Monsters from the Id 怪獣大悪脳

Today I had to print out 4 reels of FX and BG cuesheets from Nuendo and it really couldn't have been easier. The editor had one session per reel with everything in it. Predubs A through D were backgrounds---E, F and G were hard effects. Initially I tried printing the whole session in one pass in Nuendo 2.2 in Mac OS X, but it kept crashing on the the last page. I switched to printing a couple predubs at a time and from that point on everything went very smooth.

Nuendo has group tracks. Click on plus sign in the group track labeled "AFX" and it will open revealing all the AFX tracks. By clicking the solo button on the AFX group track, all AFX tracks are soloed. If you solo tracks, only those tracks will be printed on the cuesheet.

I soloed predubs A through D---the BGs. Under the "Project" menu I selected "Track Sheets". A new windowed opened and I saw my cuesheet. I clicked on the "More" button to show all the options. By default the cuesheet is a vertical US letter (8.5" x 11") page. I selected "Page Setup" from the "File" menu to change that to a horizontal Tabloid (11" x 17").

Back in the cuesheets (track sheet) window, I turned off the timecode column from the pulldown menu, filled in the blanks for the name of the cuesheet and editor, and dragged the track width until everything fit on two pages across. Then I selected "Print" from the "File" menu.

So amazingly easy.

The cuesheets look pretty good. If I had my way, I'd make a few minor tweaks to the layout. I think there should be a space between the track header and the first cue. Likewise there should be a space between the cue in-point and the description. Plus there are a couple of line-wrapping issues that need to be resolved, but considering I was able to print out those four reels in three separate passes each in less than 10 minutes, I didn't care.

This was such a huge difference from my usual struggle with Tape. Plus with OS X 10.3's built-in "Print to PDF" option, I was able to save great looking digital files of all my cuesheets that I could email to the dub stage for safety.

If I have some time tomorrow, I might investigate and see how hard it is to open a Pro Tools 5.1/5.3/6.x session in Nuendo and print the cuesheets from there. It might be possible to Pro Tools 6.4.1's DigiTranslator to save an OMF file with no media. Open that in Nuendo and print.

Posted by Jon at 9:46 PM | Permalink

Pro Tools 6.4.1 is the pinnacle of achievement on the Mix|24 hardware and you've just finished cutting the most amazing piece of sound effects work in your life. Now it's time to layback your session to another drive for dubbing. So you select "Save Session Copy In" from the File menu, choose the other hard drive, check the box to copy audio files and your cranking away. The only problem is that part way through, the copy craps out with a -37 error. WTF?

A -37 error usually happens when you try to copy two or more pieces of media with the exact same name into one folder. You've got duplicated audio. Two files have the exact same name sitting in two different places on your master cutting drive(s). They are both referenced in your editing tracks in the Pro Tools session. When you try to combine everything under one Audio Files folder with a "Save Session Copy In" the copy quits when it tries to copy the duplicate file and returns the -37 error. Those two files might be identical in every that counts for Pro Tools---name, Unique ID, length---but they don't have to be. They could be completely different sounds but have the same name. Look back over all the shows you've cut. How many "Applause 1" or "Footstep 27" do you have in you library?

Thankfully there's a pretty quick fix.

1. Open the master session. This will set things like timecode and I/O's to the settings you're looking for. It's also your chance to double-check that all your fades are created and that you're not missing any audio files.
2. Save and close the session.
3. Create a new session on the layback drive using whatever settings you need---16 bit or 24 bit, 44.1KHz or 48KHz, etc. Make sure that "Last Used" is selected for the I/O.
4. Select "Import Session Data" from the File menu.
5. Choose your master session from the other hard drive.
6. Make sure to choose "Copy media" from the audio pull-down menu.
7. Highlight all tracks for import (or at least all tracks that you want to layback---you might have more in your master session). Make sure that you're importing "All" data and that it's from the master playlist.
8. Click the "Import" button.
9. Wait while all your tracks and media are copied to the new drive. You can watch the process in your Task Window. Any duplicates will show up as -37 errors at the bottom of the Task Window. The regions will still show up in your tracks but they will be blue because there is no online media associated with them. Everything else will be copied to the new drive.
10. Save and close the layback Pro Tools session.
11. In the Finder, open the layback hard drive and open the folder of the layback session you just closed.
12. Rename the "Audio Files" folder to something else like "Audio Files 2".
13. Reopen your layback session in Pro Tools.
14. Pro Tools will warn you that there is missing audio. These are just the files that are now in the "Audio Files 2" folder. Select "Manually Find" and check "Rebuild Fades" if necessary.
15. The duplicated media that didn't copy the first time will be found on your master drive. A new "Audio Files" folder will be created and the duplicates will be copied into it.
16. In the Relink Window, only check your layback drive. Even better, only check the layback session folder in the layback drive. Highlight all missing audio files and click the "Fink Links" button. Click "Commit Links" when all files are found.
17. When all the copying and relinking is done in your Task Window, save and close your session.
18. Reopen it to make sure that everything was copied. Be sure to choose "Select -> Offline Regions" from the Audio menu above the Region List to make sure that you're not missing any files.
19. You might have to repeat at step 10 if there are 3 or more files with the same name in the session. Go ahead and repeat as many times as it takes to get all files copied to your layback drive.
20. Your "Audio Files" folder will probably only have a few files in it while "Audio Files 2" might have hundreds. This doesn't really matter, but for the look of things, you might want to rename "Audio Files" to "Audio Files dupes" and "Audio Files 2" to "Audio Files". It's all up to you. If you rename any folders, you should probably reopen the session one last time and "Manually Find" any files that are now "lost".

