LIVE 8 CONCERT GOES TO DVD

Metropolis Studios, London puts it all together using Avastor Hard Drives

London -- September 2005 - On July 2, 2005 an estimated 3 billion people watched the Live 8 concerts staged in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Philadelphia – as well as Barrie (Canada), Tokyo, Johannesburg and Moscow.

Sir Bob Geldof and the Band Aid Trust organized the concerts to focus attention on the continuing poverty, famine and disease that is still a major problem in Africa. The concerts attracted major artists – the London concert alone, in Hyde Park included a reformed Pink Floyd (which included Roger Waters re-united with the band for the first time since 1982, U2, Paul McCartney, The Who, Sting and Coldplay.

Metropolis Studios in London handled the mixing and mastering of audio material for the London and Philadelphia concerts for a 4 disc DVD set; and Paris, Berlin and Rome concerts for separate DVD sets that will be on sale later this year.

Crispin Murray - Metropolis Technology Development Manager, and Matt Lawrence - Metropolis Chief Engineer, supervised the mixing and mastering of the original live multi-track audio masters.

There were over 50 hours of multi-track audio recorded on a variety of different recording platforms and file formats including Protools HD, Pyramix, Alesis HD - even DA88 tape!

Crispin has been impressed with the performance of the Avastor HDX800 (triple interface FireWire 800/400 and USB2) hard drives.

Crispin states: ”The Avastor drives have provided an extremely reliable interchange format to manage the massive amount of data onto a common file format (Broadcast WAV), in order to provide the edited surround and stereo master material for the DVD.”  He continued – “The Avastor drives have been able to handle 30 plus tracks of 96KHz 24 bit with edits and play back flawlessly. We have even daisy chained up to 8 drives to play back 36 streams of surround and 12 channels of stereo, complete with video… Overall, we have been very pleased with the performance of the drives to handle the amount of data we put on them.”

About Metropolis Studios

Metropolis Studios has been established for 16 years and is a world famous facility comprised of recording studios, mastering and DVD authoring suites. There is an elite team of producers and mastering engineers who attract high profile CD and DVD releases. A few notable projects include:  Led Zeppelin DVD set, Peter Gabriel complete back catalog remastered for CD and Super Audio CD, Oasis’ new album Don’t Believe The Truth, and even the original 1985 Live Aid Concert for DVD!

About Avastor

Headquartered in Peachtree City, GA, Avastor was founded in 2005 to bring full-featured digital storage devices with the highest quality and performance to the professional audio and video marketplace. The company's flagship product, the HDX hard disk drive system, is produced in the USA with a mandate for superior build quality and 100% quality testing, aimed directly at the demands of professional audio and video applications.

Avastor and HDX are trademarks of Avastor Inc.  All other marks herein may be property of their respective owners.

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