BYP upgrades for entertainment: located outside of Houston, Bill Young Productions attracts the sound of music - Audio Today & Tomorrow

Post, August, 2003 by Marc Loftus

SUGAR LAND, TX -- Just 20 miles outside of Houston is a full service post facility working with some of the biggest names in entertainment. Brooks & Dunn, Tim McGraw, the Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles are all regular clients at Bill Young Productions (BYP), an 18,000-square-foot facility featuring eight audio suites, five video rooms, DVD authoring, printing and productions services.

Bill Young Productions was founded in the early 1980s, when Bill Young himself was a part of station KILT in Houston. A series of expansions eventually led him to his own building in Sugar Land in 1990, and today his facility includes eight Russ Burger-designed audio suites, six of which were recently upgraded with Yamaha's new DM2000 digital production console.

The studio's main business comes from tour packages for entertainment clients, with a much smaller percentage stemming from commercial and corporate projects.

"That's how Bill started," explains BYP president/COO/engineer Steve Kelly, who's been with the studio since 1985, "doing concert commercials for promoters around the country. We contract the tours with the booking agent or the management. It's still probably 80 percent of our income."

According to Kelly, a tour package can typically consist of television and radio spots, print campaigns and online pop-up promotions. The facility has an Avid system in-house, along with online rooms for video work, and can execute graphics, Web spots and E-cards using tools such as Adobe's After Effects through its new media division, which was set up almost seven years ago.

Working through the new media division, BYP completed work on an E-card promoting the Eagles' summer tour. The electronic promo was sent out to venue email lists alerting fans to upcoming tour dates.

NEW GEAR

It has Digidesign Pro Tools and Yamaha gear throughout and, not long ago, the studio upgraded its Pro Tools systems to V.5.3 Mix 24. But unlike many audio post houses, BYP is using PC versions of the popular digital audio workstation application.

"It's a lot more reliable," says chief engineer/IT manager Tim Triche of the PC environment. "That's what we've found. "Triche notes that the ProTools systems are running on 550MHz IBM workstations and that the studio's work is being done at the 48kHz range, though future DVD projects might increase demand for high-resolution audio.

And just last March, six of BYP's audio suites were upgraded with the addition of Yamaha DM2000 digital production consoles, replacing Otari and Sound Workshop boards that had been in operation for more than a decade.

"They lasted a long time," Kelly recalls. "It was time to upgrade." He says the studio had looked at a number of boards and were seriously considering Sony's R100 when the folks over at Sound Construction in Nashville--who were making cabinetry for them--suggested checking out the Yamaha unit. A local rep had them in front of one in no time.

"Yamaha did a nice demo," recounts Kelly. "The board has everything you could ask for on it and you could certainly grow with it. I could see us growing five to 10 years down the road."

Since a total of six mixing consoles had to be installed, only one room was brought offline at a time. With Trische handling the swap, getting up to speed on the new boards didn't take long.

"We set one up outside my studio here and started playing with it--both myself and Tim--to see what it could do," says Kelly. "By the time we got my board in, I was pretty much up to speed. Since we could only do one board every two weeks, [other engineers] were able to come by and learn from me, so the learning curve was pretty short."

Kelly says the studio will look to Pro Tools|HD in the future, but not necessarily for its higher sample rates. "The power that Pro Tools|HD brings to the table is more enticing than the 96K [features]. We've never really been one to jump on the leading edge of technology, but we try to be somewhere just ahead of middle. That way we get a longer time of usage for what we finally decide on. Since a lot of the stuff we do is in-house, we do not have to worry about staying compatible with the rest of the world. As long as it sounds good for us, that's the end product."

Since completing the upgrades to the audio rooms, BYP has posted a number of projects for entertainment clients, including a theatrical spot (a first for the studio) for the band Fleetwood Mac. The trailer was designed to introduce the band's upcoming tour and played in all Cinemark theaters throughout the country.

"We did it in After Effects so we could do it in a 16-by-9 aspect ratio," says Kelly. "We did the audio mix here but took the separate files and sent them off to California to have them encoded into Dolby 5.1."

The :60 trailer uses a simple black screen with white letters along with the guitar and bass riffs from the band's song "Chains."

"The bass riff and guitar go for like 50 seconds," says Kelly. "Only during the last 10 seconds did we pop up with actual visuals--very fast cuts from the DVD they did called The Dance. We worked on that for two to three weeks. It kept going back and forth. They wanted to do a :30, then a :45, then a :60, and finally settled on a :60, so we started refining that. It went down to the Concerts West people to sign off on and HK Management in LA, and then the band."