Yes, it's a lot of steps to describe, but I think you'll agree that it's not very hard. This definitely works with Pro Tools 6.4.1. I would imagine that it's the same under 6.4 with HD hardware but since I don't have that, I'm not 100% positive. If I remember correctly 6.2.x and lower always asked you where to save audio and fade files on import. In that case you could just create a new folder in the Save Window and save things there.

Posted by Jon at 7:56 AM | Permalink

Today I received several OMF 2.0 files from the picture department with embedded audio. Under certain circumstances, the timecode of the Pro Tools session generated from the OMF was incorrect so all the material was out of sync.

I'm not sure what version of software is being used on the Avid, but the movie was shot with 3-perf film. Since this throws off all the footage counters, we are cutting in timecode. OMF 2.0 files were generated for me but with all the media, they were going to be larger than 2 GB. To remedy this, the assistant split each reel in half, usually around the 10 minute mark, and sent me OMFs for each reel.

I opened each OMF in Pro Tools 6.4.1 with the built-in DigiTranslator. After conversion, I immediately changed the timecode from 24 frame to 29.97 pulldown. This is what I always to with OMFs. However, I found that the second OMF, the one that would start somewhere around 10 minutes into the reel, would always be out of sync. Sometimes only 1 frame early but in a few instances, up to 6 frames early. The first OMF for each reel, the one that started evenly on the hour, was always in sync.

After much trial and error, I found that if I left both OMFs in 24 frame timecode. Combined them, and then changed to the combined session to 29.97 pulldown, everything stayed in sync. For some reason, if an OMF doesn't start at an evenly on the hour of timecode like 01:00:00:00 or 02:00:00:00 and you attempt to change the timecode in Pro Tools without first resetting the start time of the session to an even hour and maintaining timecode, then the session will fall out of sync. It's possible that the version of Avid software and the fact that it was a 3-perf film might also have something to do with this. I haven't had a chance to experiment more.

Posted by Jon at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My recent experiences with doing almost all of my sound assisting on my laptop with an Mbox got me thinking about other things I could do to expand on that model. One big sticking point was SCSI. Firewire is awesome, but in the post-production sound world, SCSI is still king---if for no other reason than the Tascam MMR-8 and MMP-16 still deal exclusively with Kingston-style removable SCSI drives.

You can cut all you want on firewire hard drives or even on your internal---those SATA drives in the G5s are screaming fast---but you will still often need to layback you finished sessions to a SCSI drive for dubbing. Or you might get some SCSI drives with stems from the stage.

The idea of moving away from SCSI is even more tempting when you consider that PowerMac G5s only have 3 PCI slots. The old G4s had 4. This was perfect for 2 Pro Tools cards, a digital picture card and a SCSI card. What do you do with 3 slots? Go back to an expansion chassis? That's a possibility. Run only a core Pro Tools system with 1 card? Also a possibility. But how about dumping your SCSI card? That's a much cooler idea. Especially since RATOC makes a couple of cool SCSI without a SCSI card solutions.

I picked up both the FR1SX Firewire to SCSI adapter and the U2SCX USB2 to SCSI cable. So far I'm loving what I'm seeing. I've used the FR1SX quite a bit. It works perfectly with removable hard drives. You get speeds comparable to regular Firewire 400---about a gigabyte copied per minute. I've also used it with a DLT4000 tape drive and had slightly faster rates than I did directly through SCSI. It's an old SCSI-1 device so it's not particularly fast, around 85 to 87 MB per minute in Retrospect 5 under OS X. With the FR1SX, I was getting between 90 and 95 MB per minute. Different types of audio backup of different speeds so I wouldn't count on it always being faster but I think I can easily say that it's the same speed as SCSI. You're not losing anything.

Under OS X, it's perfect. You turn on your device. Attach the FR1SX. Plug in the Firewire cable and it's available. A SCSI hard drive will mount up just like as if it were Firewire. You can even hot swap by unplugging and replugging the Firewire cable. The only problem I've seen it that it only supports one SCSI ID. So even though the carrier that I have it attached to has 2 bays, only the top one (the first in the chain) works. The FR1SX doesn't support SCSI chaining. But if you're just using it for laybacks or to copy off a SCSI drive, you probably don't need more than one at a time.

I haven't tested the U2SCX. I can't see that it would be any different. The Pro Tools system I'm working on only has USB1 ports so it would be much slower (1.5 MB per second maximum through-put at USB1 versus 60 MB per second at USB2). But Aluminum PowerBooks and G5s come with USB2 so it could be very viable there. The webpage for the U2SCX says that it support SCSI chaining of 7 devices but it mentions that you have to be running the RATOC driver in Windows. I don't know if they have a Mac driver and frankly I like the fact that I don't have to install any new drivers in OS X.

If you are going to get one or both of these devices, it would probably be a good idea to kick in for the power adapter. They don't need to be powered if your SCSI device has Termination Power, but it's probably better to be safe. Another thing you'll need is a SCSI adapter or two. Both devices have an HD50 Male SCSI-2 connector. You'll want to pick up an HD50 Female SCSI-2 to HD68 Male SCSI-3 adapter for Wide SCSI drives and an HD50 Female SCSI-2 to Centronics 50 Male SCSI-1 adapter for any old devices that you might have.

