To Cannes via AirMail

Actually it should read, to Cannes via FedEx.
The DVD has been sent to France. Just waiting for confirmation that the little sucker arrived...

A conservative 120+ audio tracks

Steve Orlando and I finished our primary pass on the 5.1 surround mix for the film. This one will be good enough for the pre-selection DVD that I will send to the Festival de Cannes in France.
With all original recorded sound effects, we struggled to get the track count low enough that an HD2 pro tools system could handle the load. We still required an extra HD Accel card to play back the entire session - this with a hefty load of AudioSuite and RTAS plug-ins used to put a good deal of processing on the computer rather than the HD cards.
We played the compressed ac3 file on several surround systems with good results, often removing a lot of high end with a sharp dip and rolling off a marginal amount of bass. Our struggle with brightness could likely be the horns on several speakers as well as poorly tuned rooms. A little adjusting with an SPL meter smoothed out some of the troubles.
We'll do one final pass for the final HD version sometime early next year.