Eric Lalicata and Ken Skoglund aren’t your conventional sound guys. They’re working on the James Cameron film Aliens of the Deep – shooting sound files back and forth, editing them and logging them for the next stage of the project. There’s nothing unusual about their workflow-except that Lalicata and Skogland are working on two different continents.

Lalicata is at his home studio in Burbank, and Skogland is based at a personal studio in Skutskar, Sweden. A sea change in post-production technology and thinking has made long-distance collaboration feasible and attractive for certain projects and budgets. The new workflow is pushing some buttons among conventional facilities, and even some facility employees telecommute using a computer and the Internet. Lalicata likes to call them “creative pods”-flexible, remote audio workstations that allow audio pros to seamlessly post audio as if they were working right alongside their collaborators.

“There’s a growing number of ways we can share workflow,” says Lalicata, who won a 2002 Emmy for his sound-editorial work on director Cameron’s Expedition: Bismark. With Pro Tools session files becoming the lingua franca of audio post, format conversions rarely slow up the process and therefore the number of ways to move audio data is proliferating. “There’s still a lot of physical media moving around, mainly on FireWire drives or DVD-Rs,” he says. “DA-88 tapes are still used, but not really for workflow as much as for final delivery”

If the files are small enough, which is often the case with sound effects and dialog files, as opposed to denser sound-design and music files, more remote editors are opting for FTP sites as a dead drop. The newest wrinkle for Lalicata is the use of America Online’s Instant Messaging (IM) feature. “The latest version of AOL [for] OS X has the ability to transfer files between editors’ computers-no FTP sites required” using peer-to-peer networks, he explains. “My Foley supervisor on Steel City [on which Lalicata is working as a freelance supervising sound editor] sent me his tracks at the end of each day as a compressed .sit [Stuffit] file attached to an IM. Even if it’s a lot of information-even if it takes 12 hours to transfer and download-I’ll just let it download overnight.” The average size of a Foley file is 1.5 GB, he estimates. Further communication about the files takes place via conventional email.

“The most efficient procedure for dialog editing is to get the files into OMF [format],” Lalicata says. “Then you can distribute the resulting Pro Tools session to as many editors as are needed for the project, and everyone is working from the same media and format. As long as no one is recording new audio, just editing audio, the edit information contained in the session file is all that has to be exchanged, and that’s a relatively small amount of data compared to the audio itself. Video editors have been doing it that way for years using low-res video.” (Most of the audio is at 16 bits/48 kHz, a remnant of the DA-88 format, which is still widely used for final delivery and archiving.)

Mandell Winter is another L.A.-based editor who often shares editorial projects with Lalicata. Winter has a small home studio that holds his Pro Tools system and a desktop-sized Blue Sky MediaDesk 5.1 monitoring system. (Tight working quarters are a hallmark of the connected post universe; Lalicata says size is irrelevant since many sound editorial bays at conventional facilities are also quite small.) Winter uses a Pro Tools HD1 system at My Eye Media studio in Glendale, CA, and meets there with clients. Winter’s equipment complement is typical of the trend, completely digital and very compact: a Mackie Baby HUI as a control surface, Mark of the Unicorn Digital Timepiece, Pro Tools OO2 Rack w/ DV Toolkit, DigiTranslator, Macintosh G4 1.25 GHz with 2 GB of RAM, Soundminer to manage SFX libraries, and FireWire drives for deliverables. He says remote editing works for many types of projects. “Episodic television tends to need things to move more quickly than film projects, but even TV can work well this way because, even though the elements come in and go out quickly and you need fast approvals, the Internet can do all of that.”

Winter says he sometimes encounters workflow issues in the back-and-forth between the post facility and home. “One of the most difficult obstacles in dealing with picture editors is that they don’t completely understand the dynamics between the facility and the home studio,” he says. “I often get very large files-one editor recently gave me a QuickTime picture file that was 30 GB for 17 minutes of film. I used Final Cut Pro to compress that down to roughly 4.5 GBs. I have a 1.25 GHz dual processor on my Mac G4 and 2 GB of RAM and want to use the processing power for the sound and not be bogged down by the picture.”

Perry Robertson, half-owner of Burbank sound-editorial company EarCandy, edited dialog and sound effects files for The Devil’s Rejects working from a house used as an office and studio. He says because dailies were digitized close to the front end of the editorial process, location audio could be digitally input into the Avid picture editor to create the working dailies, which were output as OMF files and sent to editorial. “It saves a lot of time if we don’t have to reload the dailies’ audio every time,” says Robertson.

Robertson says the pool of quality freelancers has increased in recent years while tighter budgets mean the time allotted for films has decreased. “It used to be that a feature film would have 20 to 30 people working two to three months at a time,” he recalls. “On The Devil’s Rejects, we had a crew of six working for three to four weeks on the audio.”

