Revolutionizing Remote Collaboration: Inside Source Connect Four

In this special episode of The Pro Audio Suite, join hosts Robbo, Andrew, and George as they dive deep into the latest advancements in remote collaboration technology with Source Connect Four. Joined by special guests Rebecca, Ross, and Vincent from Source Elements, the team discusses the game-changing features and improvements that make Source Connect Four a must-have tool for audio professionals.

The episode kicks off with introductions and sets the stage for an in-depth discussion on Source Connect Four. Celebrating the recent accolades and advancements in remote collaboration with Source Connect Four, the team explores the groundbreaking features, including the Auto Restore/Replace function, which has been improved and made more user-friendly. They also delve into the future integrations with Nexus and other platforms, promising further enhancements for audio professionals.

Discover how Remote Overdub Sync revolutionizes the overdub process, ensuring seamless synchronization in remote recording sessions. Exciting news for iOS users! Learn about the upcoming iOS compatibility for Source Connect Four.

Wrapping up with congratulations and gratitude, the team reflects on the insightful discussion and looks forward to the future of remote collaboration in the audio industry.

Tune in and stay ahead of the game with Source Connect Four, the ultimate solution for remote audio production!

A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth...

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Hunter S Thompson

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Summary
In this podcast, the Source Elements team celebrates their success and discusses the latest updates to Source Connect 4, including support for Dolby Atmos, improved user interface, and the Restore Replace feature. The software has been redesigned to simplify remote connections and enhance the user experience. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of remote recording technology, making it a necessity in the audio industry. The podcast also explores the potential integration of Source-Connect and Nexus, as well as the benefits of Source-Connect's remote overdub sync system. Finally, the host expresses gratitude to various individuals as the show concludes.

#SourceConnect4
#DolbyAtmos
#RemoteCollaboration

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Timestamps
(00:00:00) Source Elements Wins NAB Best in Show

(00:01:40) Source Connect 4: Dolby Atmos Support

(00:05:52) Source Connect 4: Improved User Experience

(00:08:36) Recorded Files in Pro Tools

(00:10:08) Port Forwarding Simplified in Source Connect 4

(00:11:10) COVID's Impact on Remote Recording Technology

(00:16:11) Streamlining Remote Audio Engineering

(00:20:03) The Future of Source-Connect and Nexus

(00:22:27) Remote Overdub Sync in Source-Connect

(00:24:27) Farewell and Gratitude

Transcript
: Y'all ready? Beat history.

: Get started.

: Welcome.

: Hi. Hi, hi. Hello, everyone to the pro audio suite. These guys are professional. They're motivated.

: Thanks to Tribooth, the best vocal booth for home or on the rote voice recording and austrian audio making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from source elements and someone audio post Chicago, Darren Robbo Robertson from voodoo radio imaging, Sydney tech to the Vo stars, George the tech Wittem from LA and me, Andrew Peters. Voice over talent and home studio line up learner.

: Here we go.

: And welcome to another pro audio suite. Thanks to tributh. Don't forget the code Tripap 200 to get $200 off your tributh. And austrian audio making passion heard. Just imagine a New Zealander, an American, a Canadian, an Australian and a half Englishman walk into a podcast. It's just happened. We have, apart from Robert Marshall, we have Rebecca Wilson, we have Ross and we have Vincent from source elements.

: Ooh, here we are.

: Wonderful.

: An Argentine too.

: Can you talk from our laughter who is here?

: Yeah.

: And welcome to the party in Las Vegas, by the sounds of it.

: Now, we should say the award winning team.

: Yeah, I was going to say there's a bit of a party going on because there's a new trophy in the cupboard. By the sounds of things, there is best in show.

: We're holding it up right now. It's brilliant. Shining blue and it says, nab. Best in show. And it's gonna go under Robert's trophy case.

: Exactly. I don't have a trophy case, but I have a trophy shelf.

: Trophy shelf, yeah.

: So, Phyllis, in best in show for.

: Remote collaboration, remote production. Yes.

: This is the new baby source connect four. Yeah.

: Yes, it does. Atmos, amongst other many cool things, source Connect used to do and more than it does now.

: So go and fill us in on the atmos thing because that's a massive leap forward.

