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If you read the industry trade magazines regularly, you can be forgiven for assuming that all audio post work comes out of New York and LA Granted, the overwhelming majority of big shows do come out of these two major markets, and we in the press devote a lot of attention to the high-profile productions. But down South, in the Heartland, in the Great Northwest and in the Southwest, stellar work is performed day in and day out. The facilities may be smaller and the work may sometimes consist of mattress spots and car dealer ads. But the talent and commitment to quality are every bit as evident.

In this issue, we profile a success story, with a full-blown video and audio production house, out of a secondary market. This facility has been built piece by piece in Reno over a 30-year period with the fruits of a small group's labor paying off. There are lessons here for anybody working in sound for picture.

CAMRAC
Big Sound in the Biggest Little City in the World It's refreshing to speak with a character like Jim Mitchell. He's colorful, loyal, a straight shooter, self deprecating nearly to a fault, and after 32 years in the film/video/audio production business, he's maintained the boyish enthusiasm of a 13-year-old who just picked up his first tape recorder. He calls himself “one of the little guys,” in reference to the fact that he works in the small market of Reno, Nevada. But his reach is global, and he's sitting on a gold mine, though you'd never hear it from him.

As the owner of CAMRAC Studios (the name is both a reference to “racking a camera lens” and an homage to to George Eastman, who gave Kodak its name because it was a two-syllable word that was easy to pronounce in any language), Mitchell is a resident generalist in an age of specialists. He produces, directs, shoots, edits, designs soundtracks and creatively markets his productions around the world. He co-owns the business with his wife, Shirley, and has a small staff that does everything from design print ads to operate the cyc stage. As he puts it, “We're bigger than a breadbox and about a size 3 in a gray flannel suit. There's 12 of us hopping around on stilts doing the job of 20 angry men.”

It would be hard to pigeonhole the type of work that comes out of CAMRAC. They shoot and edit commercials; they've won a New York Film Festival award for a Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority production; they have corporate clients in the medicine, manufacturing, steel, construction, etc.; and they have a home video series under the trademark Skyfire: America's Video Storyteller, which now includes upward of 60 titles-everything from The Great Reno Flood to a profile of the F4 Phantom fighter plane to Travels With Shadow, the Baby Snow Wolf. Mitchell has a complete library on the history of steam locomotives in North America (many with discrete 4-channel sound), as well as footage and sound of every US Fighter plane since World War II. Did I mention that he's also a budding geologist and amateur historian? And that he regularly works till midnight?

The history of CAMRAC serves as a model for any up-and-coming small-market enterprise in that smart purchasing decisions, savvy trend-spotting and growth within limits rule the day. Mitchell started the company in 1967, working on film. When video came along in 1979, he purchased a ľ-inch system, then in '84, he updated to a seven-machine 1-inch bay. (“We've always been heavy into transports,” he says, “because we do a lot of multi camera shoots.”) Today he works primarily in Digital Betacam, and in defiance of the norm, he edits video and audio out of the same room, usually at the same time.

The suite was designed in 1994 by Carl Yanchar of Wavespace. Yanchar came recommended by longtime Mitchell friends Jody Peterson, a sound recordist, and Jon Holloman, now director of sound recording at BYU. The space Mitchell had was, in polite terms, problematic-32 feet wide by 15 feet deep, with a plethora of panels and housings related to the video editing equipment.

“Carl came in and said, 'acoustically, you're killing me! I have no spread here!” Mitchell recalls. “But he came in, did all his measurements and went back and built all these traps. And I tell ya, you just can't believe the sound in here.

Yanchar designed a series of eight individually shaped baffles and traps to reduce standing waves. A bass trap was fitted into the back-wall ceiling, leading to an upper chamber that measures eight feet high by 80 feet long. The four Digital Betacam and Beta SP machines were housed in air-conditioned, pressurized cabinets with rear vents to draw off noise and heat. The same airtight/exhaust design was used on all housing for source monitors, color correctors, and DATs and DA-88s. Because of the odd room shape, Yanchar specified a Bag End surround monitoring system because he knew Mitchell had loud source material and needed a “big-room sound” in a near-field environment. “I've never heard anything like them in my life,” Mitchell says. “We feed some outrageous high-SPL material through these speakers, and I have never, ever heard a rattle in this room. They're faithful, and they don't mask.”

