Simon Franglen – Pandora: The World of Avatar

Mentioned in this October 26, 2020 OWC Radio interview.

Simon, you’re in Hollywood. Can you do me a favor? Can you kind of look around the studio you’re in and tell our audience what kind of gear you’re using and a little bit about your process. I know you have a current project you can’t talk about. You can’t talk about the one you’re working on now. But perhaps we can use the example of the 2019 release of The Birth of Skies and Earth because that was a huge project, and perhaps we can talk about how you managed that one?

Well, if I look around from where I am, I’m looking at a 55-inch OLED main monitor, which I moved to use touchscreens, and I’d like backlighting, so they don’t sort of blast your eyes out, especially late at night. And then that’s feeding into a 28-core Mac Pro 2019 with 384GB of RAM and 32TB of OWC RAID internally.

Oh, that’s awesome. So you’re using the OWC SSDs inside the Mac Pro?

Yeah. The NVMe writes,

Aha, you know, they just came out with a new case for those. You can actually carry some of those projects with you and use them on your laptop. If you’re thinking about work, you can actually hook the Envoy Pro to the back of your laptop with the NVMe in it. It’s wonderful.

I have external 4M2. I have the 4M2s externals as well as the 4M2s internals. I have two boxes with 8TB in each, which I used to carry stuff around as well.

So you have a studio in London, and you’re currently in a studio in LA. Is that your second place, or are you just traveling?

Yes, it is.

Okay, you have a full setup. You’re looking at your 55-inch OLED. What manufacturer do you use for your monitor?

I’ve used the Sony, but it’s the same panel as the LG. It’s basically the same thing, but I like the Sony. It was the one that came out that had the sort of angled stand on it and made it look a bit like an artist’s easel, and it works perfectly. I have it set up on my keyboard workstation. I have a Yamaha 88-Note Keyboard in front of it. And then a load of little side panels used to control different things like iPads and androids of various sorts that go with different remote controls. Then to my right is an iMac Pro, which is a, I want to say a 12-core. And that’s got 128GB in RAM in there. And then I’ve got two Mac Pro 2013, they both have 128GB in as well.

Mentioned in this October 26, 2020 OWC Radio interview.

Simon, you’re in Hollywood. Can you do me a favor? Can you kind of look around the studio you’re in and tell our audience what kind of gear you’re using and a little bit about your process. I know you have a current project you can’t talk about. You can’t talk about the one you’re working on now. But perhaps we can use the example of the 2019 release of The Birth of Skies and Earth because that was a huge project, and perhaps we can talk about how you managed that one?

Well, if I look around from where I am, I’m looking at a 55-inch OLED main monitor, which I moved to use touchscreens, and I’d like backlighting, so they don’t sort of blast your eyes out, especially late at night. And then that’s feeding into a 28-core Mac Pro 2019 with 384GB of RAM and 32TB of OWC RAID internally.

Oh, that’s awesome. So you’re using the OWC SSDs inside the Mac Pro?

Yeah. The NVMe writes,

Aha, you know, they just came out with a new case for those. You can actually carry some of those projects with you and use them on your laptop. If you’re thinking about work, you can actually hook the Envoy Pro to the back of your laptop with the NVMe in it. It’s wonderful.

I have external 4M2. I have the 4M2s externals as well as the 4M2s internals. I have two boxes with 8TB in each, which I used to carry stuff around as well.

So you have a studio in London, and you’re currently in a studio in LA. Is that your second place, or are you just traveling?

Yes, it is.

Okay, you have a full setup. You’re looking at your 55-inch OLED. What manufacturer do you use for your monitor?

I’ve used the Sony, but it’s the same panel as the LG. It’s basically the same thing, but I like the Sony. It was the one that came out that had the sort of angled stand on it and made it look a bit like an artist’s easel, and it works perfectly. I have it set up on my keyboard workstation. I have a Yamaha 88-Note Keyboard in front of it. And then a load of little side panels used to control different things like iPads and androids of various sorts that go with different remote controls. Then to my right is an iMac Pro, which is a, I want to say a 12-core. And that’s got 128GB in RAM in there. And then I’ve got two Mac Pro 2013, they both have 128GB in as well.