Return to TwoFour54 Intaj

Entering the foyer of TwoFour54 Intaj is a very different experience to that of a year ago, when Pro Audio Middle East first visited the facility, based at the National Theatre and housing Intaj studios Three, Four and Five.

Back in 2009, squeezing into the building required careful navigation past towers of cardboard boxes, the sign of a makeshift warehousing space thrown together as the infrastructure for the broadcast hub of TwoFour54’s remarkable ambition took shape. Now, the same area is virtually unrecognisable – visitors now breeze into the kind of immaculate, minimalist foyer that reflects the professionalism laying behind everything TwoFour54 does.

Nor are the changes merely cosmetic. The advent of TwoFour54 within the Arabic media community is already being keenly felt, with the organisation’s Khalifa Park campus having grown on the foundation of support and enthusiasm it has received from partner companies and interested newcomers. While both the Khalifa Park facilities and the Intaj satellite broadcasting hub are temporary measures intended to establish the organisation ahead of a move to a purpose-built 300,000 sq-m facility on Abu Dhabi’s corniche, both locations have become state-of-the-art incubators for the creation of a truly Arabic media industry, creating content for Arabs, by Arabs.

It is this mission which motivates the men and women who work within TwoFour54’s family of divisions, dubbed the ‘ecosystem’. And the mission is progressing well. A year ago the list of the organisation’s partner companies was already impressive, but now the Intaj facility has an equally striking body of work to celebrate as well, as a walk around its studios quickly confirms.

Within the facility is the standing set for Abu Dhabi TV’s Formula One coverage – a reflection of the high profile sports coverage produced through Intaj for the UAE capital’s main television channel. Elsewhere is one of the biggest green-screens in the Middle East, the centrepiece of a gigantic installation designed to facilitate the Arabic production of the children’s TV programme Driver Dan’s Story Train. Intaj doesn’t just add Arabic dialogue to the TV show, it edits in Arabic actors via the green-screen, completely replacing their Western counterparts.

The array of equipment being used throughout the Intaj facility is as impressive as it was a year ago, with the initial systems integration having been handled by Sony Professional Middle East. Included within the audio suites are Pro Tools HD3 systems with Icon D-Control ES consoles, Neumann U87 microphones and Dynaudio Air 6 Series monitors in 5.1 configurations. Elsewhere, the three audio control rooms each boast 56-fader Calrec Omega digital broadcast consoles, linked via the manufacturer’s Hydra network. Arguably one of the facility’s crowning glory acquisitions is a TC Electronic Powercore6000 mastering processor – reportedly the first to be shipped to the Middle East during the facility’s construction.

Among the projects currently being worked on within the audio suites is a documentary based upon the recent UFC: Invincible event that took place on Yas Island. Intended to be a 45-minute account of the build-up towards the event, the audio side of the project comprises some 20,000 video clips requiring normalisation – no small task when most of the audio was recorded on construction sites, and the dialogue is the only narration on the documentary. Asked to describe the experience of working on such a project within the Intaj facility, a sound engineer cleaning up audio files for the UFC documentary quickly responds with: ‘It’s amazingly technologically advanced. The workflows are exceptional’.

Visiting TwoFour54 a year ago made clear the ambition behind the organisation’s ecosystem. Now, as Intaj and its fellow divisions continue to grow and develop, that ambition is taking shape, and the Arabic media industry will follow.

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