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.

Whosiwhatsis and the Thingamajig

Skylor Morgan has another post up at Trew Audio entitled Secret Jargon. Snip:

Little did I understand, very few people use technical names, but if I want to serve the customer better, I’d better learn their language. Imagine my thoughts when I first heard, butt plug, clown nose, juice can, furry, cat, coily, viper, vampire, etc. So this is my homage to jargon. I hope you enjoy.

Link.

For the more etymologically inclined, you may want to check out Strike the Baby and Kill The Blonde: An Insider's Guide to Film Slang.

I'm Your Density

Found this great clip demonstrating the differences between variable area and variable density optical film soundtracks. Please to enjoy:



Via Filmmaker Slog.

Slog Blog

Filmmaker Slog: in the cloud is a blog by Mike Peter Reed, about many things but primarily production sound. The sub-title: "Making a good film is hard work; making a bad film is hard work."

Yep, it surely is.

Link.

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!.

The Sound Cart

Hey, kids.

Be sure to drop by veteran mixer Phil Palmer's blog The Sound Cart. Recently, he posted a series of photos of his new cart that he had custom built.

Currently, I rent a beat-up old Magliner cart when I need one. It's cheap and it gets the job done, but it certainly isn't the most elegant of beasts. Down the road, when I'm (hopefully) doing more feature films, I'd like to put one together myself. Seeing photos of setups like Phil's makes it easier to visualize what you may need in the future.

Link.

Coffey Audio Files Spring '08 Now Available...

...as either a PDF download, or sign up to receive a hard copy via snail mail.

Link.

This So Totally Happened On My Last Gig

Talk about a tough day on the job...

"The Hitler Bottle" (No, Not the One With His Brain...)

Found via jwsound.net:

NPR's All Things Considered recently profiled John and Mary Peluso of Peloso Microphone Lab. Snip:

But unlike some of their rural neighbors, who may rise before dawn to cast their lines in the local creek, this couple rises early to meticulously assemble microphones by hand. The Pelusos' microphones are modeled after some of the world's legendary mikes, but at a price more affordable for today's musicians.

The Pelusos are part of a boutique microphone-making movement — an effort to inexpensively replicate the look and sound of classic mikes. Peluso microphones have been used to record the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the bluegrass band Blue Highway and the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra, among others...

As a recording engineer, [John] eventually worked with all the classic RCA, Sony and AKG microphones, and particularly the German-made Neumann mikes. But it was when he went to work for a mysterious physicist named Verner Ruvalds that he learned about what he calls the "black art" of making microphones...

Ruvalds had helped produce the Neumann bottle mike, designed in 1928 by Georg Neumann, and considered a technological breakthrough. Neumann took the old carbon-grain broadcast microphone, which uses bits of carbon sandwiched between two plates, and turned it into a mass-produced "condenser" microphone, which has one fixed plate and another that forms a diaphragm moved by sound waves...

The Neumann mike — the CMV3 — was so widely used by the Fuehrer and Nazi Party leaders that it acquired a nickname: The Hitlerflasche, or the Hitler Bottle.

Be sure to listen to the full story, which includes recording samples made with Peluso mikes.

Link.

Trew That

Skylor Morgan of Trew Audio has posted a series of video tours fresh from NAB in Vegas, and no, they're not tours of strip clubs (unless the quality of audio gear in strip clubs had dramatically increased lately...which would be a surprise to me, because I certainly wouldn't patronize such places. Ahem...).

Link, courtesy of trewaudio.com

Eight Is Enough

Alas, your fearless reporter could not swing the funds to make it to NAB this year, so the staff here at the offices of sync.sound.cinema will be furiously combing the internets as relevant product announcements trickle out. First up, something on many a mixer's wish list: Sound Devices Introduces 788T 8 Track Field Recorder. From the website:

Designed specifically for multi-track on-location productions, the eight-track 788T features a significant expansion of input and output capability—eight full-featured microphone inputs and eight tracks of recording. The eight inputs, together with a thoroughly revised digital architecture, provide unprecedented recording flexibility...

To accommodate the larger data storage requirements of multi-track recordings, the 788T comes equipped with a 160 GB 2.5-in. internal SATA hard disk drive. This on-board storage provides up to 30 hours of 8-track, uncompressed 24-bit audio recording of industry-standard Broadcast Wave files. Additionally, CompactFlash cards with UDMA support and external FireWire mass storage volumes can be used for recording and playback. All three storage mediums can be selected for simultaneous, redundant recording.

