TheBlimp

Similar in the regard of the "burn the bridge" aspect - unsimilar in other regards. I will be available for future gigs under the condition of 50% advance payment. Sumthin like that.

I got a call from a producer last week, told me I was recommended to her and they were doing this super movie, funded by two major culture TV channels, they would shoot on two Alexas, etc. They needed a local guy w/o gear as sound utility, as sound mixer and boom op were already flewn in, yadda yadda. I said, sure - I charge so and so much. To which she replied "but we just need a sound utility"... (as if that would imply utility work should be for free). To which I kindly replied I'm too busy to work for free, but I took the time to set her up with a student who agreed to do it. Maybe I should charge commission fee in the future.

Robot, I hope this works out as promised by the client. Would be neat. I'm in a similar "burn the bridges" position... one client is not paying me. The money keeps pouring in in tiny amounts, but only when I harrass them. After promising several times they'd pay the complete rest sum "this week", "next week" and so on, I showed up at their office to talk about it in person, waited for about half an hour and had to leave with noone speaking to me. They said they were in a meeting. I must confess, I really didn't care about the meeting at that point. If I owe someone money, I'll take a few minutes of whatever precious time for them. If I can't pay a bill out of the business account, I'll pay it from my private account and do the appropriate bookkeeping. Nothing esoteric. I treat my clients with utmost respect, but I can only take so much before seeing red. The day after the "waiting session" at the office they sent me a kinda surprised email, stating that they dropped yet another partial payment. I slept over it and told myself everything's going to be okay - but upon re-reading their mail I responded to them that I'm not willing to accept this kind of behaviour. If that's the end of the relationship, so be it. I guess I'd rather be known as the guy who collects his money than the guy you whom you can put at the end of the pay list. Maybe it wasn't the smartest move, but I feel I need to keep my integrity here. If I'm proven wrong, I'll have to take it as a lesson in business behaviour and... move on. You live and learn.

Hm yes I can imagine smaller projects having a more flexible workflow. It might as well be that I'm trying to be too flexible, haha, since I'm doing this mainly as a one man gig and I sometimes don't know which hat I'm wearing at the moment... the producers in me keeps giving orders to the director and the dialog editor is sitting in the same room telling the picture editor which takes must be used, but the colorist is concerned about the blown out highlights of the scene with the great dialogue. Next project will be considerably smaller, shot to script. I'll be a happy fella when this is done. Phew.

I do "noisy stuff" 95% of the time, so I didn't bother much beyond doing some test recordings of my voice and it seemed totally fine to my (not too critical) ears. But I did let the shower run steaming hot for about 20 mins and did some testing under sauna-like conditions. Performed flawlessly. But I know this i no real world testing

I'll never get used to one specific cam op, he's a good guy, but sometimes he's driving me nuts (especially when I'm doing a one man gig): Director calls for sound, and somewehere inbetween hitting record, getting myself and the boom in position - yes, it can take a second or two - and before I can annonce sound speed, I hear the cam op: "...and rolling!"

The nice folks at Rycote have sorted my issue out. A+++ on their support!!!

Wow, great input, thanks a lot! Yes, that's what I sometimes have to do - when in doubt, I look at the audio spearately, forget about picture and see if if there's spare material for smoothing with editing and/or whether it can be NRed good enough. Slows the picture editing down a lot, but I will have a good time when it comes to audio post, I guess Track splitting for type of shot: Genius! Where appropriate, it should be a real timesaver. Picture edit is getting along, but every so often I fee there's no way to make a smooth thing out of what at this stage looks like fragmented mess. Think i need a break. Will dig through the forum a bit. Have a good one, everyone!

Great stuff! I also use a massive hosts file (one that gets regularly updated is "http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm") - dunno if DNT+ is doing the exact same thing, but i just installed it, too. Better be safe than sorry, no?

Yup, great book. I like his take on things. Emotion, story... then the rest. Cut on change of idea or emotion. A movie is like a dream. Etc. Maybe I should pin the six rules behind my monitors - sometimes I get hung up in detail and forget about more important things. We'll see, I don't expect the movie to be a hit, I'll consider it a success if we make it to one or two small festivals at all, but I'll sure be doing my best. I have friends and colleagues who are more into the visual side of things than me and they all offered their help, which will sure come in handy to get fresh feedback from time to time.

