Jump to content

Jay Rose

Members
  • Posts

    1,295
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by Jay Rose

  1. I worked in radio, back in analog days. Every now and again, we'd see an ad in Broadcasting magazine for a 'beginning announcer'. It would promise decent pay and shift at an out-of-the-way station. It would also request a 'longform demo reel'. We'd laugh. This was basically that station's way of replacing their stock of blank tape... --- [Totally off-topic, but in the 'recycled tape' category: Through most of the 70s and early 80s, my sound studio had distinctive blue boxes for 5" and 7" reels. We sent out a lot of radio dubs - hundreds a week - and it was cheaper to get custom pre-printed boxes than plain boxes and printed labels. The boxes had my name on them, since that was also the name of the company. ... Sold the studio in '84 and went to work for a big post house. One of our gigs was playing home base for CBS Sports when playoffs were in Boston. Playoff time. I'm about to mix a live sports insert. Producer hands me the v/o, recorded by their network voice in LA. It's in a blue box with my name on it! The spot title and advertiser had been crossed out, and "Boston V/O" scribbled in. I didn't say a word. ]
  2. It's all on this page. OP: I'm not used to being pushed around by producers or cameramen. Jim: 3. Can we tolerate working with you? If you can reconcile those two items, you're in. Having faith in yourself and your abilities will make it easier to choose your fights, and know when getting along is more important than being proven right. Or as a mentor once told me, back when I was doing advertising sound: "Try to do things the right way. If they won't let you, just say to yourself 'Okay, we'll do it their way. I've already got my Clios.'"
  3. This is what comes from having an invisible art. You can point to the contributions of almost every other department and say, "they made that happen". Lighting and camera (and wardrobe, etc) are obvious, and most people realize that impossible locations or actors that age during the course of a film are thanks to set, makeup, and postproduction tricks. But sound? For most people (including some producers I know) the soundtrack is the score. Period. So since we're obviously not doing anything except pushing a few secret buttons, it should be something anybody could do.
  4. ProTools and Nuendo don't eliminate the need to fill tracks. But they make it a heck of a lot easier to grab small sections of tone from the OMF's handles, pauses within dialog, or (if need be) production files before the action starts... and then c-loop them to what you need. A lot of times you don't even have to open the "room tone" files. Which is good, because on a lot of practical sets (and almost always on non-narrative projects) the background has changed slightly between the take and when they get around to recording room tone... so using pieces from the take itself make the mix easier.
  5. Did you mean I really should look it up? Or did you mean I shouldn't be pretending to look it up? I didn't think I was doing the latter. As far as the former, the best I could find was -- New Oxford American Dictionary and the note -- ibid So you really were agreeing with me? From a style point of view, I'd say you went on kind of long. And the dismayed smiley didn't help. But I'll accept the correction. You were agreeing with me. Sorry for taking it the wrong way.
  6. Really? I've been aware of the commercial implications of our craft for almost* as long as I've been in the business. And it's never stopped me from enjoying the work, taking pride in a job well done, and feeling good when I've been part of a successful project. It's called show business, not sound business. * -- Okay, I started in public broadcast. But so did some of our most accomplished colleagues.
  7. There are times, with today's constantly changing workflows, that the reference track becomes Sync God during post. Particularly on smaller / faster projects. Sure, we can match lipsync by eye, using a couple of tricks, if we're lucky with source material... but there are times when even correct sync seems awfully soft. When a producer says 'reference pix is in sync", all we have to do is agree with it. (Yeah, sometimes the editor's ref is out, and we can show the producer what the difference is. But that's rare... and it also sometimes happened back when we had sprocket holes.)
  8. Sorry, but nobody comes out of a movie whistling s/n or intelligibility either. (If they're whistling anything, it's from the score rather than from dialog.) Almost-most-important: The story is what matters. Then the acting. Absolutely-most-important: The effect on the viewer is what matters. This can be the result of story or actors, or visual effects, or acoustic effects, or even an accidental relationship between something in the film and current events. That's what sells tickets, and makes buzz, and drives our industry, and makes the classics memorable. Yes, we have a lot to do with helping that happen... but bottom line, no more than some other departments. The problem is when producers or directors think of sound as an unfortunate nuisance rather than a vital part of affecting the viewer.
  9. I've done this on smaller projects, where they wanted a really good mix for a next-to-final screening but knew there'd be changes: Give them both a full mix, and d/m/e stems. Tell them to put ALL FOUR into their NLE timeline, call it a new project with just those four audio tracks, and edit straight across. Then give me back an OMF of the new edited version... with fairly big handles. Changes are now obvious, and in most cases you'll have enough right there in the OMF to handle them. Worst case you can open both the original project and the new version in your DAW, use the stem timecode to locate places in the original, pick up whatever pieces you need for fixes from the original and copy them into the new version. It's a band-aid, but if everybody respects the 24-bit files there's no quality loss.
  10. Jumping around, going 'ook ook!', and picking fleas off your buddy? Hey, it's a step up from when the soundie was depicted as a caveman...
  11. Further, the SM58 is designed to be close-miked. If you're using it at boom distances, its output will be even lower than normal for a dynamic.