Posted by Jon at 5:38 PM | Permalink

You know how much I dislike Tape, the only program to print cuesheets for Pro Tools sessions, right? Well, I still don't like it but I did get it running in Classic in OS X. (And finally getting it running really did prove what a piece of shit software it really is.) Here's how:

1. Download the latest version of Tape. (1.5.2b47 as of this post)
2. Download a copy of Pro Tools Free if you don't have a version of Pro Tools 5.x installed.
3. Run the Pro Tools Free installer. If you already have Pro Tools 5.x installed you can skip to step 5.
4. A folder called "Digidesign" will be created in the root level of your hard drive. You can put this where ever you like. Your OS 9 Applications folder would probably be a good choice.
5. Run the Tape installer.
6. Select "Cue Sheet (USB)" and click "Install".
7. Choose a good place to install Tape like /Applications (Mac OS 9) and let it do its thing.
8. Run the installer again but select "OSX Support" this time.
9. Choose the same install place you did last time.
10. Open the newly-installed "Tape Folder" and run "Install OMS 2.3.8". If you already have OMS installed and configured because you have a working Pro Tools 5.x on your computer, you can skip to step 19.
11. This will put a folder called "Opcode" in the root level of your hard drive.
12. In /Opcode/OMS Applications run OMS Setup.
13. Go through the standard setup options for OMS, scanning the ports and whatnot. You will probably just end up with three items: IAC Driver, Studio Patches pgm chg, and QuickTime Music.
14. Save this setup in an appropriate place like in the same folder as OMS Setup.
15. In OMS Setup, select "Prefereces" from the "Edit" menu.
16. Uncheck "When AppleTalk is on, ask about turning it off" and click "OK".
17. Quit OMS Setup.
18. You can move the "Opcode" folder to your OS 9 Applications folder if you like.
19. Go back into your "Tape Folder". Open the "Utilities" folder and run "OSX Activator".
20. This will install HASP drivers for OS 9 and OS X.
21. Drag "OSX Activator" to your Dock or put an alias to it on your desktop. You'll be using it a lot.
22. In /System Folder/Preferences/Tape Preferences Folder/Tape Translators, take out the Listener application and put it in the Tape Preferences Folder. (This is part of the full Post Utilities spotting program and not necessary for cuesheets. If you're using the full Post Utilities, don't do this step.)
23. Restart your computer.

You are now setup to run Tape in Classic under OS X. Any time you want to actually run Tape, you have to follow these steps:

1. Plug in your Tape dongle to an open USB port.
2. Run Classic.
3. Run the OSX Activator.
4. Run Tape.

Rick Steele, the guy who wrote this wonderful program, told me that you had to set Classic to "Start Classic When You Login" in your System Preferences. I did a bunch of testing on my laptop and found that I didn't need to do that. If your copy of Tape is only running in Demo mode after following the steps above, I would first try restarting your computer and doing the 4 steps above. If that doesn't work, you can try setting the preference that Rick suggested and restarting.

The biggest problem that I've encountered so far is that it doesn't work with older dongles. I don't know at what point Rick changed the software on the dongle but if you follow all the steps above and my restart and "Start Classic" suggestions and it still doesn't work then I think it's the dongle. Rick told me that some dongles might have to be flashed to work. I've encountered 3 so far where this is the case. Only the one that I just bought from him 2 days ago works for me. (I know. I hate this program and I still spent money on it. Like I said, there's no other option right now.) I don't know what the process is for flashing the dongles. I don't know if it's something you can do yourself or if you have to send them to Rick. I emailed him about this yesterday and I'm still waiting to hear back.

One other point that Rick strongly suggested: make a copy of any session before opening it in Tape. As he said, "I don't want to be responsible for my program ruining your session."

I think you can see why I hate this program. The process that you have to go through to just to print out some lines and characters on some pieces of paper is utterly ridiculous. Having to not only have a full version of Pro Tools 5.x but also OMS installed on a computer that quite possibly doesn't even boot into OS 9 (like my laptop) is the most retarded software requirement ever. This is obviously because he has two levels of functionality---cuesheets only and then the full spotting, assembling, yadda yadda mess. They need to be separated. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to print cuesheets on a computer with nothing on it but OS 9 or OS X and a print driver. Open the file, give it a name and editor, change some font settings and go.

And this whole business of having to reinstall the HASP drivers every single time you want to run the program is foolish. If you go to Aladdin's website, the makers of HASP, you can see quite clearly that they fully support running Classic applications with HASP4 dongles in OS X. Soundminer and all the new Gallery software uses HASP4 dongles. The letters "HASP4" are clearly printed on them. Tape's dongle says "MacHASP". Obviously Rick is still using an old HASP development kit from 4+ years ago and is too cheap to upgrade to the latest release. Consequently there is only partial support for these dongles in HASP OS X driver and we as the tormented end-users have to rerun the installer every time.

And his warning about not wanting to be responsible? That's utter crap too. When he told me this he actually said the problem is because Digidesign has released a buggy software development kit. Now I can't speak to whether or not Digi's SDK is buggy or not. But here's a novel approach for your damn Tape code: open the file as read-only! And then if you want to give support for editing the text of the regions in the Pro Tools session, write a temp file to the drive for this. Never change the original! I've never had a single day of formal programming instruction and even I could have figured that one out.