Frank Gaeta was the supervising sound editor for indie-film sensations Sideways and Thirteen, working on both mainly from his personal studio. Gaeta says this kind of satellite workflow has been enabled by more affordable and accessible data storage, management and retrieval. “Apple in particular has been good about having local networks that you can set up off-the-shelf,” he says. “As the supervising sound editor, I’ll have one computer act solely as the [central] server and use Ethernet connections to hook up the other [workstation] computers.” Other trends that have helped the storage side are the sub-$1,000 1 TB LaCie FireWire drives he uses regularly and a program called Folder Synchronizer that catalogs and automatically updates changes to files. The iChat feature on Apple’s OS X has helped by putting a face to IM exchanges. “You get used to walking to the next room in a facility to discuss edits with someone, and this helps replace that kind of contact,” he says.

Thirteen showed just how frugal satellite post production can be: ADR and Foley joined dialog and effects editing inside a Pro Tools system, and the final audio was mixed in Pro Tools, as well.

Mandell Winter is typical of freelance sound editors: he freelances but also works for a major Hollywood post facility. He prefers not to say which one, reflecting the fact that this is still a relatively new way of working in Hollywood, and one that’s not universally appreciated. “Just because you have a Macintosh and Pro Tools doesn’t mean you’re good,” snorts Jack Levy, owner of ANEFX, a boutique post house in Los Angeles. “Farming out the editing work to freelance editors may mean lower overhead, but it also limits the supervision of the project and leads to less connection between the project and the people doing it. It affects the continuity. Shows get farmed out by the reel, and each reel has different aspects to it. I don’t want someone just showing up with a reel at the end of the day. If it’s done in-house, then I know what the quality is.”

Bill Johnston, senior vice president of engineering for Ascent Media Creative Sound Services in Hollywood, has a practical perspective. “It’s an area that’s in flux at the moment,” he concedes. “Our facilities, like Todd-AO and Soundelux, in Hollywood, New York and London, expand and contract regularly as the work flows in and out. We have a core of employees but we also have a large pool of freelancers that we call on as necessary. People have the capability to do some very sophisticated work from home and they do it. That’s the reality.”

To accommodate the trend, Ascent facilities have made their sound effects databases available via the Internet on a password basis, accessible by those contracted to work on Ascent audio post projects outside the facilities’ walls. Also helping is Digidesign’s DigiDelivery system, a secure server-based transmission protocol, which Johnston says he likes because it doesn’t require a server on the other end. “That’s what sets it apart from facility-to-facility transmissions and makes it appropriate for people working in smaller, personal studios,” he says. “We make a transport copy of the files and download dailies and compressed picture to the remote site, and they post it back to our server when it’s done. It’s all stays as Pro Tool files and we don’t have to compress them.”

Johnston cautions that going outside the walls poses some real concerns. Some studios, he says, are concerned about elements being snatched from the Internet, describing a Sony Pictures Entertainment presentation for post-house vendors about the issue. “Early animation elements from Hulk got out,” he says. “They were far from fully rendered, but the word got around the Internet that the animation was cheesy. They believe it ended up hurting their opening-weekend box office. That’s the kind of picture that accompanies audio for post. Even low-res audio elements are subject to piracy. So the security concern has gone way up recently.”

Another concern is that while the EDL approach to sending back edited files works to a large extent, as soon as new audio elements are added to the file the benefit of not having to resend an entire audio session file is lost. “I’ve had this concern with Pro Tools, Pyramix and Nuendo,” says Johnston. “All of the systems can link metadata updates to local files, but none of the systems can compare audio data between files. If new information has been added or taken away, if we have reconformed the reels, we have to send a whole new file again.”

Then there are transmission-speed bogies. “[On] a commercial DSL line, upload times are terrible,” Johnston complains. “It’s fine for certain elements like simple Foley and dialog and some EFX work. But 48 channels of background predubs could be 20 GB of data. That can’t wait for a DSL line. So there’s a built-in limit to how much we can use satellite studios based on transmission speed.”

Even as bandwidth gets cheaper, these pods will still rely on the resources of conventional studios. As Winter puts it, “I can edit the dialogue, FX, backgrounds, Foley, and sound design at home, as well as spot Foley and ADR prior to booking stage time. I can then just show up with the sessions on a FireWire drive at the stage and start mixing. I’ll always want to work at post facilities for the things that we can’t do as easily in our own studios.”

Ryan Harper, co-producer of Steel City, which just debuted at Sundance, agrees that that’s a likely workflow model for the future. “Hollywood doesn’t like to change, and it does like to spend money,” he says. “But at some point the virtues of using independent editors for projects like mine, and using post facilities at certain junctures, just makes perfect sense. We’re saving 50 percent on the cost of our sound editorial over the last picture, and I get the sense that the editors feel more committed to the project than they would if they were just working on salary at a studio. It’s a good way to work.”