Jay Rose

This is what happens when one mic has a male connector and one has a female.

It would be fun to do sync dialog with lip mics. Well, not "fun" exactly, since the actors would be holding the mics. You'd certainly get a tight sound. The fun would be when the various picture departments start saying "we can't get a good close-up because of sound!" Turnabout and all that... ; )

Most digital recorders [are designed to] erase all the sound. Then you add it later. Can someone tell me what that means? Are they talking about a lower internal noise floor? Do they like thermal and random magnetic noise? Or are they working with digital recorders that have internal noise gates (with the thresholds set too high), which are killing the backgrounds? The Zaxcom Nomad is very simple.... It has "room tone," which a lot of people don't want because they want to have full, maximum, clean sound. ...and that? Nomad is definitely an excellent recorder, but what are they talking about? Nomad's noise floor isn't significantly different from other recorders in that class. Obviously these folks are using 'all the sound' and 'room tone' differently than we might, but I'm not sure what they do mean. Help an older guy out!

New York Times has an article today about how the U.S. Labor Department tracks the skills needed for most jobs, in terms of things like "hand strength", "acute sense of smell", or "mathematical analysis". The article lets you enter the name of your job, and kicks out which job it considers to use the exact opposite set of skills. There's no entry for "production mixer" or "sound designer" or "postie"... but it will accept Sound Engineering Technician. Guess what.... we're not nuclear physicists! (Yeah, I know. The article isn't rocket science either, and its analysis has lots of faults. Think of it more like a party game.)

I've had amazing results with software from Tom Erbe: http://www.soundhack.com/ ...not only turning raw into readable with headers, but also turning text and graphics files into audio... ...and a lot of sound design tools, like one of the best phase vocoders around. [Don't let the name food you. It's not a sound-effect-into-voice vocoder, but a way to do extreme time expansion on speech without audible splices or changing the pitch.]

Philip, thanks. That's the Gefen I was referring to. I've use a bunch of 'em.

no one should necessarily believe that anyone in particular has actually said anything, unless you are in the room and hear/see them say it ...and are close enough to hear them say it acoustically, and see their lips move in person. Between what we're getting to in synthesized speech, and the lip-sync apps our CGI friends develop, you won't be able to trust a giant on-screen Trump at a giant rally even if you're in the live audience.

There are plenty of pocket s/pdif to RCA analog converters. They come with wall warts, but easy enough to replace with batteries... it's not like they draw much current. (I use ones from Gefen... AFAIK, the same guys who used to sell sound effects!) AES3 to s/pdif in is just a couple of resistors. RCA -10 dBV unbalanced analog out depends on your line inputs.

Just a quick update*. I reached out to them as a user/journalist/educator back in early March, when they announced what was described as nothing short of miraculous. I wanted to know whether they could provide a more revealing demo, or process a track of mine, or give me a one-week NFR license to evaluate. My concerns were that their music app appeared to be pitch/harmonic based, and that's nearly impossible with speech (pitch changes too quickly for most tracking and the best portable vocoders there days -- aka cellphones -- have quantization; on top of that, the harmonic structure depends on the vowel and can be constantly gliding). So also wanted whatever details they could release, and would sign an NDA for that part if needed. I got a call back from a woman who identified herself as doing their marketing. She promised I could have a talk with one of their developers... when he was available... probably after NAB. I saved the notes/contact info, and tried again a few weeks after NAB. No response this time. I poked around on their site, and it appears as though this really isn't a native plugin. Instead it requires net access, phones home with the track, and just leaves a proxy on your machine while it's working. No idea how much computer it requires at their lab, or how much human tweaking is necessary. Haven't been able to verify this (or get it denied) with anyone from Audionomix. Since then, nothing. My take: something like this will occur. We're getting close enough with natural speech recognition that includes DSP noise reduction, and some form of phonemic analysis (Google Home / Alexa anyone?). We're not quite there with natural speech synthesis mimicking real-time voices, but it'll come. When those two converge: it you can't clean the production dialog, just re-create it without the noise. True ADR! Just, probably, not on this year's Christmas List. -- *I was offline for a while. Getting married, then having ortho surgery. Both completely successful.

I've posted mumblecore that was well recorded and needed very little repair (usually by editing from alts). The style/genre was the director's decision. The crafts (including acting) were still allowed to do their/our job.

Does it have to be that gear? Can you access the speed control on the modded TCD? Can you play on any other cassette deck with a varispeed hack -- or dub to 1/4" to play on a deck with varispeed? Then you can resolve with a scope and a wall transformer.

Beachtek makes a box specifically for the Alexa. Is that one too complicated for your client?

