Sony Pictures Posts with Harrison

Culver City, CA (October 22, 2024)—Sony Pictures Post Production Services is using more than four dozen licenses for Harrison’s MPC Channel Strip software across 14 mix stages, continuing a partnership that began over 30 years ago.

In 1992, the Sony Pictures Post Production Services sound team installed the first of many Harrison MPC film re-recording consoles, the product of a design collaboration between the manufacturer and Jeff Taylor, chief engineer at the studio’s Culver City facility, amongst others. More than three decades later, post-production workflows have evolved significantly, but Sony Pictures’ engineers continue to utilize Harrison’s powerful audio processing tools, with more than four dozen licenses for Harrison’s MPC Channel Strip software in place across the facility’s mix stages.

“We have a lot of mix stages here at Sony Pictures Post Production Services and cover both feature film and episodic television,” explains Mark Onks, post production sound engineer. He has been a witness to those changing workflows, having arrived at Sony Pictures Post Production Facilities 26 years ago when mag machines and analog consoles were standard.

The New-Look Sony Stages

These days, the Sony lot’s stages are largely standardized on a DAW workflow, or hybrid configurations with the MPC consoles. “We are using the Harrison MPC Channel Strip plug-ins to emulate how mixers in the past have shaped and contoured their sound sources and elements with familiar tools. They are rebuilding a Harrison console in the software world,” Onks says.

“The MPC Channel Strip plug-in primarily is used to do EQ, dynamics, de-noising, de-essing and other things with a great deal of similarity and feel as the old MPC consoles,” he elaborates. “They work the same way and the response of the filters, the equalizers and the dynamics control is similar in feel and function to the original hardware version. The consoles have been around for eons, and a lot of big movies have been made using that signal flow.”

Those movies include Uncharted, Bullet Train, Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story, Escape Room, The Woman King and popular franchises including Spider-Man, Bad Boys, Ghostbusters, Jumanji, Venom and many others.

Sony Pictures may have embraced Harrison software, but there is no shortage of hardware on the lot, either. “We still have some Harrison MPC consoles active in the music sections of the bigger stages,” Onks reports, including in the Burt Lancaster Theater, Kim Novak Theater and William Holden Theater, where 32-fader sections are available.