: Yeah. It allows you to have all sort of the raw atmos stream, so not just a rendered mix going across a remote connection, so someone can listen, but instead it gives you the flexibility to send what's called the bed. Then all the objects, these are all separate audio channels, as many as it will be, as many as 128 and the time code. And then most importantly, the metadata that steers all these objects around so that whatever the receiver has, as Atmos does, is it just conforms it. It renders it specifically for their speaker setup. So you could have a stage mixing a film with, say, 20 speakers and a director reviewing that mix in real time over source connect with, say, twelve speakers or even ten speakers. And maybe another person's connected at the same time and they just have headphones. So they're getting it as binaural.

: It takes a lot of the thinking out of the equation, right? You just let the renderer on the remote side deal with the translation. So just lets the host, or the mix host, if you will, put one stream up and have it divvy out to everyone accordingly.

: So everybody's end basically decides what it's. What it wants to hear.

: Exactly.

: Yeah.

: Right.

: Well, no, they'll hear the same thing. They'll just experience it in spatialization differently.

: It'll be optimized for their speaker set up because it'll be coming out of a renderer directly on their side and.

: The spatialization would be compatible from what you hear in binaural or 5.1. It's what someone's hearing in nine 1.6. But just with that lesser detail, I.

: Guess the end goal is sort of like listening parity, which is almost impossible to achieve because everyone's going to have different speakers and configurations. But this is the most optimized version to get closest to that.

: It's not like we're dropping like, you know, one of the voice channels so you only hear one side of the conversation.

: It's the purpose that Atmos was made for so that there'd be one deliverable and then whatever your speaker set up. The person with the really nice speaker setup doesn't have to compromise for the person with the really simple speaker setup.

: And the other way around.

: And the other way around. The other person with a simple setup is not sort of burdened, in a sense, by having something that they can't play because of someone who has a really fancy system. So Atmos is like a deliverable that lets you play back anything from stereo all the way up to, you know, huge speakers arrays and 15 and 20 speakers even at home.

: I think I have kind of an alternate kind of take on this which is basically like a bit of a tangent from that, that angle of it, but it's basically like these. Getting into a really tuned listening environment is a really expensive moment. You only get so many hours in there and the ability that now you could be working on a laptop in headphones through the Dolby Atmos renderer and building a mix towards your big mix session where you're going to actually sit in that room. That's kind of like what I think is at stake. And what's really exciting about this is you could be working on 5.1 before when you were working like in a stereo setting is you weren't able to know that it was going to translate. Exactly. This is kind of, or even at.

: All, you kind of use tools like I had the, the waves thing that lets you take five one and make it binaural and you'd kind of have an idea.

: I think most engineers I know would say they do their best work when like they, the client leaves and they get to work on something by themselves in a bit. So now the ability that you could be working towards this grand big spatial mix in a laptop setting and then transmit that to a listening environment that you can get into or physically get there, that's the real exciting prospect.

: It kind of feels like equity, really like true equity.

: Let's bring it back into more of the realm of our listeners, I guess. And AP and I have been having a bit of a play around with source connect four. Thanks very much to you guys. And the biggest step forward I see is firstly the GUI. You know, it looks so much more SmIc, so much more professional, so much more user friendly. But in terms of operation wise, the biggest step forward is the old queue manager, which now becomes restore replace. In source connect four we were like.

: You know, we've spent 20 years honing technology and then we thought now we need to hone the user experience. It's really an internal focus for all of us.

: Now the queue manager so often was just, people never read the manual. It didn't, it didn't work automatically enough. And then people would just go, what is this thing? I don't know. Shut it down, let's get on with our session. It wasn't something that they thought to ask for because they never had anything like it before.

: It's weird, I've done so many sessions where I've said, are you using Q manager? And I get the answer, no. What's that?

: Yeah, we just have one extra step to go, which is to be reading your session file automatically, your pro tools or logic or other session file, whatever we can. And then you honestly wouldn't have to do anything. And you've got restore happening all the time without needing to configure anything.

: For me, the other awesome one would be for it to work even after I've shut down source connect because there's so many times that you shut it down and you go, oh, I shouldn't have done that, should I?

: But you know, well we have reconnection logic built in now or like a new method where you know, if somebody does shut down, you still got work to do, you can bring it back up and it'll reconnect and it will restart. But we also, you know, if you shut the program down, then it can't do it anymore. That's the same.

: But as far as, like, uploading the data maybe ahead of time or right away so you don't have to wait for the talent or worry if the talent shuts their system down.

