TABLE OF CONTENTS One extremely revealing indicator of the popularity of any particular piece of recording technology is the demand for this at the leading hire companies. All the major recording studios are seeing Pro Tools systems increasingly in use this year, so how are things looking from the hire companies perspective? Early in 2001, I spoke to representatives of all the major hire companies in London to find out.
Matt Bainbridge has been Head of the Pro Tools section at Dreamhire since the beginning of 1998. When I started we had just five systems, but this has now increased to 12 and we have four Pro Tools technicians available for support. All our systems use the latest MIX+ cards. We still have one G3 desktop model for smaller systems, with nine 9600s running at 350 MHz. We also have a G3/400 and a G4/400 which we use for our Pro Tools AV system which tends to go out with our eight-channel ProControl unit. We have 29 88824s along with three AD8000s and a dozen USD synchronizers, all the popular MIDI interfaces, three Digital Timepieces, and several Aardsync units. We also have a couple of the Magma one-slot chassis and an older Bit 3 13-slot chassis. For storage we are using Glyph Trip hard drives which have space for plenty of additional devices such as CD-Rs, Exabyte EL820s, AITs, DLTs or whatever for backup. According to Bainbridge, business in the Pro Tools department is brisk. This year in particular has...
