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His credits with his StellaDAT include:

• "Four Rooms"
• "Leaving Las Vegas"
• "The Substance of Fire"
• "Inconvenienced"
• "Touch"
• "One Night Stand"

For director Mike Figgis, timecode DAT means easier production and a better result.

Mike Figgis is one of the elite band of British directors to have made it in Hollywood. Very much a hands-on director, Figgis keeps in touch with the nuts and bolts of film-making, and as an accomplished musician and composer, he takes a particular interest in sound. His latest feature - 'Leaving Las Vegas', starring Nicholas Cage - was, like his last three pictures, shot on timecode DAT.

"I am actually very fond of analogue sound," he confesses, "but by using good technicians and the right mics, you avoid the kind of brittle sound that has given digital a bad name - just as anyone who knows their stuff can light video to look like film. I'm very open to new ideas if they bring benefits."

As post-production moves away from traditional mag tape-based technology to digital audio workstations, Mike feels that the benefits offered by timecode DAT over analogue are overwhelming.

"With traditional methods, by the time you get to the optical track of a print, you've done so many transfers that it probably doesn't matter what you used on the shoot. But for this picture, all the post-production has been done on AudioFile, and we can stay digital right up until the optical stage- that for me is when DAT really comes into its own. We have a genuine first-generation optical soundtrack, and it sounds fantastic."

Conditions were rarely ideal from the point of view of sound recordist Pawel Wdowczak. "When we were shooting on the street in Las Vegas" explains Mike, "we had no control over the traffic. Between one take and the next the lights might change, and all of a sudden there's more traffic noise. But despite the fact that we were mixing everything live - a mixture of radio mics, plus booms and poles - the location sound was fine, and we needed hardly any ADR work. In fact the post-production people [Hackenbacker in Soho] said they thought the sound was 'miraculous'."

DAT cannot solve all sound problems, however, and there is one aspect of film sound that still drives Figgis "round the bend" - transferring material from a 24fps film format to a 25fps video format. "The problem is that so often a soundtrack ends up getting slightly speeded up in the transfer, and everything rises in pitch. Voices tend to lose a flattering resonance, and a score that sounds great in C minor may sound wrong in C# minor. We can put a man on the moon," he sighs, "but we still can't fix this one..."

Nigel Heath, Supervising Sound Editor on 'Leaving Las Vegas', has this to say about DAT.

"DAT's great advantages as a recording medium is that it gives you a very honest record of the output of the sound guys' mixer. On 'Leaving Las Vegas' the sound mixing was incredibly good, and it was quite remarkable, for example, how few of Nicholas Cage's lines required re-dubbing.

"The real differences for me are firstly that auto-conforming from an EDL is so quick and easy utilizing machine control, and secondly that you can carry 40 tapes along to a session in a briefcase. That makes life much easier."

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