: This is maybe the most important thing about source page four. We've redesigned it from scratch, completely rewritten every line of code so that we can add these features that we know everybody wants. So the plan was the very first version on the first day. It's pretty much feature to feature for source connect three because we just need to get it out.

: Right?

: Yeah.

: With doggy connection.

: Okay. All right. Some more extra cool stuff.

: There's a lot of cool stuff to.

: Get you to want to upgrade, but then what you're talking about, like, hey, let's upload, you know, the whole session to the cloud so that the engineer can get it later on. All of that stuff can come now because with built hooks into all of this technology.

: Sure. Well, let's pick through a few of them. AP and I were talking, we were looking at that restore replace page. AP noted the recorded files area and was wondering if that was sort of a hybrid of the old source connect now where you could actually record directly to the cloud. Is that the case, or is that actually looking at my. Well, in my case, my pro tools folder going, these are the files you've recorded so far.

: Exactly. Those are the files that you've recorded in Pro tools. What I would originally say the Qmanager or the auto restore. Auto replace system recognizes as ones that it knows what they are and who they were connected to. And if there's any audio to fix or replace, restore or replace that it can do it. So those are your recorded files. And then the other one you might see in there is the uploads, which are files that maybe someone else recorded that you are uploading data to, to either restore someone else's file or replace data in someone else's file.

: Okay. Because I think AP, you sort of liked the idea of recording in the cloud, didn't you?

: Yeah, that's one of those features you're.

: Technically recording there, and we can make that recording more available. It's actually, I think source connect three had that, but it had some flaws to it. But exporting the connection, if it's not there already, will be there.

: AP has been playing with twisted wave too much. That's the problem I've been playing.

: Yeah, indeed. Just going to ask about port forwarding. How does that change? Or has it changed in source connect four?

: I got this one. How does that change? No more port forwarding is necessary.

: Yeah. Nice.

: Basically.

: We find a way through your connection path and make it work. You don't have to go into your router and figure out anything complicated. You don't have to call us in a panic. You decided to take a vacation, and then you get called for a job. But nothing like that. It's just gonna work.

: So source stream is available. Mac and windows. And port forwarding, especially in the pro version, is available if you want to use it. It does kind of. It's the ideal path for the connection, if it's available. And if you can lay out the red carpet for source connect, it appreciates it, but it's no longer required.

: Only very strict networks and, you know, corporate environments.

: Yeah.

: My question is directed at you, Rebecca, and I'm wondering what hand COVID played in the development of source connect four, the one we're seeing now.

: You know, it's still a complicated thing to process. What happened to the world in 2020? We all changed. It was a one of major cultural shift for them, us as humans. And so, of course, that can only be reflected in technology. And the main thing that changed, I would say, for us, is that we realized we kind of know what we're doing with the Internet, which was really nice to find out. It was really, you know, it wasn't a pleasant situation at all, but it was nice to know that we were able to help. That was really satisfying. If you could have called anything in that situation satisfying. And then it said to us, hey, I think that we have an idea what's gonna be needed the next 1020 years, because we've already been doing it 20 years. You know, Robert and I, the team are all young spring chickens, and.

: And I have a cane.

: We've still got some ideas left. I don't know, maybe just a certain insight that we have from doing this so long. It was like, now the world's ready for us.

: I think what happened in the pandemic is a. All the doubters went, oh, remote really does work. And for us, what we realize is that remote is no longer just like the talent's remote or the client's remote, but remote is everybody's remote, and they all have different roles. And how to put those roles together in the most cohesive way became more what SourceConnect four was about compared to what we thought source connect four was going to be prior to the pandemic.

: If you think about source Connect, like source Connect pre COVID was something that was nice to have, and then when COVID hit, it was something you had to have, and that changed the whole game.

: I thought, well, Andrew, honestly, you and I, you know, we're from the South Pacific, from Australasia. I wouldn't say that source connect was a nice to have. It was kind of a, you know, whether it was source to nature or something else, we had to have something or how on earth we were going to work internationally because plane tickets are expensive and, you know.

: Yeah, that's.

: I think.

: I think so, yeah. But I'm thinking from my point of view, like, as a voice talent, working with studios like you, historically, you just drive it. I go to Melbourne or Sydney or whatever it was for a job. And, you know, you managed to convince people that, you know, you can actually connect with to my studio if I work with someone in Sydney or wherever. But it was kind of a luxury, really. And people would just use local talent, pull up in their car park and go into their booth. But once COVID hit, it was not like that at all. It was a different game.