Thanks for the great input! I really don't mean to treat the audio stepmotherly, as I'm much too attached to it, and one of my goals during shoot was to make a doco with a "deep" soundtrack - or, at least, the best I could do, haha. I have about 30 hrs of wild sound alone. What I mean to say is: If there's a plane overhead, I'll have to live with it, as long as dialogue is intelligible and important things are said. Different from a scenic shoot. If I need to do a picture cut in the effing middle of a car pass-by, I'll mask it as good as I can. Things that would make me normally call for a cut during a scenic shoot. If one of the protagonists is mumbling away unintelligibly, because he's drunk out of his mind, missing three front teeth and and no native speaker... so be it, because it's important as is. We shot in super noisy locations, under freeway bridges, industrial terrains, but I think I got myself covered well enough regarding dialogue quality. I showed some raw footage around got asked how we got such clear audio, considered the circumstances. I really don't know... I made my boom op point the mic in the right direction? No super wide dialogue shots in 16:9? Haha. But the aforementioned things I have to live with - it's all first takes and for picture edit I'm only choosing material where dialogue is "good enough" - but it may as well be I'm just in over my head by trying to walk the line between reality show style and a more sophisticated approach. Maybe I can upload a rough cut of a scene in the near future and get some input based on what's really there, instead of me just blabbering away. Back to work. Further wild discussions highly appreciated! And please excuse if I tend to express myself clumsily, as this is not my mother tongue. Cheers, Mike

Good points re. the "reality" considerations from both of you - I mean, how much does one need to alter the original material to give it verisimilitude - in a medium that doesn't capture reality anyway. Ethical questions arise. Excuse the bad joke. I guess editing one's own material is both a blessing and a curse. Advantage is, I know the stuff inside out, and so far it's been easy to find the bits and pieces for a scene, but on the other hand I'm prone to not to seeing the woods for the trees - hmmm. Normally I do audio post for other people who just drop me a locked edit, and I have to sort it all out. This time, I can select material that I consider good enough, with hopefully not too much emphasis on audio (still, in some scenes the audio is more important than the picture - sorry, cinematographers), which should save me plenty time in audio post, as I already know what will be an easy fix or not. Hm, how would you go about dialogue edits / splitting to tracks? I think that if I it sounds okay enough/coherent, I needn't do it as meticulously as with scenic material, example - I can't/mustn't be bothered by minor room tone changes as I usually would. And maybe only do track splits when I have to, e.g. have to EQ one speaker in a longer take. But I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Hello all, seeking for a little advice on reality stuff: I'm currently editing a documentary I shot over the course of the last 1.5 yrs., my first own project with funding, we had a little team, but I also had to do some one-man-band stuff, with the result of: either sound or picture are good, haha - but I'm positive about the coverage, 35 hrs of logged material, Interview transcripts are done, currently in the very early editing stages of the "easier" scenes. Getting along decently. One of my headaches is, of course... sound. But this time the other way around, as in: On the shorts I usually do audio post for, I try and go by the book (namely Purcell's) as much as I can. Splitting tracks, room tone bridges, stem mixing, etc. But I'm wondering to which degree I should/have the need for/or even the luxury of getting down into such detail with a rather rough 1h doco. Rough in the sense of - we have 3 former homeless guys visiting their old spots in the woods, drinking and stumbling, doing a lot of talking, and we won't try and polish it up or bring it down to easily consumable level by putting string sections underneath and have a voice of god narrative. Mainly, I'm looking for a decent workflow when getting to the audio post - I'm a bit afraid I might otherwise lose to much time over it, e.g. by fixing things that would be considered no good in a scenic movie, but maybe would be considered perfectly fine in a reality doco. What should I consider "good enough"? I even considered judging dialogue by listening to the edited scenes over a set of old TV speakers, and if it's, erhm... okay, just to live with it, move on and only do minimal sweetening later on. How do you experienced guys go about reality doco sound?

Still running 10.6.8 on my BigMac and 10.4.11 on my iBook. Totally happy. My colleagues who are prone to installing fresh OS releases (only because that new OS has better support for their iphone or the like) tend to curse an awful lot, as in: iCalendar syncing with iPhone is up - but FCP and PT are down. Haha. I'll only install Lion and beyond when there's no other way out (as in: if i need to buy a new Mac that won't run anything older than that new OS). I can't see any advantage in Lion, I have seen and tried it on other peoples computers and I can't be bothered. Not a bit. Make it fast, make it stable, and don't try to to sell me what is basically a telephone OS. If this trend goes on, my next editing machine will be a Hackintosh. Not for the sake of saving money, but just because I can't see myself shove any more money down a company's throat which has turned into pure evil. My 2p. Sorry for the rant.