For the future: bury it in boiler plate in your "standard" production agreement, deal memo, session completion form, deliverables spec, or whatever else you get them to agree to. If it's in smaller type and looks like it's part of stuff your lawyer made you put in or you copied from the internet, people won't question it. That being said, you'll have a hard time collecting anyway. I've always found that an interest charge (coupled with a discount for very prompt payment) just helps make sure I get paid quickly. But if it's a client I've got a good relationship with, and they occasionally go to 60 or longer, I'm not going to make a fuss. The other thing that can help is a 'boilerplate' disclaimer about ownership in your contribution remaining yours until the agreed amount is paid. That can help a lot, with recalcitrant payers, when you let them know that you'll have to advise their client that there's a copyright issue. (They'll never call you again, but you were ready to drop them anyway, no?)

IIRC (my studio is temporarily down), RX5 gives you a lot more automatic, learning, and self-configuring options. So depending on which UI you're using, it could very well be that RX5 has better processing... even if the underlying algorithms are similar.

FWIW, RX also does automatic round-trips in Nuendo. I love that I can use the same RX algorithms as a clip-based VST process, on a channel insert, and with the Connect passing to the full-on app. You can apply as much or as little tweaking as you think an element requires. Flexibility is a good thing.

A group at MIT has come up with a way to generate very real-looking motion videos, with people and objects doing what they'd normally do, based on a single still photo of the scene! Article at http://web.mit.edu/vondrick/tinyvideo/ has before-and-after shots, along with a discussion of the algorithm and machine learning involved. The process is in its infancy and generating only short, small-format clips. But we've all seen how quickly these things can be developed, once you throw money and programmers at them. For those who say, "well, what about the story? We'll always need to have writers and actors and directors..." I respond - not really tongue-in-cheek - what about reality tv? There's a heck of a lot of programming being developed where the story is tacked on in post. And there's a lot of money to be made when this process is developed well enough to fill cable tv slots. Not to mention all its other implications...

Unfortunately, my beat up Polaroid snapshot was digitized a long time ago. When I digitized it, 8 bit 22 kHz was considered hi res for audio... and I was probably behind the curve for pix. (2" lowband... wow!) OTOH, you can open just the forum image in another tab, and have your browser bump it up 400%. Still holds together well enough to identify the pots and pans.

Anybody want to take a shot at naming everything in this picture?

Little known fact: Mel Blanc actually looped the lion. It was the industry's first post-sync job, made more fascinating since it occurred pre- sync being invented. ; ) (Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the mic and mixer were because they made an ET of the roar for use in their radio promotional shows. Radio tie-ins were a very big part of the Hollywood Machine in the 20s.) (For you post-Digital folks: "ET" refers to electrical transcription, radio-talk for cutting an acetate disc to record an audio event or delay a show. Pre-magnetic tape, though they were still using that term on the logs at my first station gig.)

ExtraPFX

There are even times when aliasing can be a useful part of sound design. I used to keep a copy of SoundEdit16 (on an ancient System 7 Mac that could run it). It was too early and underpowered to use oversampling, and they didn't bother to do additional filtering when lowering the s/r or varispeeding. But when you wanted harsh, non-musical upper octaves on a monster or weird machine, it was great. (On the other hand, it was at the same time that I discovered the Nubus Digi card that came with early ProTools and Avid didn't change its filters when recording at lower sample rates. If you were doing a multimedia project that required lots of 22k s/r voice files, you had to record at 44.1 and convert. If you recorded at 22.050 s/r, the ADC's input filter was still at 19k and even normal voices would alias.)

You're asking in the wrong forum. This is a gathering place for people who got into sound because they appreciate it, can hear the difference between a clean track and one that says 'amateur production', and have spent the time [and made the mistakes] to learn how to do it right. From the choices you've made, it seems like you're much more concerned with picture. That's not intended as an insult. But to get the answers you want based on the assumptions you've made, you'd be better off asking in a camera forum. [Before other forum members accuse me of trolling... think about it. The OP wants what he'd consider usable sound for what we'd consider an impossible budget, using what we'd consider untrained operators. It's possible his definition of 'usable' sound is a lot less than anything we'd ever accept... and a bunch of DPs or shooter/editor/producers might be able to understand his goal better.]

That was an incredibly cool box for very remote recording. As I recall, it included a soldering iron in its case, so you could make field repairs.

Somebody in theTrump Tower either started thinking about what the debate mic issue really was... or maybe the Donald himself reads JWSound: “It wasn’t that the mike didn’t work,” Mr. Trump said, during comments about the difficulties he had faced during the debate. The problem, he said, was that the people operating the soundboard had been “oscillating” as he spoke, changing the levels of his voice. -- NY Times, http://nyti.ms/2dDJ92X This actually is consistent with what we've been saying here, particularly if an automixer was involved (how would the device try to cope with all his loud interruptions, and how quickly could it react so there wouldn't be roller-coaster levels during Trump's lines following the interruption?)... ...and it even partially explains the 'sniffles', much more logically than blaming a defective mic.

Time to resurrect this one?