: I think, especially here in Australia, there was a massive resistance to home studios, to the point where owners of studios would refuse to work with remote voice actors because they figured they were trying to steal their work. So. But COVID sort of put a whole new perspective on that, I guess, really, didn't it?

: Yeah, and there were people. There were people that were actually literally coming out and black banning talent for having a home set up.

: Yeah, that guy's got a home studio. He's stealing my work.

: Prior to, like, up to. Prior to the pandemic, or did that subside at some point?

: Yeah, I think it was. Look, it was. It was softening, but it was still there.

: I think what the pandemic did is kind of shift the focus from the studio to the operator to the engineers at those studios. Right. So I definitely spoke to a lot of people in those places that said they got more work because they were able to do so much of it remotely.

: Well, I know that's a fact for a lot of studios where they were able to, like, have engineers at home and at the studios, or just because clients weren't in, they were able to do just more work. Like, yeah, everybody could be put to work. All you needed was more licenses of whatever it was that you were using, like. Like pro Tools and Source connect and whatnot.

: Yeah.

: The irony of this whole thing. When COVID hit, all of a sudden studios were calling me because they had to get out of their commercial studios and set up at home and asking if I could do tests with them to make sure their source connect was working.

: Wow.

: Right. Or weren't some talent going to your place just to do sessions? Because they were, you know, they couldn't go all the way to the studio, but somehow they could give you COVID.

: Exactly.

: I don't know how the rules were, but I seem to remember you were hosting some talent at your place.

: Yeah, there was a few that came here because they got out of the city and they were living sort of coastal, so they couldn't get in there anyway. And I was asked if people could come here that were living locally, and of course I obliged.

: The amount of tech that was pushed on to pretty much every operator in a remote setting was, I think, probably one of the humbling parts of the pandemic. Right. Because, you know, it was, it was once you have every role get remote, then all of a sudden, like, I know a lot of audio engineers that know nothing about networks. Yeah. You know, like, it's like literally everyone has kind of thrown this wrench of technology and different roles now I got to be it as well as engineering. Well, that's what support was here for.

: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking like literally a big part of like source connect helping in pandemic was just a huge heavy load of tech support. And it wasn't just getting talent on boarded, but it was almost teaching a lot of people like how to work remotely or how to like not just do a remote ISDN, like to freaking have everybody be remote and lots of people routing. Yes.

: So you know, all that's kind of, I think that's what source connect four represents. I think a lot of the learning of that is how to streamline exist, make the UI, make it make sense for you so you don't really need to think too much. The getting rid of the eye lock and the port forwarding requirements. I don't know if we talked about ilock, that's the thing. We've experienced that probably in huge volumes right at the start of the pandemic.

: What's this?

: What is this Iloc thing?

: I need something physical and I can't.

: Go out and get it.

: You didn't need it physical at the time. Another account? Is it going to cost me anything? No, it's a free account and you know, you can't verify or you can't easily set somebody up because there's just more email verifications for new accounts that are created and God forbid the account that you created in source elements, that same account name is not available in Ilog. So now you have two different account names to remember and like two different passwords and.

: Yeah, and people are losing their passwords because they use one thing for one account, one thing for another account.

: So that's gone.

: No more eyelock.

: Wow, you heard it here first.

: You heard it here, folks. That's right. Exactly.

: Breaking news.

: Bravo did say that he would like the UI to be bigger.

: Bigger, small.

: Can't see shit.

: Smaller the GUI.

: Oh, smaller the GUI.

: It would be nice to be able to scale it like I want to see. I love the size of it as it is for now, but even when you've hit that little four corner box and it squashes down to the sort of send and receive meters and then the menu underneath, for me, it still takes up a lot of space on my screen.

: And you can make it smaller. Yeah, you can grab the corner and push it in.

: We're in the final mile of quality of life improvements. A lot of the stuff that, you know, those sort of smaller bits are just, they're gonna get done in the next couple months and.

: Absolutely, I mean, you've embarked on a massive job. But that was one of the observations that I sort of, I did say to rob, but is I wanna see it big when I'm setting up the session and when I'm getting everybody connected. But once everybody's connected, I've got three screens in front of me, I've got my edit on one, my mix on another, and then my third is dedicated to picture for video. Source connect plugins, meters, all the rest of it to keep them out of the way. So the less space that can take up for me, because I really only need to glance up and see if it's metering. If someone says they can't hear something.

