For someone just entering post sound... what's a good starter DAW setup?

[Henchman]

Aaaaahh. So maybe the real question is: post-house owner vs. post-house operator? Does one market just their skills or their skills plus facilities? I sure don't know the answer.

I really like the fact that I am respected and sought after for my skills. I am often quite embarrassed when clients see my "facility". So I like the idea of just being able to focus on what I'm really good at, solving audio problems, and not having to focus on what I'm not good at, maintaining an acoustic facility and studio business. But I think the issue still comes down to geography and market.

I personally am still not swimming in the market waters where people can afford to hire a good acoustic space for the extended amount of time it takes to do all the work to really make the audio in a film right. My current clients couldn't afford it whether I was the owner of the space or merely an engineer working in the space. I would love to work one multi-million dollar feature a year, rather than half a dozen low-budget indie films, but that's not where my client network is connecting me right now.

I agree with Philip that those people probably are out there, but I haven't found them yet.

sdog, I know a lot of guys who negotiate a good rate at facilities for the dub room. And do all the rest of the work at home.

And these guys do everything from very low to midrange budget work.

That's a good way to do it.

But still. The reality is. If you want to do serious post for a living, and you are in the US. LA is the place to be.

That's why I moved here from Vancouver.

[studiomprd]

" At the top of the field one is working with wealthy, famous, and ambitious people who have very high expectations of everyone and every place they work with, and thus are the most demanding clients of all. "

and some of these clients can be quite loyal (at least to a point), but they can also be incredibly finicky ...

" Henchman if you are making a good living at what you are saying then you are one of the few out of many of many of many who can do that.. "

not true.

lots of top post mixers work out of facilities on contracts (long or short term), or even as day players... some of these facilities are the very most major ones, too... (Todd-A-O, Universal, Sony, etc. --it is a significant list... look at where the Oscar and CAS nominees were posted)

" So maybe the real question is: post-house owner vs. post-house operator? "

or 'hired hand' at a post house...

" I would love to work one multi-million dollar feature a year, "

the 'big movies' are done at the 'big facilities'...

" the majority of post work that I have seen. "

seems you have seen only a small part of the big, professional movies picture.

[Henchman]

Sdog. The senator is right. There are a lot if people making a very good living in post. But the majority are right here in LA.

Which is why I moved here.

[conleec]

+1 for Pro Tools 10.

For studio monitors it depends about room size and acoustics.

Also you need some VST Plug-ins.

I recommend two: Altiverb & Speakerphone 2

If you need some extra informations about monitors, acoustics, delivery formats and other post stuff you can check the Gearslutz.

Just for the sake of clarity, if you purchase ProTools, you'll need to use RTAS or AAX plugins, not VST. I'm sure this was a typo, but wanted to make sure it didn't confuse.

 

For post-related plugins, I recommend McDSP's ML4000. It's amazingly versatile and can be used for everything from noise gating, to noise reduction, to positive expansion. Once you get your head around it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it. And +1 on Altiverb and Speakerphone 2 (although if on a budget there are cheaper alternatives). Check out McDSP's Futzbox; it comes on sale once in a while. Not as full featured as Speakerphone 2, but good nonetheless.

 

I also recommend ProTools, especially if doing post in the U.S. However, as others have mentioned, if you're doing projects that don't require a tremendous amount of interaction with other ProTools users, then I say use whatever system you're comfortable with.

 

If you're interested in doing surround on a budget, then honestly Audition is hard to beat. Reaper is fully capable of doing surround, but it requires a pretty deep understanding of routing and setting up your channels properly. ProTools and Nuendo will both do surround VERY capably, however, ProTools requires the Complete Production Toolkit which will bring your total cost upwards of $2500 at retail. Nuendo isn't cheap either at $1800, but comes out of the box, ready to mix surround.

 

Good luck!

 

Chris Conlee

[conleec]

I would really appreciate some feedback from those principally concerned with good audio as to what you want.

