24 February 2007

SCENE MISSING

Just wanted to let my regular readers out there (you two know who you are) that I have not abandoned this blog. After getting a week-long production audio gig, I jumped right into doing post work on a project of rather daunting scope with Cinema Queso, the production group that I belong to with twelve other not-quite-sane people.

It's called Kcor the Warrior, a sword-and-sorcery mini-epic in serial form. Over the course of about a year in our spare time, we managed to shoot about eight seven-minute episodes, all over the great state of Oregon. While I did production sound for the majority of shooting, I now have the entirety of audio post before me.

While I love post, and especially film-style creative projects, it just eats time like fire does flash paper. I only have another week before we must submit what we have as a work in progress to an upcoming festival. Until then, I will keep combing the interweb tubes for audio tidbits to share in the future.

Thanks for hanging in there, and remember: no matter where you go, there you are.

(That's Confucious, not Banzai, you '80s-cult-movie nerds...)

11 February 2007

New Audio Post Forum

Hey there, campers.

The venerable gearslutz.com has recently added a forum specific to audio post. While there are other forums out there (most notably the Digidesign User Conference, or D.U.C.), they are mostly product-oriented, whereas this one is just about audio post in general.

In addition to her day job at Global Audio, Georgia Hilton, M.P.S.E., C.A.S., has posted quite a bit of good info over there about the history of audio post, as well as a guide to industry terminology, so be sure to check those out.

Link to gearslutz post forum.

(Note: don't be confused by the website's name. Anyone expecting to see scantily clad women draped in microphone cables will be sorely disappointed :)

04 February 2007

Gestalt 'n' Pepa

Hey there, true believers.

Mike at hdforindies beat me to the punch on this one. Adam Ecker and Laurie Heller have put together a video demo at Cognitive Daily that illustrates human auditory/visual perception entitled What We Hear, and How It Affects What We See. Snip:

In movie fight scenes, punches often miss by a foot or more, but when sound effects are added, and the punchee adds an effective-looking recoil, we're convinced that the punch is "real."


This little cheat of human perception, in conjunction with persistence of vision, allows cinema and video to "work" in our brains. For more info, you may want to check out this essay about Gestalt Theory. Snip:

...visual perception also changes over time, when we look at moving or changing forms, even when we see a static image our eyes move across it in meaningful patterns. Further, our two ears allow us to detect distance and direction, and our musical sensibilities perceive movement in a space defined by such dimensions as timbre, pitch, duration, distortion, resonance and so on.


Link to demo, via dvguru.com (thanks, you will be missed), hdforindies, et al.

Link to Gestalt Theory essay.

Double Fault

Received this link to a funny German tennis commercial via email today:

http://www.lovo.be/uploads/1862_DAB_tennis_vl30_ws.mpg

Thanks to Gonzo for sending it in. Be sure to drop by Gonzo's website at t2audio.com.

01 February 2007

Finding His Voice

I find it ironic that the first audio editors were able to cut visually, by following the audio waveform on the optical soundtrack, more than seventy years ago. It wasn't until the late '70s or so that DAWs became sophisticated enough to display a visual waveform that we finally regained this ability that we take for granted today.

In 1929, Max Fleischer produced Finding His Voice, an animated demonstration of the Western Electric Sound System (later known as Westrex), which employed optical variable area recording technology. This was a marked improvement over Vitaphone, which was a sound-on-disc system.

Link, via dvguru.com.

For those of you who wish to download a higher quality clip, you may find different versions available via the Internet Archive.