: Can I throw in a future feature that I don't think is a spoiler because I really wanted. Yep, we plan to separate the UI from the engine and you could run it from like another screen or an iPad. And to me that's the sweet spot there, especially for, you know, people who are running, you know, big installations. They can walk away and, you know, oh, source Kinect five is not working and they can look on their phone. Oh yeah, oh, it's working now.

: Right.

: Why should they have to go back.

: To the machine room and what about integration with Nexus?

: I think you're going to definitely see Nexus and source connect integration and just further integration across the whole product line going towards that platform.

: I think because I was telling Robert on a previous episode, it wasn't all that long ago, I had a session where I had a voice talent up in Brisbane somewhere. I had a creative sitting in the airport and two guys in the agency here in Sydney, and then the client was also online from, like, Perth in Western Australia or something like that. And there was another talent in Adelaide and it was this massive session. And if you could have seen my poor old thirst screen with meters and everything else going and all the rest of it, it becomes a logistical nightmare trying to remember where you've put everything and who's on what. So combining that all together would be quite impressive.

: Can't say exactly what you might see, but I think sort of connect and nexus are surely more communication.

: Well, that's actually a really good advancement that you've reminded me that you've, you've put into four. Here is the fact that all your connections appear in the one place. I think that's, that's amazing.

: And they cross connect for you.

: Yeah.

: So they all hear each other without you having to do a thing.

: Right.

: You can pull multiple outputs, everyone record on everyone on a separate track, and.

: You can even give them different inputs.

: Right.

: Right. You can send them different things, but they will all send to each other.

: Yeah.

: Can I make it so that person doesn't send to that person?

: That's the plan for sure. We want to have a more project based style where you could decide what role is everyone playing? What do they hear? What do you hear?

: What do you want them to hear? Who hears what? You can make everyone hear each other in a round circle and you could really play the game of like, tell this story to the next person and when it gets back to you. That is not the story I told.

: Yeah, well, it's. I mean, the way you've set it up now, it's almost a well and truly upsized source connect now, right?

: I'd agree. In a simple sense, it is like source connect three and source connect now. Sort of merging together and becoming each one, giving the best of what they used to do so you get the benefits. Yeah.

: The autorestore replace being like, now you actually truly have an acquisition system that's like, bit accurate, right?

: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

: Never mind the browser, you're not going to get that there.

: We know where every sample and frame is.

: Speaking of frames, we have a system called remote Overdub sync which instead of remote transport sync where you are to deal with latency on a project. If someone is singing or doing ADR, going back to ISDN, the original method is to send timecode into sync. Two timelines on either side. So one chases the other networks, but there's a lot of setup on either side. So the remote overdub sync ideas that you can send to the talent whatever they need to hear and whatever they need to see and they perform if it's ADR and they sing and that performance gets back to you and you record it. And while you're recording it using the remote over dub sync system, you hear it in sync and when you hit stop in your daw, you see the waveform and then a moment later, a couple of seconds later, you see that waveform jump back in time to be where it should have been had there been no latency between you. So you can overdub, really just connect and overdub. You don't have to tell people to load up this timeline and click this button to synchronize.

: No more comments of that doesn't look right to me from the back of the room. When you're recording with the talent, are.

: You thinking or is it going to happen for iOS by any chance?

: Oh yeah.

: Yes.

: I'm a big icad fan. I really love mine. I use it mostly as a music score player to play piano and I would love to use source connect on it and it's definitely happening.

: AP is only asking you because he's trying to create the world's smallest voiceover roadkit. It's a purely selfish motivation.

: I get it.

: He just needs to use a trrs cable. And like, if Andrew just needs to talk to me about how to make things.

: Uh huh. Absolutely. You would have the world's smallest road case. Indeed.

: That's not the only thing that I've got the smallest of, but that's another story for another day. Thank you guys. Thank you Rebecca. Thank you Ross. Thank you Vincent. And of course Robert.

: Congratulations. Congrats.

: Thank you.

: Thanks Andrew. Thanks, Jorge.

: Well, that was fun.

: Is it over?

: The pro audio suite with thanks to Tribu and austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging from George the tech Wittem. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say g'day. Drop us a note at our website, thepro audiosuite.com.

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