East. West Hollywood Strings. Reviewed by Dave Stewart in Sound On Sound September 2. Watch Spirit Of The Game Streaming. When it comes to keeping an audience interested, Los Angeles- based sound company East. West have the instincts of a showman.
Their latest release was originally announced over a year ago, raising expectations sky high and setting Internet forums ablaze with gossip. For months on end, visitors to the company’s web site were confronted with a set of red theatre drapes concealing the object of desire, so it was a dramatic moment when show time finally arrived and the curtains drew back to reveal the new star turn: Hollywood Strings, the world’s largest self- contained string library, 1.
In case you’ve somehow managed to avoid the growing hype, on August 21, a solar eclipse will pass over the United States. And to protect your eyesight when staring. Was ist maxdome? Deutschlands größte Online-Videothek. Auf Smart-TV, Tablet, PC, Laptop, Smartphones. Keine Werbung. Viele Videos in HD, Originalversion & Dolby 5.1. This Halloween, watch something that's thought-provoking? and will also scare the bejeezus out of you.
A recurring question has been “what kind of system do I need to run this library?” One strong recommendation from East. West is that users seeking optimum performance should use Solid State Drives (SSDs) to house the samples. While these devices have much faster access speeds than regular hard drives, they are considerably more expensive. Happily for those hit by the current economic doom- fest, the library runs without problems on conventional fast drives, though some of its bigger patches do demand a pretty hefty system. See below for East. West’s specifications.). Contrary to rumour, installing gigantic orchestral libraries from 3.
DVDs is not the thing I enjoy most in life, so it was a relief to discover that HS ships pre- installed on a hard drive. However, I was surprised to find that the drive in question is a bare internal type, which means that you either have to put it in a spare drive slot inside your computer or buy a suitable external case for it.
At the time of writing, East. West’s web site states that the drive is supplied for installation purposes only and is “not intended for daily use (such as for storing the samples for streaming)”, a caveat repeated on the product box. The company have now upgraded the drive to a 5. GB Western Digital Caviar Blue 7. RPM SATA model which they say is suitable for sample streaming, and they advise that this warning message is now out of date. The library was created by a quartet of Hollywood heavy hitters. East. West supremo Doug Rogers and Nick Phoenix of Quantum Leap need no introduction — having enjoyed a professional partnership since 1. Watch The Asian Connection Online Hulu.
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For decades, photo and video equipment was designed and tested with only white subjects in mind. Lighting darker skin tones takes a different approach than lighting. Watch the latest Featured Videos on CBSNews.com. View more videos on CBS News, featuring the latest in-depth coverage from our news team. Watch32 - Watch Movies on Watch32.com - Watch32 is the Biggest Library of free Full Movies. Watch 32 Movies Online.
For this project, the pair enlisted talented Norwegian composer/orchestrator Thomas Bergersen. Like Phoenix, Bergersen is an experienced film- trailer music producer, and having created a number of orchestral sound libraries for his own use (no, they’re not commercially available), he shares EWQL’s sampling and programming pedigree. The fourth team member has a CV as long as your arm, and a display case full of Academy, BAFTA and Emmy awards: enter Shawn Murphy, the veteran sound engineer who has recorded and/or mixed the soundtracks of over 3.
In the words of Doug Rogers, “Who better to obtain that quintessential Hollywood sound than someone with his credits?” An excited forum user put it more emphatically: “DUDES!!! Shawn F- ing MURPHY recorded it!!! It IS gonna be sick.”. Since early 2. 00. East. West/Quantum Leap releases have been formatted exclusively for their proprietary Play sound engine. Play 5 comes in 6.
PLAY 4 for 3. 2- bit compatibility), both of which are included with the library. The chief advantage of the 6.
RAM, but in order to run it, your operating system, computer motherboard and (if you intend to use Play as a plug- in) host sequencer also have to be 6. The Play sound engine was reviewed along with East. West’s Fab Four and Ministry of Rock libraries in SOS March 2. Read the article at www. In the interests of musical expression, Hollywood Strings uses an unprecedented amount of sample crossfading, causing a hike in polyphony that required some improvements to Play’s software. Play version 2. 0 (not to be confused with the forthcoming Play Pro) is now available as a free download to registered users. The makers claim the update also improves loading times, and while I was unable to compare Play v.
I can say that on a 3. GHz PC the player took 2. MB instrument containing 7.
So what’s not in HS? Since its selling point is a large- scale, big- budget cinematic sound, it doesn’t contain solo instruments or chamber sections. No chords, phrases, ‘wild card’ effects or glissandi are included either, but you can simulate the latter by playing a rapid chromatic run using a ‘repetition runs script’ instrument. Though it’s probably not an issue for media composers, there are no real- life muted (con sordino) samples; the effect of the mute is simulated by a switch that activates an EQ curve modelled on sordino recordings. Enough of the prologue: it’s time for the main feature.