Posted by Jon at 10:27 AM | Permalink

Those of you who have dealt with Pro Tools and digital picture over the last couple of years may have already encountered this:

Digital Picture digitized on an Aurora Igniter videocard is not usable on a Pro Tools system with a DC30+ videocard running OS 9. Since the Igniter uses non-square pixels (720x486 or 360x243), the picture appears very squished on the DC30+ with its square pixels (640x480 or 320x240). The Aurora Fuse, the other videocard often used by Pro Tools in OS 9, doesn't have this problem as long as you use the 2.0.3 driver.

There is a fix for the DC30+ and it's called OS X. If you switch your system over to OS X, some version of Pro Tools 6 and use the DC30 Xact Driver, your DC30+ card will playback your Igniter digital picture at the proper aspect ratio. I just tested this out myself on Friday.

Unfortunately there still isn't an OS X driver for the Aurora Fuse. Those of you with this card looking to switch to Pro Tools 6 should probably just suck it up and plop down the $1000 for the Igniter. Obviously the DC30+ is a viable option with the 3rd-party driver, but since the card hasn't been manufactured for 4 or more years it's a crapshoot whether you can get your hands on one.

Posted by Jon at 8:35 AM | Permalink

Here's step-by-step instructions for loading digital picture for use in Pro Tools in that cool way that I briefly talked about the other day. I can't take credit for this one. The amazing Ron Eng came up with it. It definitely works with OS X 10.3.4, Pro Tools|24 Mix hardware, Pro Tools 6.2.3 software, Final Cut Pro 3, Adobe Premiere 4, Miro DC30+ videocard and DC30 Xact driver. I'm sure it works with newer versions of hardware and software like Pro Tools HD and an Aurora Igniter card, I just haven't tried it out myself.

1. Final Cut Pro must be set up to capture video from your video card at the recommended 1000 KB/sec and audio from the Digidesign hardware via the Core Audio driver. You will probably need to have audio from your videodeck coming in on Analog 1 and 2.
2. Make sure that your Universal Slave Driver or Sync I/O is set to pulldown and the sample rate that you're working in. You can run Pro Tools first and set that in the "Session Setup" window if you're not familiar with doing it on the hardware.
3. Make sure that you've quit Pro Tools. Core Audio cannot use Digidesign hardware while Pro Tools is running.
4. Run Final Cut Pro.
5. Select "Log and Capture" from the "File" menu.
6. Press play on your videodeck and click the "Capture Now" button in Final Cut Pro prior to the "Picture Start" frame.
7. Load the entire picture and press the Esc key to end capture.
8. Press Cmd-W to close the captured picture, saving and naming it appropriately.
9. Quit Final Cut Pro.
10. Run Adobe Premiere 4. This is a OS 9 application so you'll need Classic installed. It's the only video application I know that allows you to reconform digital video frames.
11. Open the digital picture that you just captured in FCP.
12. Find the first frame of picture. If you have an Academy Leader it will say "Picture Start". It might simply be an even hour of timecode or 0+00 of footage in the window burn.
13. Click the "In" button to set this frame to the in-point.
14. Select File -> Export -> Movie Segment.
15. Name and save the new digital picture file.
16. Select File -> Tools -> Conform Movie.
17. Choose the newly saved digital picture from the open dialog window.
18. Set the frame rate to 30 fps and click "Conform".
19. You are now good to go. You can throw out the original digital picture from Final Cut Pro.

The beauty of this method is that the audio and video tracks are in sync so the video file can be played back on any computer and it is completely usable. It could be used to spot ADR or cue Foley on a laptop. Since the picture is set to 30 fps is is compatible with Pro Tools 5.0 and 5.1.x---software which only has a joined video and audio pulldown setting. The audio tracks can be imported into any Pro Tools session by selecting "Import Audio From Current Movie" from the "Movie" menu. This audio will be in sync with all of your other film-speed material that is being pulled-down to video speed.

This method works great. If your audio and video are not in sync when you're done with the process, check that your sync device (USD or Sync I/O) is set to pulldown. If not, you'll have to reload. Otherwise the reconform probably didn't take. Run Adobe Premiere 4 again and repeat steps 16 to 18.

Posted by Jon at 4:31 PM | Permalink

Hey, hey party people. I'm typing up this entry in my brand-spankin' new copy of BBEdit 8. Perhaps you don't know this, but I love BBEdit. If I were still in third grade, some clever person would undoubtedly quip, "Then why don't you marry it?" That's how much I love BBEdit.

So of course typing this is hardly giving it a workout. If it had been released Friday I could have truly put it through its paces as I worked diligently on my site redesign. I will have to break it in while I try to slog my way through various PHP and Javascript methods of dealing with style sheets later this week.

Today was software update day for my workstation. Pro Tools 6.4.1. Soundminer 3.1.2 (b96). Change Note Assistant 1.0.2. Titan 3.1b11. I did verify that Adobe Premiere 6.5 does not properly support Core Audio in OS X. It won't work with the new official Pro Tools Core Audio Driver 6.4.1. Final Cut Pro will handle it however. I'll have to dig out my copy and put it on my system.

Shhhh. Here's a secret: Load picture digital picture in OS X in Final Cut Pro with audio via Core Audio through your Pro Tools hardware. Make sure your USD or Sync I/O is set to pulldown before-hand. When you're done open the picture in that old copy of Adobe Premiere 4 that you have lying around. (Come on, you know you do.) Trim the picture to start at 0 and export video clip or piece or whatever that option is. Use the Conform tool to conform the picture to 30 frames per second. You now have digital picture file with in-sync embedded worktracks that you can use to spot to on a laptop or whatever. It can also cut against it in Pro Tools 6.x or 5.3. It's also backwards compatible with 5.1.x. And you can use the Import Audio From Movie function to get video guide tracks into your session. Pretty sweet.

