In this article, Grammy-nominated producer and mixer Nathaniel Reichman takes a closer look at Evergreen Audio Design Group’s Post Production Metering Suite - the brainchild of software engineering veteran Bob Brown.
Meters, Meters, Everywhere
It might be hard to understand why a new metering plug-in should warrant special attention since there are a lot of sophisticated and useful meters already available to Pro Tools users. My own plug-ins folder is filled with them, ranging from the old Waves ‘PAZ’ to various ‘Dorrough’ emulations and all the way up to Nugen’s clever Halo Vision. What makes Evergreen Audio Design Group’s ‘Massive Meter’ special is its ability to combine the metering from many different busses and from many different Pro Tools systems into one, customizable view.
To understand why this is important, one has to look at existing metering solutions on film and TV stages. When I was starting out, I worked in a studio that had multiple Dorrough hardware units. Dorrough-style metering is really useful, but those colorful rackmount meters are expensive. Not only are the units pricey, they require AES/EBU feeds from similarly costly audio interfaces (in this case, the old Digidesign 888/24s, and 192s).
When Waves came out with the software version of the Dorrough meter, I purchased it immediately but on a big film stage, mixers often synchronize multiple Pro Tools rigs with each rig dedicated to a specific task (dialogue, music, stems recorder, etc.). Each one of those rigs is feeding many channels to many busses. The great majority of those stems aren’t being monitored on loudspeakers, so it’s critical to somehow see the signal flow is working properly. In the ‘heat of battle’, at the end of a long day, you might not notice right away that the rig feeding quiet backgrounds has dropped out of sync. Relying on software meters in this workflow is impractical, since it would mean looking at four or five dedicated computer screens, simultaneously. This is the workflow gap that Massive Meter and Massive Meter Bridge fill. The mixer can choose one computer screen on one of the rigs, and one instance of Massive Meter Bridge can collect all the metering information from the other rigs.
Single System Use?
Wondering how useful Massive Meter would be on a single-system mix? When I began testing the Massive Meter for this article, I was hosting clients in my studio for the final mix of an ‘indie’ science-fiction film. I have three screens attached to my single-system Mac Studio Pro Tools rig. Usually, during longer passes of a re-record, I find myself scrolling the Mix Window far right to where my stem record tracks are located so I can see (1) that all my re-record tracks are record-enabled, in destructive punch, and (2) that the levels going to the various stems (dlg, music, sfx, TV full, TV dlg, TV M+E…) are okay. The downside of doing this is that if I bank select anywhere else in the mix, it throws off my view. So, my solution was to make a Window Configuration that allows me to see the Massive Meter Bridge application while Pro Tools is the top application. No matter where I bank in Pro Tools, and no matter which plug-ins I open, I can still see the meters. Not only that, I can choose which to make visible and in what order.
In practice, you instantiate the Massive Meter AAX plug-in on the channels you want metered. The plug-in goes from mono up to 7.1.2. Each plug-in has a pretty comprehensive set of preferences governing color, segments, ballistics, peak hold, and my new favorite: ‘signal present indicator’ (which puts a small box on the bottom of the meter showing that there’s some signal, even if it’s too quiet to light the bottom of a regular meter).
Massive Meter
We could stop right here and use these great meters as AAX plug-ins but the real power of the software suite becomes clear when you launch the standalone application, ‘Massive Meter Bridge’.
In this application the user can choose which meters to show from all instantiations of Massive Meter anywhere on a local area network (LAN). For instance, I launched Pro Tools on my second computer, added a bunch of Massive Meters, and was able to view them via the Massive Meter Bridge application on the primary computer: Note that this function is not dependent on the two Pro Tools rigs actually being hardware or software synchronized. Knowing this, I can imagine some interesting usage cases that don’t include Satellite Link and HD hardware.
Track names and computer names are visible in the app, and the app’s Preferences menu offers more configurability than the plug-in software does. There are some truly clever options for creating templates and configurations. In a nutshell, the standalone software’s universality means that when switching between multiple Pro Tools sessions (perhaps episodic television), the app will put the same meter in the same location no matter what session is open.
For years, the argument against using software meters in critical setups (like a mix stage) has been that they were laggy and slow. This was a good, solid, winning argument with the more geriatric of Mac Pro’s; I have dark memories of watching Pro Tools 6.9 freeze up completely for 30 seconds at a time during a mix, then inexplicably snapping back to life. Ever since the Intel Mac Pro 6,1, and now with Apple Silicon, graphic performance has evolved considerably. I think for most use cases the lagginess or choppiness is a thing of the past: Massive Meter is clearly coded with performance in mind.
Final Thoughts
While Evergreen Audio Design Group’s efforts here are certainly praise-worthy, there are a few things to keep in mind. The order of each meter on each rig appears to be determined by when they show up on the network. You can DSP-bypass the plug-ins to re-order them but I think this is an area that needs work (Evergreen Audio has since confirmed that manual ordering of meters is planned for a future update). I’d love to see a couple more logarithmic mapping options for expanding the visual range of the meter in the top critical 20db range (UPDATE - Scaling of meters is available in Massive Meter Bridge, Evergreen have a provisional Patent on this feature).
This meter is not designed to be an ITU 1770-style loudness analyzer. Hitting an LKFS or LUFS target value is something you’ll need to do with another meter.
Regarding immersive mixing, there are some structural challenges when it comes to properly metering an Atmos mix in Pro Tools. I suspect Avid is working on this issue, and until they address it, Massive Meter won’t replace the Dolby Atmos Renderer meter.
Finally, this suite is designed and priced for the professional studio. But the head of Evergreen Audio Design Group, Bob Brown, has an excellent track record in the industry, so perhaps we might reasonably expect a long development life cycle for this software.
The Post Production Metering Suite is meant for specific and relatively high-end post-production workflows. If you find yourself in this group, I highly recommend running the 14-day trial. There’s nothing else quite like it on the market today.