Apple computer monitor

Case study

From Nashville to Byron Bay, SAE Institute engineers audio magic with Apple creative technologies:

Global empire of audio engineering colleges extends its Mac investment as the world's largest recording studio opens its doors to students and musicians.

Sound off if you know where to find the world's largest recording studio. If you said London, New York, Nashville or Los Angeles, nice try--but you're off key. The answer is Byron Bay, Australia, where SAE Institute has just laid the final sound-proof the for its $40 million sound and video recording mecca. The new facility is a state of the art, university-style campus where musicians, video producers and audio engineering students can hone their skills on the finest multimedia equipment available.

Teaching and production work is conducted on more than 100 eMacs and Power Mac G4s connected to the latest sound and video engineering consoles. The task of managing, storing and distributing massive multimedia files is handled with ease by six powerful Apple Xserves and three high-capacity Xserve RAID storage arrays.

The Australian-Made Sound Empire

Byron Bay is the new global headquarters for the sprawling SAE Institute empire. What started out as the School of Audio Engineering (SAE) in Sydney in 1976 now spans more than twenty countries. With forty-five colleges in its international network, SAE Institute is recognized as a world-leading provider of education for audio engineering, video production, multimedia authoring and other digital creative arts.

SAE Institute teaches the specialized technical and engineering skills that are such a vital cog in the modern entertainment industry. Among the 30,000 graduates that have passed through its low-noise halls are the producers of such smash-hit acts as Aerosmith, the Dixie Chicks, Faith Hill, 'N Sync and Britney Spears. Dance music trailblazer Tim Simenon of Bomb the Bass fame is a graduate of SAE in the United Kingdom, while the ARIA Award-winning engineer of Silverchair's Diorama album, Anton Hagop, is another alumnus. The man behind this great Australian success story is SAE Institute Chief Executive Tom Misner, an audio engineering pioneer who built SAE from its humble origins to a position of worldwide dominance. Over the past twenty-five years, Tom Misner has enjoyed one consistent advantage: Apple. 'SAE Institute used Apple technology from day one and we were among the first people anywhere in the world to pioneer integration between computers and sound recording systems', Misner says.

Apple hardware and software is an integral element in SAE's international education and creative services. The technical environment at our new Byron Bay campus is simply incredible. The cutting-edge Apple tools we have allow SAE to really push the use of technology in the creative arts to new levels.

Building the World's Biggest Boom Box

The new SAE Institute facility at Byron Bay houses a feast of audiovisual technology. On site are fourteen recording studios, sound stages and editing suites that are the envy of many professional recording studios around the world.

More than 100 eMacs and Power Mac G4s conduct the show at Byron Bay, just a fraction of the 6000 Macs used in SAE colleges worldwide. The Apple hardware is closely integrated with cutting-edge sound and video recording platforms, such as digital audio workstations, digital compositing systems, sound consoles and editing suites.

At the heart of the world's biggest boom box operation lies Mac OS X, which provides the power, performance, stability and multimedia integration to amplify the inspirations of SAE Institute staff and students. 'In the world we live in, the Mac is the leader. It has the best software capabilities, is simple to operate and offers greater stability and reliability', Misner says. 'Coupled with outstanding technical support from local Apple reseller Lightforce Computers, Apple suits our needs ideally.'

Apple Sounds Right for Multimedia Software

At SAE Institute, Macs are used across the board for sound recording, video editing and compositing. The Byron Bay campus has the latest Grammy Award-winning Pro Tools digital audio workstation technology from Digidesign, a division of Avid. Pro Tools offers unparalleled quality in sound engineering and the consoles connect directly into the Mac workstations via PCI card interfaces. This integration allows SAE teachers to instruct students intuitively with top-notch technology they are likely to encounter as professional audio engineers.

The school also uses specialized Logic Audio systems for MIDI sequencing and hard disk-based recording. 'SAE was one of the world pioneers of automated MIDI consoles: we started integrating MIDI systems with the Mac back in the early 1980s. Nowadays everyone uses hard disk technologies, but that didn't really become mainstream until the 1990s. We were well ahead of the pack', says Misner.

For video editing, SAE Institute uses Final Cut Pro 4, Apple's industry-leading editing suite that provides the tools for the most demanding compositing, effects and post production requirements. One key advantage of Final Cut Pro is its RT Extreme system which enables staff and students to play back effects to an external video monitor without rendering. Its precise editing tools, integrated audio controls, pro-quality text effects and broadcast-standard codecs make Final Cut Pro very popular.

SAE Institute teaches advanced video compositing with Shake, another high-end multimedia software package from Apple. Shake is an affordable post-production solution for film and video professionals. Its intuitive, tree-based compositing model gives editors access to any part of the film at any time and incorporates powerful colour correction, effects and rendering.

In all of these applications, performance and reliability are paramount. While Mac performance with applications like Pro Tools is considered to be better than alternatives, Misner says the real advantage of the Apple environment is stability. 'Apple products are generally superior in quality, especially in terms of the Mac hardware. When you are looking at the ultra-demanding applications we run, that enhanced quality makes all the difference.'

Multimedia Learning Begins on the Desktop

When SAE students log in to work at a Mac, a user-name and password provides access to their personal desktop environment, software and network-based files. Software updates are distributed automatically, when required, using scripts written in bash, a Unix-based scripting language. Every one of the 300 network ports across the campus is a switched Gigabit Ethernet connection, ensuring bandwidth is available in spades.

At the head of the network, SAE Institute recently invested in six Apple Xserves equipped with dual 1.33GHz processors, 1.5GB of RAM and redundant system drives. Two Xserves are configured as optimized video workstations with FireWire-based AJA Kona SD video processing cards and two terabytes of dedicated high-speed media storage. Vast file storage and distribution requirements are accommodated with a total of six terabytes of capacity housed on three Apple Xserve RAID systems, each equipped with the 2.5 terabytes of storage and 1GB of memory. The servers and RAID arrays are cross-connected via a 2Gbps Gadzoox Fibre Channel fabric switch for high-speed server and storage performance. All servers are connected to a universal power supply.

The Future Sounds Great

With its new permanent home at Byron Bay crammed full of the latest Apple and media engineering technologies, SAE Institute is looking forward to continued expansion. The new campus welcomes its first student intake in October 2003 and this is expected to ramp up to a full complement of 400 students in 2005. SAE Institute now offers full university degree courses in conjunction with Southern Cross University and UK-based Middlesex University. The new facility will enable SAE to deliver Masters degree courses in Audio, Film and Multimedia Technologies. Tom Misner expects this will fuel demand for the college's world-leading technical education. 'Our long-term partnership with Apple enables SAE Institute to remain at the forefront of the latest technological advances in creative arts engineering and we expect this relationship to continue sounding sweet for many years to come.'