Jay Rose

I thought the issue was the mic. I also thought Trump was saying the next morning that the mic was picking up his breathing/sniffing too loudly, which I suppose is possible if it's seriously compressed for broadcast. His voice didn't sound squashed to me... but who knows what additional processing there was between the venue and air. Slams of his or her sliminess don't belong in a professional forum, IMHO. You can find enough of that elsewhere...

Beg to differ: The Orban Audicy could not only follow a timecode VTR smoothly, it could even be the master and make a 9-pin machine follow it smoothly. Performance on a mechanical BetaSP was pretty darned good... pix locked in a few seconds and of course audio was stable from the moment you pressed play. During editing, it almost looked like a Steenbeck when you scrubbed the audio (smoothly across all tracks) and the pix would advance precisely one frame whenever you crossed a boundary. You could also set Audicy for half-speed play for checking sync and the pix would stay with you. Performance on a 9-pin HDVR (I used Doremi) was absolutely perfect... it looked like sound and pix were on the same perf'd sync block. Unfortunately, higher-ups at Orban decided not to pursue marketing in the TV/post space, but just stay in their radio comfort zone. OTOH, the dealers sold video-enabled Audicy. My clients were blown away at how much faster and smoother the thing worked, compared to PT. This all fell apart when Harman sold Orban in 1999, and the new owners decided to ax everything except the transmitter processors. Development stopped short. I kept on using Audicy for TVCs, corporate, and short indie films until 2005. Then I had to switch, to keep up with technology...

In the early 70s ('72? '73?) I wouldn't record voice-over without a Kepex and GainBrain in the line. But that was in the luxury of booth recordings with a standard mic distance and quiet room, and big monitor speakers in the control room.

We had one of them in Massachusetts a few years ago. A 'big Hollywood producer' who 'preferred to keep a low profile, which is why nobody ever heard of him' was going to build a facility in a town south of Boston. The town bought into it, there was some kind of land and financing deal, and the state dutifully sent out press releases. Friends asked me when I was going to move down there. Nothing happened.

Usually - but not always - there'll be more than one clip that need the same processing. So at least in my workflow, they go onto their own track, which can then be processed as a channel (not a mix), and then combined with the dialog premix. The processing isn't printed to the track unless there's a darned good reason, in which case there's also a mirror track. But this, by the way, is eq/filtering, NR, and specialized things like reverb reduction. Not normalization, which usually shouldn't be done at all unless it's necessary to make the mix conform with a loudness regulation. Normalizing individual clips is scary, since it'll make the background level jump around... Occasionally a specific clip will need processing (like, for a specific time-limited noise to be 'painted out' with Retouch or RX)... in which case a muted, unprocessed version clip goes onto a nearby track first, in sync. But YMMV.

Are you talking about general purpose computer recording, or a clean machine running specialized production sound software (eg, Boom Recorder)?

99% of the time I use reverb to make natural sounding tails to unnatural sounding dialogue edits... Have you tried just cutting to a few frames of clean roomtone after a truncating edit? I've found this works fine most times -- there isn't technical silence but it still sounds like it could be natural, so the ear fills in the missing tail based on context. That saves having to muddy up the dialog with electronic reverb on top of whatever the boom picked up.

Well, it's only "half" the movie. Hard drives are a much bigger half.

(* -- or worse, is it the future of 'opposition research' by dishonest political operatives?) New NPR web app breaks thousands of newscasts into very short written phrases, lets you slide them around on a screen, and then assembles the resulting soundfile: Pope recalls whistle-blowers: dont-play-with-your-news.mp3 http://dont-play-with-your-news.com/. Requires hand-held device or emulation from your desktop browser.

Interesting web app: custom assembles a :30 loop of tone, gathered from close to 50,000 NPR programs, and layered/mixed in surround. http://silent-sky.com. You'll need to access it from a handheld device, or if you're using a desktop browser, reset the user agent that the site sees. (I've been doing it from Safari, set to emulate an iPad under IOS 9.3... when I do that, Safari lets me download the sound to my hard drive.) From the site: About five percent of radio news is silent, the short breaths and pauses we faintly hear. I’ve taken the last 6 years of NPR hourly news broadcasts and collected every such moment of silence, whisper & human breath — a total of nearly a million tiny clips. Silent Sky generates a unique compilation based on these silences for every visitor. Each compilation is released only once, its selection of silences is played only for that visitor. Each compilation is 30 seconds long and contains 350 silences on average, layered in 6 tracks of surround sound. Make a tape recording of the sound of the stars moving. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and give it out to the people on the street. — Yoko Ono Silent Sky is a project by Gregor Hochmuth...

All Gone! Everything either has been sold, given to worthy newbies in our industry, or contributed to an inner-city kids' facility that has a media production suite. I suspect I'll also be recruited to run hardware classes...

Soundflower is spotty on new Macs. I've switched to Loopback (Rogue Amoeba); seems to do all the tricks I need... particularly when coupled with AU Lab (free Mac app, in your Utilities folder).

The commercial magazines aren't helping. They used to have expert tutorials and useful case studies. Now, since NewBay has taken over most of the titles in film and broadcast, the "tutorials" are thinly disguised ads for whoever is buying space. "Case studies" are a paragraph about the workflow, and a big pile of "I used products x and y. Couldn't have done it without them!" I realize the business side of magazine publishing has gotten scary. But it's not helping our industry.