What we have in mind is:---

a) Analyse any difference between a previously done AAT conv to any of the dest formats we can do & a new revised conversion to the same destination format.

move prev content & add new content to match changes.

John L

Hey John,

 

As a picture editor who dabbles in post audio as well, this sounds like a FANTASTIC solution. Anything that helps take a prior session and conform it to a changed session would be TREMENDOUSLY useful, and you could count me among your early supporters. Particularly if your price is as reasonable as your translation tool! Awesome and thanks for your consideration!

 

Chris Conlee

 

Just an FYI, most changed sessions (fresh from picture editorial) wouldn't have as many tracks and wouldn't have the same audio many times, because the post audio guys will likely have added to the session and may have even matched back to the original field recorder's audio files. Presumably you've got a strategy for dealing with that?

[sdog]

...Anything that helps take a prior session and conform it to a changed session would be TREMENDOUSLY useful, and you could count me among your early supporters. Particularly if your price is as reasonable as your translation tool!...

 

Chris Conlee

+1

[conleec]

Well, back to the OP's original question: Tracktion 4 has just been announced an NAMM. For those looking to get started, it's a pretty cool app. Completely revamped for modern OSs. And at $60 for a full license, you're not going to get hurt too bad if you decide that audio mixing isn't your bag.

 

http://www.tracktion.com/

 

Chris

[Tim M]

One more Reaper+AATranslator fan. Around a dozen films posted with this combination.

Upsides:

Reaper is super stable. Super pleasant to use. Super flexible. Super extendible. Feature packed. Inexpensive. Very responsive development teams with Reaper and AATranslator.

Downside:

A Reaper user is going to have to work just a little bit harder to interact with a world of ProTool users (both technically and psychologically). Also, Reaper is really not audio post-focused. It is really just a very well-designed music DAW that just happens to handle most post audio tasks very well. There really are no shortcuts for conforming edit changes. Reaper doesn't handle "handles" very thoroughly (there are a huge number things one wants to do that distinguish between the audible/visible portion of a clip and the underlying media file. Reaper lets you do some amazing things to clips and underlying media, but not always in a way that is most useful to a post engineer).

I originally avoided ProTools (and all dongle-based software) because it offended my belief that God invented software to be independent of peripheral hardware. God spoke and said, "Let us communicate with peripheral hardware through the driver layer, not through the application layer," and He saw that it was good. ProTools chose blesphemy.

Now that ProTools is less hardware dependent, it's too late. I've already built all my audio posting habits on other software.

 

I understand why you would feel this way. I felt the same way until I bought my first mac. I realized yes I was mostly paying for design but also that everything was tested to work well together, and it did. I'm currently using a macbook pro that has lasted twice as long as any prior windows laptop I owned and destroyed the windows desktop I specially built piece by piece, as that barely lasted a year lol. Now that is a good plug for mac but I'm not sure it fully applied to Pro Tools, but I think that is what people thought lol.

[dkgross]

ProTools 10 for sure. Upgrade the internal drive to an SSD, or just get a small portable FW800 for your PT Sessions.. More RAm for sure.. I've got 16gigs in my 2 year old MBpro 15.. PTools screams on it    Then again.. So does Logic..but doing Post in Logic is like death.  

[Winter]

Anybody using AATranslator on Mac? Any feedback?

Thanks in advance!

[Philip Perkins]

I use AAT but so far only on PC.  Contact the people at AAT, they are very responsive to user requests and suggestions.  

 

philp

[Winter]

I use AAT but so far only on PC.  Contact the people at AAT, they are very responsive to user requests and suggestions.  

 

philp

Hi Philip,

Does it work for you? Can you correclty manage OMF files?

[Philip Perkins]

Hi Philip,

Does it work for you? Can you correclty manage OMF files?

It does open OMFs but as I said I'm using it on a PC

 

philp

[Winter]

It does open OMFs but as I said I'm using it on a PC

 

philp

Thanks! And what about Adobe Audition 6? Did you still use it? It's seems to be really nice, but I'm not sure about audio engine sound quality.