Tomorrow I'm back with the Universal folks.

Ooo! I just discovered something fun in BBEdit 8! Ok, those of you who used 7, might remember the screen flash that you would get if you typed a close parenthesis ) before the open (. In 8, you get a fun message that flashes on your screen. Go on. Give it a try.

Posted by Jon at 10:58 PM | Permalink

Digidesign has finally released the long-promised Pro Tools 6.4.1 software---the last version to support Pro Tools 24|Mix hardware. It requires a G4 PowerMac, OS X 10.3.4, and obviously Mix hardware.

I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. I have been using the unsupported Pro Tools 6.2.3 for a while now and I've been anxiously awaiting things like an officially supported Core Audio driver, sorted AudioSuite and TDM plug-in menus, +12 dB faders and the like. Unfortunately I think they're only offering breaking timecode loading with HD hardware. I was hoping to use it to load DATs.

Posted by Jon at 5:03 PM | Permalink

I encountered my first Mbox Pro Tools problem yesterday. I was converting a massive dialog session from BWF to SD2 via "Import Session Data" and it seemed to stall at the very end. I tried to force quit and it ended poorly. I had to hold down the power button to shut down my laptop and reboot. A second test wound up with the same result.

I wasn't sure what what causing it but I thought I could figure it out so I tried it one more time. This time I kept the Task Window open and the arrow on the process turned down so I could see the complete list of audio and fade files it was working with. Sure enough, as soon as the last audio file was reached the end of its conversion, Pro Tools hung again. This time however I fired up Terminal, which took a really long time. I was starting to suspect that maybe Pro Tools had managed to chew up all my processor cycles and was now stuck in loop and not freeing it up.

When I ran "top" from the command line, I was surprised to see 75% to 80% free CPU. But then I noticed that I was only showing 5MB of RAM free. When I went down to the Pro Tools process I saw that it had wound up with nearly 2GB of virtual ram. I don't have 2GB of physical ram in my computer so it had written a lot of stuff to the swap space on the hard drive. As I watched, that number slowly dropped. Eventually I was showing about 250MB of free RAM and suddenly Pro Tools came back to life.

Obviously I need to install some more RAM in my laptop.

Posted by Jon at 7:13 AM | Permalink

My regular digital audio workstation that I use for my job is a Pro Tools 24|Mix Plus. It's the old hardware, I know, but I haven't really needed to upgrade to HD. (Though that support for breaking timecode in the 6.4 software makes it awfully tempting. Loading production sound roll DATs would be much easier.)

I've also been the owner of an Mbox for a while now but I never used it very much. I bought it with the thought that I could do work at home if I wanted to, but the situation never arose where I decided to do so. I also bought the DV Toolkit to unlock the timecode and feet+frames options so that Pro Tools LE is nearly identical to my full system in the office. Plus at $1450 ($450 for the Mbox and $1000 for DV Toolkit) it's a far cry from $16K+ for a TDM system.

This job I'm working on over at Universal has me away from my main Pro Tools system that's set up at Fox. So since my Mbox and a pair of Sony MDR-7505 headphones don't take up that much more space in my bag, I've been bringing it to Universal and using it a lot and I'm really impressed. My zippy laptop is certainly a factor in this. I have a 15" Aluminum PowerBook at 1.25GHz. But still, I'm amazed at the amount of things I'm able to do as an assistant sound editor with an Mbox.

I can't load digital picture from videotapes since the editors use various MJPEG A cards (DC30+, Fuse, and Igniter) but if we were using DV picture with a box like from Canopus, I could. I can't print cuesheets because I can't get stupid Tape to work in OS X and my laptop doesn't boot into OS 9. And I can't deal with SCSI drives, but most of our editors I cutting off Firewire drives. (And if I really needed SCSI support, there are various SCSI PC cards I could use, or maybe even a Firewire to SCSI interface.)

But I can do everything else. It's really fantastic. Titan 3 works great. The DigiTranslator that comes with DV Toolkit converts my OMFs to Pro Tools sessions. Soundminer runs well. It is a viable alternative to a full-blown system.

Of course I could always do all the paperwork-related assistant things with Excel, Word and BBEdit. I'm reallying digging this.

Posted by Jon at 8:29 PM | Permalink

This program is the bane of my existence. Ugh! Tape is the worst piece-of-crap software I have ever had the misfortune of using. And I'm forced into it. There's just nothing else for printing cuesheets from Pro Tools.

The whole "OS X" support is a big effin' joke. I have tried on 4 different computers and cannot get it to work. Full of bugs, never out of beta and I have to own it. It totally sucks.

For years I used this other awful piece of software called Track-It. Thankfully it is no more. Why can't anyone write a real cuesheet program that works with Pro Tools?

Well today I discovered a handy little trick for Tape. Tape finally supports Pro Tools 5.1 sessions. (Don't blink or look at it wrong or it might stop working. Crap ass software.) I forget when that was added in. Sometime in the last year I think. Even though Pro Tools 5.1 has been around for something like 3 years. Whatever. It's bullshit. Anyway, Tape only works properly with SD2 Pro Tools sessions. Well, maybe it works with AIFF but it certainly won't deal with Broadcast Wave---even thought it's a perfectly legit sound file for Pro Tools 5.1. Like I said crap-ass software.