Studio timecode DAT decks in very good condition: Otari DTR90, Fostex D25. Record / insert / assemble, lots of other features. DA98 DTRS in almost good condition ... has trouble loading. Doremi V1 Hard Disk Video Recorder [SD] in good working condition. Unusual Sony PVW2800 with AFM mod: Uses BVW cards to record/play all 4 tracks. Head clogged. Random AES3 cables (Gepco/Neutrik). (I put these here rather than WTB/WTS forum, because I'm not selling. I'm giving away, since I'm moving my studio. The only hitch: you have to pick up in Boston. Before the end of July. Reply by forum mail or email. )

Of course there's also Studiohub, used in a lot of stations and available from almost any broadcast supplier.

Really? Boom and lav for a radio show? Back in the 1930s we got into the habit of using mic stands for radio... You might also be interested that their description of job duties is copied directly from http://creativeskillset.org/job_roles/3845_boom_operator_film I differ with ptalsky, however: there are times when it's appropriate to give a client your checking account number and bank routing... I've had lots of jobs paid by transfer from the client's account. Sex and age aren't needed for bank transfers, however... and AFAIK, asking them on a US job application can get you into serious legal trouble. Which, I'm sure, doesn't bother the CL advertiser.

I've walked out on precisely two political spots, where I was told 'the candidate wants to express position x' -- how politics is supposed to work -- and then proceeded to sling the worst kind of misleading mud. If I believe that my contribution has any worth at all, then I can't sit still for having a small part of my art cause people to vote one way for the wrong reasons. The producer 1) said 'well, we just get someone else'. I resisted the temptation to say 'yeah, but they won't be as good.' 2) never called me again. No loss.

I had to switch from production sound to nothing but post years ago, when I was still young enough to run & gun a docy, but my bones had started to develop problems. I really missed the fun and excitement of working with a crew and actors on something scripted. Now, however, I'm old and gray... and I can keep working whenever I want. It's all sit-down, indoors. (In fact, I'm building a small post suite in the condo we're buying for retirement.)

Looks something like a Western Electric 639 directional dynamic... The ad is from 1940, but heck: we had one at the studio where I worked in 1970!

Funny thing about the unpredictability of this stuff. Back in my Kraft-dinner days, I built an advertising sound studio across the street from the office tower with the biggest concentration of FM/TV transmitters in downtown Boston. To save money, I used mostly prosumer equipment and a handmade unbalanced patchbay. The only nod to proper noise control was a fat audio ground bus, and telescoping shields on the longer cables. Never had a problem. And the studio was so successful I built two more rooms using the same principles. Now that I'm older, know better, and can afford topnotch gear (which is all digital interconnect, anyway) I realize how lucky I was. I don't want to make the same mistakes and let karma catch up with me.

I'm considering moving my home (and elaborate setup) to a location about 500' from a 33kV high tension power line. I've found plenty of literature pro and con on health effects... but nothing on equipment. I'm worried about low level noise in balanced mics and preamps, and in the monitor chain. I couldn't find anything while searching the forums. Anybody have any experience or leads?

Audio steganography is pretty well developed. It can be applied automatically, and can carry actual data identifying a print or anything else. But as Minister points out, it is (or should be) inaudible. Thus it doesn't have be done in a mix theater or approved by a director or conflict with the sfx stem. Just about every major market radio station uses transparent, automated watermarking to identify their program stream for Nielsen audience-rating sample listeners, who carry a pager-sized gadget that hears the tones while the people are listening to the station. (Don't get me started on how the watermarking has recently gotten less transparent and more audible. I'm on the Voltair development team.)

There was also a mechanical "CCD" delay device for reverb in early electronic organs. As I understand it, a rotating arm swept over a circular bank of contacts, connected to capacitors that slowly discharged. When a key was pressed, voltage flowed through the arm and charged the cap. When the key was released, the arm read the voltage... which slowly faded down as you moved from one cap to the next. I'd seen a description of this a long time ago, but can't find the reference any more, so I'm not sure of the operation. Or why the organ company chose this instead of a variable RC circuit. It's possible (though highly doubtful) that the arm swept quickly enough to preserve waveforms instead of envelopes.

There are some clients who, no matter how much you like them personally, are just unprofitable to keep working for. Either they take advantage of your 'friendship' and nickel-and-dime you, or they expect too many extras (unbilled hours, unusual services that end up being time- or health-wasters). It's always hard to say no, because you know they're a constant source of bookings. Low budget, painful bookings... but at least they're cash flow. And there's always the promise of better, full-budget jobs just around a mythical corner. At some point, you may begin to realize you're better than this. And that mythical corner has never come. Turning down their bottom-feeding jobs might cost you immediate bookings, but it also frees you up to pursue better gigs. In the long run, losing these clients can be an investment in your own business. I started resigning clients decades ago, when I had a multi-room downtown facility. The full-time employees and I would vote on who was the most hassle, and -- if I could make the business case for losing them -- my job would be to take that client to lunch and explain how 'creative differences' meant they could be happier elsewhere. It cost us some hours short-term, but helped the reputation and in the long run, didn't hurt the bottom line. My most recent resignation was about a year ago. Producer kept calling with cheapo jobs and eventually got the message.

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