Frank Serafine
The Soap-Clean Audio Vistas of MalibuBy Randy Alberts
"The audio and music restoration business is exploding. It will be huge in the next few years," says longtime BIAS Peak user Frank Serafine, "and SoundSoap Pro is at the front of the whole thing."
If anyone knows intimately the delicate, caregiving process of transferring treasured analog master tapes into the digital age, it's Frank Serafine. Since the dawn of the effects-oriented film epoch he has been, and still is, a leader in establishing the Oscar-winning sound design benchmarks we strive for today. Like lead guitarists queried in Guitar Player about why they do what they do for a living, the better modern sound designers of today will tell you it was movies like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Tron, Star Trek III, Poltergeist II, and The Hunt For Red October-the latter earning the sound team an Academy Award-that turned them on to the science fiction of creating mind-bending sound effects.
His up-tempo voice and unbridled enthusiasm for the sound craft belie Serafine's 50-plus years on the planet. Though he's an accomplished musician, studio designer, recording engineer, and LBE (location-based entertainment) kind of guy who composed the original music for Disneyland's Space Mountain and today looks ahead to shooting his own high-def films high above the waves of Malibu, Frank is thus far best known for his excellence in sound design and best-selling sound effects libraries. What are his favorite projects of the past 30 years? Some great property, the studio he builds on it, and the film he's working on this week, The Aryan Couple, the directorial debut of Oscar-winning producer John Daly (Terminator 2, The Last Emperor, Platoon) starring Academy Award-winning Martin Landau.
"Good noise reduction systems for analog recording have only been around for 25 years," says history buff Serafine. "That was when Dolby A began to get really good. But even Dolby SR, which achieved the best analog tape resolution and dynamic range possible of the day, by today's standards includes with it an unacceptable noise floor. Go back and listen to those masters, man, there is a lot of hiss! Now that the new DVDs can handle 24-bit/192 kHz digital sound to mimic analog quality, everyone including the Beatles are going to start baking their old master tapes and remastering entire catalogs to DVD-even from those amazing SR masters."
So?
"So, we'll just take out the hiss and noise with SoundSoap Pro and end up with all that amazing, super-wide analog bandwidth. Until now, I couldn't even begin to think about remastering my analog stuff until SoundSoap. This is the way to do it now; I'm telling you, everyone into audio restoration is going to want to start using this plug-in."
SoundSoap Pro: The Stuff of Sound Design
Beyond new and old movies-including the renovated and re-released Tron, which his friend and fellow SoundSoap user Wendy Carlos will soon discuss in this column-the "stuff" Serafine is using BIAS' revolutionary plug-in for are his incredibly high-resolution, best-selling audio effects libraries. L-Squared, recently purchased and remarketed by Sound Ideas, has previously sold 1,000 copies and, at almost $1,000 a pop, the popular library has already qualified for sound design's version of platinum status. For someone who has gone to such lengths as inventing microphones such the oil-suspended underwater rigs to capture his unique field recordings, Frank is more than a little excited about what SoundSoap Pro means to his current and future success in the field.
"I'm really looking forward to remastering most of my 1/4-inch sound effects libraries," he continues. "Back in the pre-digital day, when I recorded sound effects for Star Trek and Tron and other films, everything was captured in the field to analog tape on battery-operated Nagra and Stellavox 1/4-inch machines running at 15 ips [inches per second]. Amazing analog recordings, the best of the best, but without battery-operable Dolby noise reduction in the field at the time all these great, wide, and vast-sounding analog tapes also have lots of inherent tape hiss. I'm going to start remastering all of those old tapes by first baking 'em in a little oven before we transfer those to hard drives using a new portable Edirol FA-101 Firewire interface that can record 24-bit stereo at 192 kHz."
Though perhaps not a "poster" project so far as SoundSoap Pro is concerned, The Aryan Couple is nonetheless providing Serafine with a couple of audio opportunities for BIAS' new plug-in. Besides a couple of production dialog lines with some lavalier mic rustle noise on them that he is going to clean with SoundSoap Pro, all the film's dialog and location audio have been well captured to high-quality DAT tapes, with the exception of an advancing Panzer tank division, the audio for the new Daly-directed WWII film about how the richest family in Poland survived the horrors of Nazi Germany was recorded so well that Frank won't have much use for noise reduction.
"The quality of the field recordings and dialog in this new film are pristine. Still, there are a few things I'll use 'Soap' on to process and clean up the original dialog. For instance, there's a scene with all these tanks plowing across a Polish airfield. The rattle of one of the trucks is loud; I like the sound, it's authentic, but the director wants me to remove it from the location soundtrack. There's a lot of sounds going on around it at the time, too, so when I get to that scene I'm going to get to see how SoundSoap Pro handles the situation."
It's Always A Clear Day At The Serafine Enclave
Two miles inland and straight up from where Frankie Valli serenaded Annette Funicello, Frank has done his best audio work of the past four years atop his 3/4-acre mountaintop Malibu studio and home location. An avid hiker appreciating the joys of his ramblin' dogs, Serafine finds pure inspiration far above the coastal fog, traffic, and overcast of a typical Santa Monica summer.
Serafine has, since the pre-voting age of 17 when he lived down the street from where current presidential candidate John Kerry was born, designed and built studios inside of Denver laundromats and between the So-Cal canals of Venice, California, the latter just a Frisbee toss away from the Venice Boardwalk. Considering he is a devout sound designer and Democrat and that his "very Republican" mother still calls The Kerry's her good neighbors, Frank couldn't be happier living and working on his Malibu property in these turbulent pre-November days just off Las Flores Canyon Road.
"I love the companionship of running out in the woods with my dogs here," he shares. "There's a bond with them that's such a good feeling. They're so happy all of the time up here, and that rubs off on me. I'm really looking forward to my future projects and getting off the power grid up here, too: I'm looking ahead to the very clean and pure photo-voltaic power source to run my studios."
From No-Cal Code To The So-Cal Surf
Certainly Frank Serafine, a seasoned professional in the art of analog and digital sound, has used the industry's best noise reduction systems long before the BIAS designers themselves dreamt up SoundSoap Pro in Petaluma, California. In conclusion here, he sums up where the craft has been-and where it's going-before taking the dogs out for a late-afternoon hike above the effervescent, mystic waves of one of the Beach Boys' favorite surf spots.
"Actually, yes I have," Serafine concludes. "There's another system that worked perfectly for us before SoundSoap Pro, but it's a very expensive solution that required a giant piece of dedicated hardware, that company's entire workstation system, just in order to do some great noise reduction. Now, with SoundSoap Pro, I just turn on my computers and boom-boom, I'm done! And, using anything else until you guys came out with SoundSoap, I'd have to tweak and tweak forever using a good EQ just to get an 'acceptable' result, yet still end up removing some portion of my hard-earned, high-end sizzle: You know, the best frequencies of the crash cymbals, hi-hats, or even within the upper frequencies of the breathiest vocal or instrument tracks. That's what I'm loving so much about SoundSoap Pro: You just notch out the frequency of the noise you want to remove while the rest of your track stays untouched in very high resolution. That's a very important new feature."
"Also, the fact that SoundSoap Pro automatically analyzes tape hiss noise is great. For instance, with the sound library remastering projects I mentioned earlier-once we thread up the first old analog tape, this plug-in knows exactly what to do with the same noises on all the remaining master tapes. SoundSoap just says, 'Oh, yeah, tape hiss. I know what to do with this.'