Quiet On Set

Wired.com is featuring an article about the ever-increasing level of man-made noise pollution, and its impact on the biosphere. Snip:

Krause has a word for the pristine acoustics of nature: biophony. It's what the world sounds like in the absence of humans. But in 40 percent of the locations where Krause has recorded over the past 40 years, human-generated noise has infiltrated the wilderness. "It's getting harder and harder to find places that aren't contaminated," he says.

From a filmmaking standpoint, it's becoming nearly impossible to find an area completely devoid of background noise. For Car Trouble 2: Them's the Brakes, the first project I ever did audio post for, the director and I drove four hours in every direction over two days to try to get some clean background tracks (or atmos, for those of you across the pond) and came up empty handed. Ultimately, we ended up looping nearly every line, and creating the remaining sounds from scratch using library tracks, recorded years ago when you actually stood a chance at getting a clear recording.

Please to enjoy (bear in mind, that in addition to being my first post outing, that it was also mixed in Final Cut Pro 3, a blunt tool for audio):




Link to Wired article.

Pay Attention To the Man (or Woman) Behind the Curtain

Good morning, true believers.

Been busy, which is good. I recently mixed my first fishing show, which was far more enjoyable for me than actual fishing. In addition, our expert guides provided an amazing lunch of teriyaki salmon steaks with rice pilaf and a dessert (!) not too far removed from tiramisu, right there on the bank of Deschutes River.

So yeah, we roughed it...

Back to the ongoing world of sound: a little while back, Editors Guild Magazine ran a piece about dub-stage engineers, the un-sung MacGyvers of film sound post. Snip:

The dub stage engineer, which is the most prevalent engineering post at the major studios, handles all of the console set up on the stage before each final mix. They confer with the mixers, sound editors, recordists and others in the sound department to determine exactly what materials will be brought to the stage, how many consoles will be required, how many tracks will be brought in, and what sample rate and frame rates will be used.

They then set the board up to enable the re-recording mixers to input those tracks and work––hopefully glitch-free––to mix them out to their ultimate deliverables...

Engineers are needed not only on the dub stages, but in sound editorial and on the ADR, Foley and scoring stages as well. It’s all about client service, especially at the major studios. Put simply, a good engineer must be able to repair anything, day or night, and have the necessary intuition to know where the problem is likely to be located.

Link.

Thanks FilmSoundDaily!.

I. Ron Butterfly

For those of you who feel a bit iron deficient...{crickets}

Sigh...These are the jokes, folks.

Anyways, be sure to drop by FILMSOUNDDAILY! and check out Mix Magazine's interview with Christopher Boyes about the fantastic mix on Iron Man. I've seen it twice already, and it rocked both times.

Link.

Footnote

Whilst enjoying a sumptuous Sunday brunch here at the offices of sync.sound.cinema, I happened upon this great clip about the trials of foley work from the movie Modern Romance (via FILMSOUNDDAILY!). Please to enjoy:



(My favorite line: "We've got Heaven's Gate, the Short Version in here at 8.")

And I'm All Out Of "Snap" Jokes...

Audio Ease's Snapper is a new audio utility that streamlines a lot of the grunt work of audio post: locating, transcoding and track-splitting happen directly in OS X's finder (sorry, Mac only right now), without having to open a separate app. Snip, from multimediashooter.com:

When you select an audio file in the Mac Finder, Snapper immediately appears right beneath the current window, showing you the wave form. In the Snapper wave form you can select a part of the sound file and:
• drag it out, to create a new file.
• upload it to your Pro Tools cursor.
• turn the selection into an mp3 file.
• split stereo files into separate .L and .R files or vise versa
• convert to mp4 and attach it to an email in one go.
• export to AIFF, WAV, BWF, mp3, or m4a.

But the demo video must be seen to be believed. Very, very fast and simple. If only all DAWs were this lean.

Link.

We're Surrounded!

Soundtrack Pro has certainly come a long way in its short life, having added surround mixing capabilities in version 2 (though truth be told, while I like the program, it still has a ways to go). But once you've done your fancy 5.1, how do you get it out of the box? Kevin Mcauliffe over at Creative Mac takes us through it step by step. Snip:

I thought that for this article I would look at three very common ways to get your surround sound mix out to tape/DVD. One method for DVD, and two choices depending on your equipment setup for tape.

Link.

Also, be sure to check out Kevin's earlier article about surround mixing in STP.