So here's the way around it.

1. Take your BWF Pro Tools 5.1 session. Open it and make sure it's all set for cuesheets. Save if you need to and close it.

2. Make a new Pro Tools session with SD2 as the file format. Make sure the bit depth and sample rate match your BWF session.

3. Select "Import Tracks" (Pro Tools 5.1) or "Import Session Data" (Pro Tools 6) from the File menu. Highlight all your tracks for importing.

4. Make sure you choose "Reference original media" for the audio. (Or whatever that pull-down menu says. I can't remember the exact wording off the top of my head. Don't use "copy" or "consolidate".) And click "Ok" or "Import" or whatever that button is labeled.

5. No audio should have been copied. If media was written, you probably didn't use the same bit depth or sampling rate as the original. Start again at step 2.

6. Save and close the session.

7. Open it in Tape and print away.

Basically, it seems that Tape can't deal with the "BWF" header in a Pro Tools 5.1 session. It only likes ones with an "SD2" header. However, you can mix and match supported audio formats in Pro Tools. So as long as you have an "SD2" session at the same bit depth and sample rate, you can import BWF audio into it without having to rewrite the media and Tape will print your cuesheets.

Stupid program.

Posted by Jon at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Xeni, the author of the "Wired" article about spatial sound, wrote me a nice letter this morning about yesterday's post. She basically said I should go read Iosono's website and my technical questions would be answered. I was a bit abashed at first. Here I was proclaiming the problems I thought I saw with this new technology and I hadn't even read their website. (Hey, our president has fully admitted that he doesn't watch the news or read the paper because he doesn't want to be exposed to those lies and biases. Can I use the same excuse?)

So I read it. I still have questions. Just more of them.

The one thing I noticed was that their theater system supports all the standard sound formats. You can feed it Dolby Digital, DTS, SDDS---even stereo---and it'll happily play it back. You won't get its super-bonus positioning features but you will get its "every seat in the theater sounds as good as every other" feature. That's certainly nice. I have my doubts that theater chains will be willing to fork over cash for that feature alone. "We gave them their stadium seating. What do they want from us, blood?" People care about good sound to a certain extent. The "sweet spot" in every chair might be too much to ask. But maybe I'm wrong.

The workings of the "spatial sound" part of this new Iosono system sounds like it is basically audio files plus metadata---the master track plus information about where to place it and move it and whatnot. That makes sense. Their website says that their workstation can take up to 64 sound files and place them or move them through the theater sound space.

I have to admit I'm still confused. What is their master sound format? Is there a master sound format? Is it simply an open-ended thing? Up to 64 tracks plus meta data and that's it? No built-in hard speaker assignments? So let's assume that it's something like that. How do you turn it over for encoding? Eight 8-track hard drives off the Tascam MMR-8 recorder? A firewire drive from Pro Tools with all 64 tracks on it? Maybe most people don't care about these things but this is the nitty-gritty tech stuff that I like to understand. Now after it's encoded, what gets shipped to theaters with the prints?

When you're dealing with a 5.1 master sound track it's pretty simple---6 channels of audio. That easily fits onto a hard drive. Since many stages make use of MMR-8 recorders, the drive from that machine will usually be sent to the NT Audio or one of the other facilities around Los Angeles that will encode the soundtrack on to the film. Dolby shows up on the dub stage with their own encoding gear and they'll generate a couple of MOs (Magneto-Optical Disks) with their Dolby-encoded master audio. These disks get shipped to the lab facility as well.

With a 5.1 master sound track, each channel of audio contains all the audio that is played from one speaker in a theater. Usually the layout is like this:

1. Left
2. Left Surround
3. Center
4. Right Surround
5. Right
6. Sub

That's what I'm wondering about with my questions. How does that process work for the Iosono system?

You need to have at least the 5.1 covered with this new system so you can fill up the space with sound. Pretty much all the dialogue comes out the center channel along with some of the sound effects and foley. Most of the sound effects and music are in the left and right speakers. The surrounds are used for reverb returns on music to give it more presence, backgrounds to create the environment, and sound effects for movement (i.e. bullet bys past the camera into the surrounds). At a minimum you need to recreate that in Iosono. Everything else is bonus.

But here's a problem that I see: predubbing. When the sound editors on a film show up on the stage for predubbing they have lots and lots of tracks of sound with them. This might be a typical breakdown:

• Dialogue --- 16 tracks
• ADR --- 24 to 32 tracks
• Group ADR --- 24 to 32 tracks
• Foley (Footsteps and Props) --- 32 tracks
• Backgrounds --- 96 tracks
• Sound Effects --- 32 to 200+ tracks

Sound Effects of course is the difficult one. If the film is a talkie, light romantic comedy, then you're probably closer to the 32 tracks. If you're dealing with an action movie you can easily go well beyond 200 tracks of effects. Foley could be similar. If you're dealing with a sci-fi or a period piece with lots of objects that are not "standard" to our world there might be many, many more tracks of props.

Now these cut tracks need to be predubbed to manageable amounts for the final mix. We usually deal with 8-track predubs or at least think of them in groups of 8-tracks. So you might wind up with something like this:

• Dialogue --- 1 8-track predub
• ADR --- 1 8-track predub
• Group ADR --- 1 or 2 8-track predubs
• Foley --- 2 8-track predubs
• Backgrounds --- 4 8-track predubs
• Sound Effects --- 4 to 15 8-track predubs

So even on a light show you can be looking at 104 tracks of sound after predubbing---and we still need to add music in there. That's more than the Iosono system can handle. You almost need to do a second predub to get that down to the 64 tracks.

