quote:Q: The audio was assembled on a Mac too, correct?Reznor: Normally when you film or record a tour, on our level, you get maybe two nights to record. Invariably those are the nights that aren't very good. We took some of the budget we were saving from having massive multicamera shoots, put some into the audio, and recorded four or five different nights to digital multitrack. Got back to the studio afterwards, picked the best version of the songs, loaded everything into Pro Tools on a Mac, and mixed in surround, then remixed everything again in stereo.Q: What was the experience of using DVD Studio Pro like?Reznor: It had literally just come out, and it was timely because we had figured out digital-video editing, and we wanted to [figure out] what we could do the medium of DVD. What are the limitations? We had a very rudimentary knowledge of what you can do. DVD Studio Pro, we used with the intention of mocking up something. We knew we were taking it to an authoring place, and we could beta test it at home. This was a way for us to get a feel for things in very easy-to-deal-with terms. It puts a lot of power in something that doesn't have a thick manual.
quote:The ease of use of the hardware and software made it possible to get the tedious crap out of the way and just get down to what we wanted to do.Q: Didn't you record Pretty Hate Machine on a Mac?Reznor: Yeah, I've had a Mac since the very first one. I was also using a Commodore 64 for MIDI. At the time of Pretty Hate Machine, I had a Mac Plus. I did all the sequencing of that record on that. With Broken, Studio Vision had come out. That was the first marriage of MIDI and digital audio, and that forever changed the way I was going to record. Now that it's gone from recording everything on tape with a few things on the computer to recording everything on the computer, it's really changed the roles of a lot of people in the studio. The programmer's job is much more the engineer now. All the engineers now have to know Pro Tools.Q: What kind of rig do you have in your studio?Reznor: I set this up several years ago to Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar. It's an SSL analog big console, and we've moved away from two 48-track analog tape to everything being recorded on hard disk. We have 72 tracks of in-and-out ProTools hardware. The main computer in there right now is an 867MHz G4 with 1GB of RAM and several fast SCSI cards. We still use SCSI drives. We have a few of them laying around to always have at least two 36GBs online at all times, and we have a big tape backup system that backs us up every night. We have a secondary Mac in the control room as well that we use for software synthesis and running through plug-ins in real time. I think the coolest thing that's happened in the last few years is with synthesizers going virtual. That's why we have another Mac that's just up to run things in real time, running Reason or Reactor, or a number of software samplers like Battery or Absynth. Reason is from Propellerhead--it's spectacular. There's a lot of gear just being reduced to a PowerBook.Q: Do you have a Titanium PowerBook?Reznor: I'm about to as soon as I can get Apple to give me one. In the meantime I've got a gasoline-powered 500MHz G3.
