Outstanding Sound Blogs: Meet Mike Thornton from Pro Tools Expert

Hi Mike, please introduce yourself and Pro Tools Expert:

I am the Editor of Pro Tools Expert and I have been in the broadcast industry all my working life, some 35 years. I started as an apprentice with Marconi Communications Systems Ltd, becoming a broadcast audio test engineer and later development engineer, whilst still an apprentice! I continued to work for them until they dropped out of the broadcast sector in 1981.

Pro Tools Expert Editor Mike Thornton

From there I went to work for Piccadilly Radio (the commercial local radio station in Manchester, England) as an engineer helping to keep the station on the air, before becoming the OB department in 1985 and their senior engineer in 1986.

I left Piccadilly Radio in 1990 having built Key 103 for them as well as pioneer live acoustic sessions with visiting artists like Dean Friedmann and The Alarm. Once freelance I worked on the TV OB circuit, mainly in the North West of England, before joining forces with a couple of others, to set up a sound-only OB truck – The Omnibuss Mobile. One of the highlights for me was being the first person to mix a live TV Outside Broadcast programme in Dolby Surround in the UK for Granada TV in The Omnibuss Mobile.

One of the highlights for me was being the first person to mix a live TV Outside Broadcast programme in Dolby Surround in the UK

I got into Pro Tools in the mid 90s starting with v2 when it was 4 tracks on a good day with a following wind! Ever since I have been recording, editing and mixing documentaries, comedy and drama for both radio and TV as well as doing the occasional music project.

Regular readers of Sound on Sound will also be familiar with my Pro Tools column and I am also known as “Mr RX It” providing training and tips & tricks on iZotope’s RX software and more recently as “Mr Loudness” with my loudness training resources. You can read more about my career on my LinkedIn profile
 

How did you get the idea for PTE in the first place?

I went on a course run by my union, BECTU – The Digital Toolkit, which was a series of affordable training days on Saturdays covering areas like building web sites, managing money, Marketing Yourself as a Freelancer, Social Media and so on. I found these incredibly informative, practical and hands on.

Although there were blogs and forum sites about Pro Tools they were focused on ‘Music’ rather than Post.

As a direct result of the Marketing and Social Media days I decided to have a go at doing my own blog. I had been aware that although there were blogs and forum sites about Pro Tools they were focused on ‘Music’ rather than Post.

So I set up Pro Tools For Media, and slowly built up a following, added Twitter and RSS feeds and gained a niche world wide following. Then just before the Pro Tools 10 launch I was approached by Russ Hughes of the AIR Users blog, which was a music Pro Tools blog, to see if I was interested in working together and possibly merging our two sites. The outcome was Pro Tools Expert www.pro-tools-expert.com and the site has taken off with around 5 million unique visits per year now.
 

What’s been one of the best moments running the site?

It has to be the launch of Pro Tools 11.

We worked very closely with Avid and were able to produce a range of resources, posts and stories ready for the launch including a video 44 minute presentation that Russ and I prepared called Pro Tools 11 – Everything You Want To Know – Review To Follow which alone has had over 250,000 views making it the most popular video on our YouTube channel by far. I was also in NAB for the press launch so all I did as the event finished was to text Russ “Go” and we had all the information and inside track on everything to do with Pro Tools 11. Being there, I was also able to interview a number of the key Avid staff, talk more about, and get the full back story on the development and launch of PT11.

But actually thinking about it more, for me the best moments are being able to help people find answers and solutions to problems that are bugging them and this is the key driver for am and all the team, to be able to help people, do things better, easier, etc.
 

There’s been some debate in the community about the new pricing model for Pro Tools – what’s your take on the situation?

This has been one of the most difficult issues that we have handled on PTE, not helped by the fact, that by this point we weren’t getting any information from Avid about their plans and strategies, perhaps because we haven’t been overwhelmingly positive about the Avid Everywhere concept. There seem to be two key strategies at play here. The first is the option to be able to rent Pro Tools and the second is that all users will need to subscribe to upgrade plans, by the end of 2015 if they want to have access to the latest version of Pro Tools.
 

This has been one of the most difficult issues that we have handled on PTE

Being able to rent Pro Tools is an excellent idea so that if a facility needs to have additional seats then they only pay for them whilst they need them. However they haven’t addressed the need to be able to rent HD software, which is in reality the target market and the most likely to use this kind of offering, which is a real shame. Also for some businesses having a fixed monthly cost is a very helpful way of managing costs, Adobe do it and that seems to have worked well, some people choose to lease hire a car because although they never will own it, they have the confidence that they have a fixed monthly cost for running a car. Ironically some of our team rent Adobe plans and lease their cars so we ‘get’ how it works.

Moving onto the upgrade plans, as a professional earning my living from Pro Tools, paying a fixed fee every year to know that I will always have the latest version is fine. It is a fixed repeating cost, like insurance or internet access. The price is not too dissimilar to what we would pay for a major upgrade and we get some Avid support included as well.

However for smaller users that perhaps are earning a living from Pro Tools, this is arguably an unnecessary expense they could do without.

For me the biggest problem has been the messaging, when the Avid upgrade plan was first announced it was billed as a Support Plan, which a lot of users kicked against because most don’t need or use Avid Support, even though the key part of the support plan is upgrades for the year as well as support.

One interesting observation is that we may be seeing that users are happy to rent/subscribe for plug-ins but that there is a resistance by users to adopt a rental/subscription model for DAWs

Add to that, the fact that features have been announced, but as yet are not available, like Track Freeze and the Cloud Collaboration features, and so users have been asked to sign up to an upgrade plan with no certainty of what features they are going to get for their money. With Avid not yet delivering on promised features and long term bugs remaining unresolved, its understandable that many users are feeling uneasy about their continued investment into Avid.

That said, there are a number of features that have been introduced into Pro Tools 12 that no one is aware of until recently, not least of which are the changes introduced into the I/O Setup window that makes opening and working on sessions from other facilities so much easier largely because they have separated the hardware setup and routing from the session related routing and introduced a Monitor path which includes automatic down mixing for when you open a surround session on a stereo system.

One interesting observation is that we may be seeing that users are happy to rent/subscribe for plug-ins but that there is a resistance by users to adopt a rental/subscription model for DAWs.

It is interesting to see how Gobbler, Exponential Audio and Slate Digital have handled their subscription/rental launches compared to how Avid handled theirs. To be fair to Avid, they were first to market and so the others have been able to learn from Avid’s mistakes, but Gobbler, Exponential Audio and Slate Digital’s messaging and product plans have been so much clearer and largely have been received very favourably.

What’s the most important trend in pro audio you’re seeing at the moment?

It is summed up by a phrase I have coined, the cottage-isation of our industry, both in the music and post sectors. What I mean by this, is more and more people are working from home or in very small facilities working largely ‘in the box’ without the need for large format consoles, big rooms, large multi-room studio complexes and so on.

It is summed up by a phrase I have coined, the cottage-isation of our industry, both in the music and post sectors.

Take sound post production in a feature film for example. It is more than likely that, most of not all, the different stages of the post production workflow will be done by different individuals working from home, just take a look at the series we did a while back on Audio Post Production Workflows and most of this work was done in home based facilities. Working in the box also means we don’t need lots of expensive hardware to do what we can do. A computer with a reasonable monitoring environment and we can do almost everything. The term ‘bedroom boy’ is no longer valid as some kind of insult, this is the reality of the industry.
 

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