Without me, the mic would be nothing!!!

finally received feedback from the editor (about the crazy busy shoot i mentioned earlier) - he's super happy with the Sanken CS3e results

i think that was what i was trying to say but took me half a page, ha - i think any additional analysis data would be great for surgical precision processing, but sometimes you don't have of such discrete extra snippets, and that's why it would be great to have the tool already "know" what is considered good vs. bad, let's say in a worst case scenario. would be really good to have a combination of standard and advanced processing options at hand: a standard noise removal tool approach, combined with an intelligent module which has an intrinsic knowledge of "good" signal's characteristics (but should be able to do additional learning). the different processing options should be able to be combined to get the best of both worlds (i.e., to mix the "standard" noise print approach and the amount of "brain" work). even if the tool would concentrate on the human voice alone, it would need a major bulk of "brains" for the tool itself and maybe an intelligent database, because the human voice can take on so many shapes... i mean, one would have to be able to tell the brain what to look for: a whispered voice will have totally different chracteristics from a singing voice, let alone to think of the many shapes the human voice comes in with even standard speech. looking forward to see what you guys will come up with. really inneressing.

Exciting!

Hello Denis, you didn't come over as enervated at all, I guess I was just overcautious in my wordings What would be super cool, and please excuse me if it sounds lame or crazy, cause i have not the slightest idea of how such a thing could be achieved, but lately I have been thinking of a noise reduction system that 100% focuses on vocals/speech. Like, in... take a noise print (say, voice print) of clean speech, speaker x. Then compare speaker x print to a "noise alone" print. Then be able to remove noise (adaptively) from a contaminated speech recording, where the system itself would know what not to touch (as it knows the voice print of speaker x). Even if we don't have a noise print, we could still tell the system to remove anything that is not speaker x (to some degree). Like a reversal of the Noise reduction systems we have at the moment. I'm not sure if this is understandable. Basically, I mean an advanced noise reduction algorithm that could work by comparing several prints (remove this, but leave that alone), as opposed to the standard algorithms where we have only one noise print (remove this, but do it blindly). Of course, it would be neat if the system would be able to analyze different selections of different input files and store them in a database, and then also be able to process them in a user defined matrix, as in: voiceprint1 compared to noiseprint2 would result in a combined analysis file (leave this alone but remove that), that then could be used to do the final noise reduction on the actual file, namely the contaminated recording. Maybe the system itself would need to "know" the human voice in all its shapes and shades of expression, or have an abstract "understanding" of the human voice. That's what I think would be the neuronal part. So, one would need all the basics of a super neat noise reduction system with all the standard parameters, plus the advanced (neuronal?) features aforementioned. I think what I basically mean is a cocktailparty effect noise reduction, where we can tell the system to concentrate on "this signal alone" and ignore the other stuff. Or at least, to some degree. Of course, matters are much more complex than that and it's all very far over my head... - I'm drifting away here, but I always wondered if something like that wold be possible some day. If it sounds like a good idea, I can send my PP adress.

Hello Denis, thanks for the reply! I can imagine it to be a bit enervating to have all kind of requests coming in while the priority is developing major versions of the application, and I understand most parameters are too complex for convential naming. Standard parameter for Adaption would be super neat, though ;-) I'll try the visual approach as suggested. I'm sure looking forward to future incarnations of the software.

no comment

either that or bad judgement: someone is rather "keeping" the money because they "feel it's not that bad". well I think i'd better get used to this kind of stuff or face some major frustration in the future. but i'd rather get used to it and enjoy the good sides of the job. sorry for going OT.

Have to chime in here - during our last (a commercial) shoot on RED, there was great communication, cam dept. and director were concerned with sound, as there were lots of dialogue, so the fans were kept down, single short takes, great silent dolly moves, everything super solid. Then the producing agency thought they could do audio post themselves. Now they have a great looking clip with constant abrupt changes in roomtone (mainly the fan noise), which they tried to cover up by adding even more noise. I delivered them a solid roomtone track and even explained how to use it, but the finished commercial sounds as if they slammed the roomtone track on top, plus some additional noisy ambiance track. It makes me sick to take good care during shoot and then have someone who is even more amateurish than me mess it up. And I bet the guy who did it charges three times my daily rate. Ah, whatever, just a little rant.

Hello Denis, I think you guys are on to something, but for "surgical" use, one would really need a better translation of the parameters in standard audio speak, most of all the "Adaptation" would benefit a real-world related parameter, say... seconds. That would make it much easier to take a rough guess in which direction to even turn the dial. What are the implemented min/max values? It think we audio people tend to think in orders of magnitude and such. But I don't want to be a smart ass, it could always be I totally misunderstand things about the app. Keep up the good work.

For quite a while I had an additional install of OS 10.5 on a spare partition so I could still use the MB2. A bit cumbersome, but why not.