers and editors abound.

That’s changing, especially in Halifax where at least two facilities now offer digital audio suites. ‘The post industry here has evolved to the point that it’s keeping some work from automatically going to Toronto,’ says Rene Beaudry, supervising sound editor at Salter Street Digital, an arm of Salter Street Films. ‘We’re going to post two theatrical features here. That’s unheard of,’ he adds, referring to Paint Cans, from Salter’s Paul Donovan, and Anchor Zone, from Ken Pittman of Red Ochre Productions.

Shares facilities

When Salter is not busy on its own productions, which include the tv series This Hour Has 22 Minutes, it’s keen to invite others in to use the facilities. Beaudry says that makes local producers happy and saves them the commute and expense of posting in central Canada.

Advertising itself as functioning ‘totally within the digital realm,’ Salter Street Digital offers automated digital mixing, Dolby Stereo surround monitoring, cd, dat and effects libraries, timecode dat and 1/4′ timecode Dolby sr mastering, sound design, Foley, post sync dialogue, and syncing dailies – digital and analogue. The favored digital non-linear editing for production audio, effects, atmospheres and music is also available, along with a fully equipped effects editing suite and a recording room for adr (Beaudry calls it post-sync dialogue), Foley recording and music scoring. Beaudry says more workstations and expanded mixing capability will be added shortly.

Whereas Beaudry says Salter’s audio post operation got started in 1991 and has been building since, fellow Halifax sound/audio/music post house Solar Audio has just passed its second birthday. Run by veteran music and sound producer Hayward Parrott, Solar has been handling post on, among other tv, commercial and music projects, the cbc series Street Cents. Parrott says digital workstations such as Solar’s Roland DM-80 have allowed editors to add creative input to their editing task list.

‘Take Street Cents, for instance,’ Parrott said in an earlier interview with Playback. ‘When we get inside their dialogue tracks and so on, we can ramp up their audio’ to make it fit more smoothly with the pictures or move ambient sound from one part of the track to any other part. These and other Solar services, along with those at Salter Street Digital, begin to explain why it’s no longer automatic for producers to send their sound post out of town.