Street price: $5995

www.sounddevices.com

Lav Is a Battlefield

Hello, Cleveland...

Dan "The Man" Brockett has come through once again with a stellar article comparing 16 lavaliere microphones, along with recording samples of each. Snip:

Often referred to as a "lav", lavalier microphones are a category of sound gear that is often overlooked and taken for granted by those new to recording sound for picture. When you consider how many models of lavaliers are available, it becomes a considerable challenge to make an intelligent choice about which lavalier you should use in a given situation. If you speak with professional sound mixers, they often have a favorite manufacturer and model of lavalier that they like to use, but why? Based upon my experience, lavalier preference almost seems like a birthright, passed down from generation to generation, but if you are not a professional sound mixer, how do you know which model best suits your needs?

But my fav quote has to be this:

The lowest cost XLR cable will always have better sound quality than the most expensive wireless microphone system.

Amen to that. In my experience, people unfamiliar with audio tend to be blinded by the notion that wireless transmitters are somehow "magic". While they can be indispensable tools, they come with their own caveats.

Link.

Premiers Bruits

Via First Sounds:

A group of researchers has succeeded in playing a sound recording of a human voice made in 1860 – 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

Roughly ten seconds in length, the recording is of a person singing “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit” – a snippet from a French folksong. It was made on April 9,1860 by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on his “phonautograph” – a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp...

The essence of the Berkeley technology, which was developed in collaboration with the Library of Congress, is to apply non-contact digital imaging to any material containing a recorded “groove”. The imaging results in a digital representation of the record which can then be played on the computer with a virtual stylus. Being non-contact, the technology protects delicate samples from further damage or degradation. This approach has been used successfully on many phonograph discs and cylinders,and its application to the phonautograph recording was a straightforward extension. It is novel however that the phonautograph recordings were never meant to be played.

Listen.

www.firstsounds.org

When It Rains, It...Well, You Know

Apparently, I have been living under a bigger rock than usual.

Right on the heels of the Zaxcom Fusion* come two other combo units, both from legacy names in the film sound biz and all aimed squarely for the same market.

First up, the Nagra VI. The Kudelski folks enjoy a well-earned reputation for pretty much defining modern production recording with their 1/4" reel-to-reel decks. I'm embarrassed to admit I've never used one myself, but from all accounts, they were built like tanks, if tanks were built like beautiful watches. Snip:

It offers six independent analogue audio inputs. Inputs 1 - 4 are equipped with traditional NAGRA microphone pre-amplifiers for dynamic and phantom +48V microphones...
The NAGRA VI records to a 120GB internal 2.5" hard disk. An extractable compact Flash card is used to record a copy of the audio tracks depending on the users track selections. The NAGRA VI allows approximately 20 minutes of 6 track 48 kHz 24-bit recording per GB of available disk / card space.

Next, the Sonosax SX-M32. A fairly common name on the audio cart, Sonosax won a Techinical Achivement Award for creating the SX-S in 1983, a veritable workhorse mixer for film recording. Their foray into the ENG/EFP looks just as interesting. Snip:

# Electronically balanced Mic/Line Input, XLR connectors
# 48V Phantom for Mic power
# Pre LF Cut for rough wind conditions - PAD - Phase reversal
# Input trim on the front panel for easy Mic Gain adjustment, retractable
# Sweep LF Cut, retractable
# Mix routing by PAN Pot
# Stereo and MS linking of channel 1/2 - 3/4 and 5/6
# M/S Decoder
# PFL for rapid channel monitoring
# Limiter on each channel
# Stereo AUX Input assignable to the MIX or to Track 7&8
# Electronically balanced Line Outputs, XLR connectors
# AES Digital Out, 44,1 and up to 192kHz@24bits
# Integrated 8 Tracks Recorder on Hard disk and CF Card, with specifications similar to these of the MINIR82

Since this writer is on the lower end of the Wechsler Scale, it thankfully doesn't take a genius to see that all of these units are clearly aiming for Sound Devices' territory: highly portable (ie "baggable"); rugged, high quality builds; four tracks-plus recording capability; and stereo mixdown for a camera feed. Here's hoping that the market opens up and prices come down a bit.

Links:

www.nagraaudio.com
www.sonosax.ch
www.zaxcom.com
www.sounddevices.com

*A Fusion sample is on its way here, and a review will be forthcoming.

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.