It's not an impossible workflow to manage but it would take more time. And that is one of the critical points from my previous post. How much is a studio willing to spend on this?

I don't want anyone to misunderstand me on this---it sounds like a very cool system. I just wonder how it can fit it our existing time frame to accomplish our goals and will studios and theater chains be willing to shell out the cash for it?

Posted by Jon at 11:01 AM | Permalink

Wired has this article about a new "super" surround sound which uses more than 300 speakers in a theater to truly recreate an environment and place sounds anywhere within the room. Three hundred speakers is a couple more than the 6 that most theaters have today. (Actually theaters usually have more than 6 speakers. You'll often see many along the sides and in the back corners but they broadcast the same sound. There's still only 6 individual channels of source material that get played through those speakers.)

It's an interesting idea and those of us in the sound industry have often joked about the fact that eventually there will be speakers covering every single inch of space in theaters. (Obviously there was a bit of truth in that humor.) However without having actually seen the demo myself---someone please add me to the list next time :) ---I have to say that I have some doubts about this system.

I don't have doubts about the fact that we will have more than 6 channels of audio in a theater in the future. That's a given. In fact it's the present. There is actually a 6.1 system (7 channels) from Dolby called Dolby Digital Surround EX which adds a center surround speaker directly behind the audience. Often only the "high end" first run rooms in a movie complex are setup for EX. Plus not all soundtracks are mixed to support that. But all that aside, we will probably see other additional speakers added in the future. (If I had my way we'd have a high center speaker on the ceiling of the theater in the front. IMAX makes use of it because the screens are so large but for regular theaters it would allow sounds to not just go side-to-side but also up and down. Try to imagine a jet fly by with a high center speaker. It could be awesome.)

There are a couple of things that confuse me about this system. The first is how many channels of sound do you actually have? Ok, sure it has over 300 speakers. Does that mean there are 300 channels of sound? When we finish our final mix on a movie we wind up with a 6 track master. Dolby encodes that into data that sits between the sprockets of the 35mm print for Dolby Digital. DTS writes those tracks onto a CD-ROM which gets shipped with the print for theaters that support that standard. And SDDS writes it to both edges of the film---outside the sprockets. (Actually SDDS is a 7.1 system with 5 speakers up front instead of 3, but very, very few theaters have it anymore. Yet another proprietary format that Sony botched.) What do you do with a 300 track master?

Three hundred channels of sound is a completely unreasonable amount of material to turn over at the end of the mix. I'm certain that they actually use fewer but the question remains: how many?

Another big problem I see is their current interface. I have been on the stage with pretty much every big-name mixer in town and I cannot imagine any of them wanting to play with a light pen to place sounds around the room. It seems like it would take way too much time. Even though movie budgets are balooning to huge numbers, the vast majority of that goes to actors' salaries and special effects. Sound budgets are often smaller today then they were 10 years ago. You no longer have 30 sound editors on a crew cutting film and 5 assistants helping them. More often than not it's 10 editors and 1 or 2 assistants. And it's a similar thing on the dub stage. Typical films today predub in 3 or 4 weeks and final in 2 or 3. That's it. Seven or eight weeks on the final dub stage to create the master track.

Again, I wasn't actually at the demo so I don't know how easy it really is to use. But when I think of the time it can take on a stage just to pan a bunch of stereo car bys through the center speaker because an editor didn't turn it over as an LCR---not to mention the time involved to create a large action sequence like a gunfight bullets and debris flying all over the room---it seems that the light pen positioning would be awkward and slow. The pictures included with the article show a Pro Tools system sending what appears to be a single sound into their positioning system. That's not a realistic test for time, ease and usability. They should try it with the hundreds and hundreds of tracks that get turned over for your typical action sequence. How long does it take to do it then?

A final problem I see is the home theater market. DVDs are huge business for the movie industry. Lots of people have little 5.1 systems in their living rooms. How do you take a 300 channel mix and bring it down to a 5.1 for the DVD release? How many weeks are you willing to spend on that? And I do mean "spend". How much money will a studio pay for that down-mix? That's what it will really come down to. Your typical home theater cannot possible recreate the same range of frequencies that a good theater can, but at least the speaker assignments are the same. Now try to untangle a mess of sounds spread out over 300 channels and focus it down to 6. It seems to me that it would take weeks to do that.

After a day to do the printmaster on the final stage we usually spend 2 or 3 days making all the versions---Dolby Stereo, Dolby Surround, Mono, plus the M&E (music and effects) for the foreign versions. Now you need to extend that by what? A week? Two weeks? Just to get a 5.1 for DVD release? And what about the theaters that can't afford the "super" surround system? You're still going to need a 5.1 version for them.

It's a pretty cool idea. I'm not sure how soon we'll actually see it in action. Or if we'll ever see it in this incarnation. (I'm telling you, they should have invited me to the demo. I'd tell those Germans what they need to focus on. ;) )

Thanks (once again) to Boing Boing for making me aware of this. (It's kind of like the old "Are you a Beatles person or a Stones person?" question. Only this one is "Are you a Boing Boing person or a Fark person?" I'm a Boing Boing person.)