Hollywood Strings was recorded in East. West’s Studio 1 with 5. LA’s top string players, using full- blown symphony orchestra section sizes (1. In marked contrast to EWQL Symphonic Orchestra (recorded in a reverberant concert hall), HS has a large- room studio acoustic which, while by no means dry, lends itself to users adding their own reverb if desired. To that end, the library includes a large menu of convolution reverb impulse responses, including some derived from the hall in which EWQLSO was recorded.
From the violins down to the basses, these string sections have a lovely sound, texture and feel, with a rich, full symphonic sound and an opulent quality that comes from combining great players with a great sound engineer. The looped sustains are manna from heaven for pad merchants like myself, incorporating three degrees of vibrato as well as alternating up- and down- bows. As one who likes to compose by playing, the provision of pre- programmed, full, six- octave strings sections is very helpful.
You can use Play’s instrument key- range setting to build your own full strings setups, though you’ll find that the presets require fewer samples. Meeting film composers’ insatiable need for driving eighth- note ostinatos, HS offers a generous selection of short note deliveries ranging in length from powerful short marcatos to brisk, urgent staccatissimos that will do nicely for high- octane action scenes. I liked the intensity and forceful attack of the ‘on- the- bow’ staccato articulations (whose notes terminate with the bow still resting on the string) and the zing and bounce of the spiccato samples — great, energetic performances. Some of these deliveries incorporate as many as 1. RR sample. Following orchestral sample library best practice, the producers recorded completely different first and second violin sections. This greatly increases the timbral variety — and arguably, value for money — as each violinist brings in his or her own unique, often priceless instrument!
The 1. 4- piece second violin section replicate many of the articulations played by the 1. Another articulation worthy of note is the ‘measured tremolos’ played by all sections, which time- stretch to play their fast iterations at a user- defined rate. The rhythmic effect is somewhat blurred, but a 1. The same idea is applied to the note repetitions played by the violas and basses. With these, the pulse is sharp and clear, though its real life speed is consistently a little slower than the tempo figure displayed by Play.
Express Yourself. To facilitate expression, HS adopts a ‘double modulation’ technique on some instruments, in which MIDI expression (CC1. CC1), an approach I first encountered in Garritan’s Stradivari.
It creates very lifelike, user- controllable swells and fades and obviates the need for played crescendo and diminuendo samples: rather than fiddling around trying to make fixed- length crescendo samples fit the tempo of your arrangement, you can create perfectly- timed crescendi of your own. Starting notes with no vibrato, then gradually introducing it with the wheel is also very expressive. It takes a while to develop the requisite foot/hand co- ordination, but with practice the combined modulation produces those dramatic, emotive surges in volume and vibrato intensity we associate with strings.
How Insecure Properly Lights Black Actors. For decades, photo and video equipment was designed and tested with only white subjects in mind. Lighting darker skin tones takes a different approach than lighting pale ones. Ava Berkofsky, director of photography on HBO’s Insecure, tells Mic how her team beautifully lights the show’s black actors, and Mic reporter Xavier Harding demonstrates some of the techniques below.
Good lighting benefits from teamwork involving multiple departments. According to Berkofsky, the makeup department should use a reflective moisturizer on dark faces. The lighting crew should maximize the surface area of light, and the camera crew should shape that light with a polarizing lens. Harding explains some of the racist history of photographic technology, and the marginalizing effect of treating white models as the “default” use case. Cameras didn’t have to be built to capture white skin more easily than dark skin; those deficiencies were built into the system by carefully optimizing the technology for white skin alone.
As Buzz. Feed’s Syreeta Mc. Fadden writes, Kodak only introduced black- friendly film stocks after complaints from chocolate and furniture advertisers.
On Priceonomics, Rosie Cima talks about how the TV industry accepted and perpetuated this bias, and how filmmakers struggled to overcome it. At Jezebel, Dodai Stewart has explored some contemporary implications of this history, like poor lighting of minorities on high- budget shows and films, and apparently white- washed magazine photos. Because of conscious choices by the film technology industry, photographers still have to learn “special” techniques for properly shooting a vast portion of the population. Even in film school, Berkovsky tells Mic, she wasn’t taught how to film nonwhite people. Digital photography has provided a lot of solutions, but as Buzz.
Feed’s Mc. Fadden explains (and MIT Media Lab’s Joy Buolamwini further explores), it inherited a lot of white- skin biases. So Insecure’s Berkovsky has a suggestion for dark- skinned people grabbing a selfie: Stand by some soft light and turn three- quarters toward it.
Because looking great on camera isn’t just for TV stars and white people.