Yanchar also sold Mitchell on the concept of separate Bag End subwoofers for each of the five speakers, debunking the myth that low frequencies are nondirectional. “We had this train clip that comes thundering in from the left and moves across the room,” Mitchell remembers. The room was just up, and I wanted to play it for a friend. I went to playback and said, 'What happened to the sound?' All the power coming from the left had disappeared. Well, it turns out the carpenters doing the carpet behind the speakers had accidentally disconnected the wire from the left subwoofer. Anyone who wants to tell me that low frequencies are non directional, I invite them to come up here and I'll show them how nondirectional they are.”

The relationship with Yanchar extended way beyond that of a traditional studio owner/designer. Yanchar has continues to consult for the past five years, and Mitchell speaks of him as he would a friend. Yanchar developed a proprietary box to allow 24-channel monitoring, driven by the video preview switcher. And, taking off on Mitchell's love for 4-channel PCM, Yanchar built him a small collection of 4-channel discrete microphones for field recording.

“I really have to attribute the development of the mic to a great guy who recently passed away, Brad Miller,” Mitchell says. “He made all the great late-train recordings in this country. He produced the Mystic Moods Orchestra Series and started Mobile Fidelity. He was a genius. I thought I knew a lot about sound, but this man knew more than I'll ever know in my life. For years, Brad had sung the praises of discrete 4-channel surround. I used to go out into the desert with my two Neumann KU100s side by side with Brad and his mic, and I would get hosed away. His stuff was clean and clear. I bought one of his mics and figured I needed to do this with video. But the mic was old technology at that point, so I started again from scratch and went to Carl. He built a mic with even higher SPL ability. It was quiet, shockmounted and came DC-powered, so you don't have to lug along a 12-volt car battery. It's actually powered right off the camera. It's brilliant. I had a bunch of them built about a year-and-a-half ago, and they're hot. Some of the nicest recordings I have were shot in the afternoon, out in the desert right before it starts to rain. You get a little tick, tick tick, then a semi truck goes by about three-quarters of a mile away and you get that strobing-type of sound. Then immediately behind that you get these late-afternoon crickets in the desert. It's a joy to hear.”

All the power coming from the left had disappeared.
Anyone who wants to tell me that low frequencies are nondirectional, I invite them to come up here and I'll show them how nondirectional they are. - Jim Mitchell

Mitchell, it seems, likes to spend as much time outdoors as he does in the edit suite. CAMRAC specializes in aerial photography, and field production has taken him all over the world. One of the growing aspects of his business, the production and distribution of family entertainment programs under the name Skyfire, came about purely by accident. It's a lesson for finding that proverbial silver lining.

“In 1984, a company came up from Los Angeles and hired us to shoot the National Championship Reno Air Races,” Mitchell recalls. “In those days, I was riding around in my '67 Volkswagen with three Mole-Richardson lights, a pair of baby sticks and a Bolex, and that's about all I had to my name. But they hired us, and someone said to me, 'Do you know anything about these guys? Why don't you see if you can get them to sign something where you don't turn the stuff over until they pay.' Well, they did not pay, and we had all this footage. I was facing about a $42,000 negative cash flow from that project. I called all my staff together and said, 'What are we going to do? We're in trouble and we're in this boat together.' That's the way I manage – were all together. One guy says, 'There's this new thing called home video and people are actually buying these VHS tapes. And watching them at home. I said, 'You gotta be kidding me. Who would do that? We got TV.' And that's how Skyfire started. We threw this hour long thing together, and in a weekend we sold 4,800 copies for $49.95, thank you very much. Man, I was rich. I said, you know, if people will buy that problem, let's show them what we can really do.”

So, ideas are submitted and shows are produced, then marketed creatively. The graphics department creates ads that run in places like USA Today and Parade magazine. One title has sold more than 48,000 copies; another on the Reno flood of '97 sold 23,000 copies locally. CAMRAC has done a production on traveling up the New River Gorge in West Virginia, and another on the formation of Lake Tahoe, with integrated graphics depicting geologic formations over time. It's not an uncommon sight for him to have nine cameras set up on desert mountaintops, capturing the sonic boom from passing fighter planes. Right now Mitchell is working on a rockumentary about the late-'50s/early-'60s group The Diamonds. A Sonic Solutions system was just installed and the company just authored its first DVD, called Steam Clouds and featuring the famous 4449 Daylight steam locomotive.

For the past 32 years, Mitchell hasn't thrown anything away. He has an incredible library, archived with care. Without giving away away his future plans, look for much of it to be available on the Internet before to long. As is his style, he has a clever plan to reach consumers and Web page designers. But consumers aside, he's sitting on a gold mine with his multichannel sound library alone. You can hear enthusiasm as he looks forward to the next 32 years. He'll be in his 80s then, and it's a safe bet he'll be hunkered down in an edit bay or waiting for the Space Shuttle to shoot across the mountaintop.