Foam Sweet Foam

Auralex Acoustics recently announced a green initiative, which includes a reformulation of its acoustic foam panels. Snip:

-36% less global warming emission

-Improved performance & durability
over conventional solvent foams

-Lessen dependency on fossil fuels
including foreign crude oil

All Studiofoam products now include soy components which reduce petroleum-based chemical usage by up to 60% ...

Auralex Studiofoam is manufactured without harmful Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s), which have been linked to the depletion of the ozone layer. In making the conversion over to the new Soy-based hybrid formula, these products now boast improved performance and durability over conventional petroleum-based foams.

The new Eco-Friendly Studiofoam is available in the same great color choices and cuts as the original with no increase in cost to either the dealer or consumer. The new offering meets or exceeds the requirements of the demanding professional in terms of both product quality and testing data (acoustical and flammability).

Link.

It Is...Alive [Bill Murray Voice]

Hey-o.

Welcome back, class. Now, I want you to take out paper and pencil and write an essay about what you learned over your winter break. [class rolls eyes]

I, for one, spent most of the month duking it out with software gremlins that have been plaguing my latest post audio project. Tough little boogers, they are....

But, on to catching up: Petrol announced an update to their Eargonizer audio bag, including new design features. Snip:

At the rear, the Eargonizer is equipped with a longer Velcro holding strap. This allows the strap to more firmly grip the top carrying handle and anchor it to the back of the bag when not in use -- keeping it safely away from the opening. The new, fully transparent vinyl top cover provides better visibility of the bag's contents. Three “D” rings have been added at the top of each side to enable a greater range of carrying options. A neoprene carrying strap is now included for comfortable, over-the-shoulder toting.

Although, anyone with any sense of self-preservation would do well to acquire a harness; your shoulders will thank you for it. (And, if any other body parts start talking to you, seek help immediately).

I own one myself; a review will be forthcoming.



MSRP: $283

www.petrolbags.com

Pass the Mic

Dan Brockett has written up a very extensive and useful article over at kenstone.net entitled As I Hear It - Choosing the Right Microphone. In it, Dan reviews several industry mainstays as well as some recent upstarts, posting his personal impressions along with recording samples of "popular short shotgun, supercardioid, hypercardiod and cardioid microphones." Snip:

I am not an engineer and I don't know all of the answers but I can tell you that after reading this article and carefully listening to the recorded samples, you will have saved yourself several days of shopping, internet research to hunt down disparate sound samples and lots of misinformation that you might hear from uninformed sound forum posters, salespeople or retailers who just didn't do their research or have a vested interest in not being unbiased. There are no clear-cut winners and losers amongst these microphones; this review is not a contest. All of the microphones I tested and reviewed are capable of excellent sound. Not a single one of the microphones sounded "bad". Some were better than others or stood out from the rest for specific sound qualities though, the purpose of this article is to help you find the best microphones for your needs, taste and budget.

Amen to that.

Link, via kenstone.net.

Self-Education Is, I Firmly Believe, the Only Kind Of Education There Is.

Happy New Year, kids.

To start things off with some momentum, head on over to dv.com for Jay Rose's column, "Audio Solutions: Confessions of an Autodidact." In it, Mr. Rose details the many options available on the web to foster self-education in the ways of audio. Indeed, I would not have the job I do now were it not for online resources such as these. Snip:

The luck part involves finding mentors and opportunities to practice your craft. These are important, and a good college can provide them both. It can also give you lists of books and help you find Web resources. But if you want to be any good, you have to keep learning throughout your career—whether you’ve taken college courses or not. So let me list some non-school resources that are part of my own continuing audio and film education. Many are free, and all are bargains.

It's a good list (someday I hope that this blog will be included on a list such as this :). Additionally, I would also check out lynda.com. They have an extensive collection of online training videos about software and basic concepts, including sound. While it is a subscription service, many of the more basic clips are free.

Link to column.

Link to lynda.com's audio section.

(With respect to Isaac Asimov for the header quote).

Consider Me Timbers Shivered

Avast ye scurvy dogs, and be sure to check out Recording "The Morning Light", an article about handling documentary audio on a ship in the middle of a 2300 mile race. Snip:

Tasked with capturing the audio for the Morning Light project, Production Sound Mixer David McJunkin faced a series of formidable obstacles during the lengthy preparations leading up to the actual race that forced him to implement some highly unique solutions in recording the production tracks.

Wind, salt water, and the unpredictability of daily life on board a sailing boat in open water were just a few of the problems Dave had to overcome during this film that chronicles the year-long run-up to the race.

Hardcore. Makes my prior sea excursion seem like a canoe trip.

Link, via locationsound.com.