Audio Mixing & Mastering

Here is how the work lines up. Audio mixing and mastering for Canadian-finishing projects runs through a deep bench of credentialed rooms: Tattersall Sound & Picture and Studio Post in Toronto's Casa Loma district, Lakeside Pictures (sound post for The Boys and Star Trek: Find), Urban Post Production (Schitt's Creek mix credits), MELS Post in Montreal, plus mastering pros Stephen Marsh Mastering and Mastering House in Vancouver.

Here is what we have to work with. Our team scopes the deliverable target first. DCP for Cineplex, Landmark Cinemas, and TIFF or Hot Docs festival screenings, IMF masters for global platform handoff, Netflix Canada office QC encoding profiles, plus CBC, CTV, Global, and Radio-Canada broadcast specs for series and feature television finishing — and then matches the room calibre and engineer roster so.

Here is the layout. ProTools HDX is the standard mixing chain across each facility, with Pyramix mastering at the dedicated mastering houses and a working pool of re-recording mixers and mastering engineers stretching from Lou Solakofski through the Mark Berger (Apocalypse Now, English Patient, four Oscars) lineage to younger Canadian Screen Award winners. Asset preparation, conform, premix balancing, and dialogue/music/effects handoff are managed from start to finish so sessions arrive on stage clean and ready to mix.

Here is how the work shapes up. Mastering engineers tune to ITU-R BS.1770 tracking with calibrated reference rooms, delivering theatrical, broadcast, and streaming masters in parallel. Loudness compliance is tuned to CRTC Canadian broadcast standards for CBC, CTV, Global, and Radio-Canada dayparts, ATSC A/85 for North American syndication, EBU R128 for European co-production deliveries, and platform-exact targets (Netflix -27 LKFS, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Crave) for streaming-bound series and features.

Here is how it adds up. Stem packages cover dialogue/music/effects, full M&E tracks ready for bilingual English/Québécois French versioning through the Difuze, Cinélume, Audiopostprod, and Audio Z Montreal francophone dubbing supply chain (the same houses dubbing 1,500+ films a year for francophone Latin America and Europe), 5.1 and stereo fold-downs, and frame-accurate cue sheets. The Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings, Crash, The Departed) and Mychael Danna (Life of Pi, Oscar 2012) scoring lineage informs music-mastering decisions on Canadian features. SOCAN, Re:Sound, and CMRRA sign-ups, QC reports, loudness logs, and unprocessed reference exports ship alongside each master before release to TV networks, distributor, or streaming sites.