  12. This is actually a wonderful change. When I started, it was the DPs who'd say "they can fix any sound problem in post".
  13. As Marc said, whatever the producers let us do. My personal philosophy is that dialog tells the story, and if my taking a couple of seconds to replace a phoneme with a more understandable one it's worth the effort. That's over and above the normal splitting and blade-cleaning in an edit, and careful eq and noise reduction during the premix. Most of the producers who hire me agree, and appreciate the difference. But I also work with a few producers, mostly coming out of TV, who figure "dialog is what it is... use the editor's track, adjust the volume, maybe brighten it a little with those knobs... but then add some sfx and move on to the final mix." Ultimately, it's their movie.
  14. And don't forget the virtual mic DSP plugins! Make your Azden sound like a Schoeps.
  15. This forum exists in the Internet Cloud. Obviously, clouds are affected by the extreme weather.
  16. Surprised nobody's mentioned the studio-builder's friend: Owens Corning 703. 2" thick fiberglass, very cheap (about $65 for a bundle of six 2'x4'x2" pieces). It's semi-rigid, so you can't fold it up like a blanket, but a panel will support itself leaning against a wall or can be clipped to a c-stand. And it's also lightweight; one person can can carry enough to dampen a small shooting area easily; in a pinch you can hold one on a wall with gaffer tape. Yes, the fibers aren't nice to rub against. But you can wrap it in fire-rated cloth... which is what I do with leftovers after building a studio, making wonderful dampers for noisy rooms in my house.
  17. +1 I've worked post sessions where the dialog was unusable because of cheap thin-sounding radios and had to be looped. When I pointed out to the producer that looping shouldn't have been necessary ... in fact, while the shot was too wide for a boom, it could have used a wired lav with no trouble ... he bragged about how little he had paid for that second-unit soundie with kit! They don't learn. For many producers, the reward is being cheap. If the film suffers, well, everybody knows that sound is a crap shoot.
  18. There will always be bottom feeders no matter what we do to educate or form a guild. Just like there will always be people buying lottery tickets no matter what the laws of probability say. Because every one of those bottom feeding soundies, and gaffers, and work-for-free DPs, and wannabe directors knows that with only a few lucky breaks, they'll be the next Scorsese. It's an old joke, but bears repeating: --- Roger Ebert (among many others); this citation from http://rogerebert.su...ERMAN/508070304
  19. Yeah, but at least Miss South Carolina's dialog track is clean.
  20. I use the Hosa little blue box converters; the one you want is ODL312, about $90. They're bulletproof. I have them all over the place. They use Toslink for the optical side, but high quality Tos to Mini pipes aren't very expensive at all, and much more reliable than using a toslink-only fiber with a plug-on adapter. Just one warning: the combo mini analog/optical jacks on Macs aren't protected from dirt. If you've used your a lot for analog, there might have been enough dust and other junk pushed in that the optical part won't function properly. They are cleanable, though... most of the time, just a long shot of canned air.
  21. The Mini's converters tested about the same as any other modern onboard computers: noise around -70 below nominal -10 dBFS, fall off on the high end (probably not oversampling). Any time you can get the ADC outside of that noisy box and power supply, you'll see an improvement. But dude: your Mini has spdif i/o, if you haven't worn out the combo mini connectors. Flat to within a few percent of Nyquist, s/n limited only by the bit depth and the external converter. Don't you have anything that already has digital i/o? Then all you need is possibly a converter to optical, and a toslink to optical mini cable. That's how I use the Mini at my desk, and the onboard audio for the Mac Pro in my studio.
  22. It could be worse. I once had a situation of a corporate president, quick OFF CAMERA line, and the middle managers insisted I couldn't even go into the room with him! "Give us the mic and tell us where to put it. Ideally, give us the recorder as well and show us how to use it, so we don't have to tell you when it's okay to record." I lent them a Uher (!) and a throwaway mic and told them to have a blast.
  23. ... I wonder if there's a producer equivalent of Jwsoundgroup, where they trade techniques and laugh about directory listings for crew members who want to be paid. Maybe they even have a t-shirt "Tuna Sandwiches are food."
  24. Sound is not intuitive. You can look at a shot in your favorite movie and get a pretty good idea how it was composed and blocked. Then you can look through the viewfinder at your shoot, and see if you're getting the look you want. Lighting is less intuitive - you can't look at a movie and immediately guess how it was lit - but you've still got that all-important viewfinder to warn you about mistakes. And the physics of optics and light are pretty straight-forward... particularly for someone with the visual sense to want to make a movie. But production sound? There's no way for even an audio professional to look at a finished film and know for sure how the dialog was done. What the mic records is not the same as what your binaural brain tells you is going on in a room. And without experience, you can't even rely on headphones at the shoot to tell you what you'll get on living room or theater speakers. Even in post, you can't just "tweak until it sounds good"... unless you know what you're listening for, turning a knob the wrong way can make things sound better in the edit and much worse in the mix. And there's a lot of myth and wishful thinking as to what post can actually accomplish. Bottom line: It's very easy to screw up sound. Unless dialog isn't at all important to your film, guesswork at the shoot will mean you have footage that's hard to understand at best, and at worst says "this producer didn't care at all about the project".
×
×
  • Create New...