Sohonet
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Ott House Audio is a boutique sound mixing studio located
just minutes from the heart of DC. The backbone of this woman-owned business is
Cheryl Ottenritter. Cheryl’s love for the art and power of sound reverberates
through every project. Its home-base in downtown Silver Spring, boasts two
client suites, an immersive audio mixing suite, a Foley recording booth,
and a fully equipped machine room.
In 2018, OHA became the first Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment
Studio on the East Coast. Every OHA sound engineer proudly maintains a remote
mixing location, allowing the shop to accommodate client needs from anywhere in
the world.
Can you tell us more about the type of content you work on?
Cheryl: Sure. Our scope is pretty diverse. We find it
refreshing to work on different types of material but we generally focus on
non-fiction storytelling which could be mixing for multi-screen and immersive
museum installations or documentaries for network TV and streaming services.
It’s on those shows where we tend to use Sohonet a lot.
It’s rare to find a new user of ClearView Flex who adopted
it as the industry emerged from the pandemic. Can you tell us why?
Yes, that’s true. We started using it coming out of the
pandemic because I wanted to get away from just the asynchronous reviews we
were doing. I also wanted to use it not just for review but as more of a
collaboration tool. Emerging
from the pandemic we knew that people had gotten used to
remote working and were only coming in for reviews. ClearView Flex allows us to
open up the feed and to collaborate on their schedule. At the same time it
allows us to achieve our goal of being truly location agnostic.
When did you move to a remote operation before?
We realized long ago that we were more efficient and better
at our jobs with the flexibility of being able to work from home. We first
started in 2017 when we decided to set up a hybrid facility where we can all
work from our home studios as well as the central shop when we need to. It is
practical as well as efficient. Because schedules in this business are all over
the place, the last thing I want is to burn out my team. It gave me the ability
to be flexible with them and likewise gave me the ability to be flexible with
my clients.
Did the pandemic enable you to extend this model, now that
the wider industry has cottoned onto the benefits of remote working?
Absolutely. We may be physically located with our studios in
the DC area but we work with clients on the West Coast, in Europe or anywhere.
ClearView allows us to collaborate with whoever we want to. For us, adopting
ClearView was more of a ‘lets keep this mindset going’ than it was an essential
pandemic tool. During the pandemic most of our clients were perfectly fine
doing asynchronous reviews but now we feel we want to offer them greater
flexibility and creative control.
What was it about ClearView Flex that appealed to you?
It’s fast, stable, and very easy for clients to use. Our
clients are amazed all the time how well it works. They love it. It’s also
very, very robust and we decided we’d rather know that when we sent that link
and we opened up that pipe it would work every time, all the time. The
robustness of Sohonet and not having to worry about all the little details
around it is exactly why we went with Sohonet over other review systems. I
don’t want my creatives to have to deal with all that technical backend all the
time.
How do you use ClearView Flex day to day?
We use it for real-time review and for work sessions. I’m a
great believer in collaboration with the client – if they want to. Some people
want to be more involved than others and this way we can just open up the link
and they can be in the session with us no matter where they are. They can pop
in and out. They might go and make a conference call or any other business then
jump back into the stream again. It’s way more productive of their time.
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