Posted by Jon at 8:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

A few notes of interest for the audio pros in the house:

Marathon has released a horizontal rackmount for G5s. When Apple unveiled the G5 at WWDC 2003, several sound editors were gathered in my office, watching the streaming Quicktime and drooling. But as soon as the specs came out we saw two big problems: only 3 PCI slots---4 slots is really optimal for Pro Tools systems, and a height of 20". The standard size for rackmount gear is 19". The new computers were an 1" too tall. You couldn't secure them in a rack with all your other gear. And all over 1 stupid inch! It seemed so ridiculous. Doesn't Apple realize that the music and film industries are some of their biggest clients? Lots and lots of people in these industries like to rackmount their gear.

Well Marathon has finally released a solution. I figured they eventually would. Unfortunately the installation instructions include the use of a hacksaw.

This isn't new but I just recently stumbled on to it:

Fxpansion makes a few audio wrapper applications including a VST to RTAS Adapter. This software allows Pro Tools and Pro Tools LE, software which only supports its own native audio plug-ins---Audiosuite, Real-Time Audiosuite, and TDM, to run VST plug-ins as RTAS plug-ins. What a great idea! And for under $100.

They also make a VST to AudioUnit Adapter which is nice for Logic users who might have been annoyed by Apple's decision to drop support for VST and only support the native OS X plug-ins standard AudioUnits. (Of course in fairness to Apple, they have offered a VST to AU SDK. And I've read stories of the conversion only taking a couple of hours to clean up code.)

And they have a third adapter which is VST to Rewire. This one sounds very interesting. Rewire is an inter-audio app bussing standard. It allows you do do things like design some techno masterpiece in Reason and send the sound directly into Pro Tools for recording. All internal. All digital. In Pro Tools Rewire is a plug-in that gets activated on a track. So in essence its VST to Rewire might be very similar to VST to RTAS. However, Soundminer allows you to audition 5.1 audio straight from Pro Tools by running 4 Rewire plug-ins---2 stereo and 2 mono. Maybe you can do similar things with this adapter. It would interesting to check out.

Posted by Jon at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I need your help. As you may know, I'm an avid listener to audiobooks. During the 2 hours of commuting I do every day, I typically spend my time listening to others read books to me. When I do get into the office, I'm a sound guy. I, along with the other people on my crew, make the movies you go and watch sound good. To do this I have all kinds of gear (boys' toys) in my room.

You may remember when I mentioned an effort by Telltale Weekly to make audiobooks of the public domain works from Project Gutenberg. This got me thinking. Audiobooks---I like audiobooks. Sound---I'm a sound guy. I've got microphones and computers and whatnot. These guys are looking to record audiobooks. Hmmm...

So here's where you come in. Today I recorded my first audiobook. (Did I ever mention that I used to be a radio DJ in college?) I haven't played it for anyone yet. In fact I literally just finished the final mix on it. I haven't submitted it to Telltale Weekly. I'm actually not sure if I can---the public domain status on this particular work is a bit tricky. I need some constructive criticism from everyone. I'd love for you to post comments or send me email letting me know what you think. I'd would like to emphasize the constructive part of that prior sentence. If you think I read too fast or my diction is bad or my voice is too nasaly, I'd like to know. Of course I wouldn't mind a few "good job" emails either. It would be great for some opinions on the sound quality too. Not just the tone of my voice, but how is the recording? Too loud? Too bright? Too noisy? (I'm really glad that Telltale Weekly exists, but I do have to say that some of their recordings are a bit on the poor side.)

So without further delay, I present to you, "The War Prayer" by Mark Twain. (We can fight about my politics too if you like.)

Posted by Jon at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I said before, I recently bought a Mackie 1604 mixer and added it to my Pro Tools workstation. I came up with what I consider to be the ultimate layout for the mixer. Obviously everyone has their own needs and their own gear so this won't work for all. But it might give you a few ideas of how you can improve your own audio monitoring.

Ins

:

1/2     (Open)
3/4     Video Deck Out
5/6     DAT Out
7/8     (Open)
9-16    Pro Tools Out 1-8

Aux Returns

:

1       Computer
2       Ipod
3       Laptop
4       DVD

Outs

:

Main    L/R
Sub1/2  LS/RS
Sub3/4  C/LFE

Direct Outs

:

1-6     Pro Tools In 1-6

Aux Sends

:

1/2     Pro Tools In 7/8
3/4     Video Deck In
5/6     DAT In

Tape

:

In      VCR Out
Out     VCR In

There are a few key ideas behind this layout. The first is the use of Inputs 9-16 for the Pro Tools. This came straight from the 1604 manual itself. It has a layout for an 8-channel multi-track recorder that does the same thing. Typical post-production sound thought is to put your Pro Tools on 1-8 since it's the single most important piece of gear. However, by moving it down to 9-16, it opens up the Direct Outs 1-8. These take the signal coming in on Inputs 1-8 and pass them out, post-fader, through the Direct Outs. This way you can send those into your Pro Tools and not use up your sub-outs.

The second key idea is Aux Returns and Aux Sends as additional Ins and Outs. Often these are thought of as paths to send signals for effects processing that then returning them to mixer. A channel insert will run an effect on a single channel like a compressor on a microphone. But an Aux Send and Return can be used to add reverb to many channels at once.

That's all very cool for working with a band but not very useful for a digital audio workstation. So forget it. The Aux Returns are 4 additional stereo inputs. You can see that I used them to patch in my computers and what not. It's mostly about listening to music. You can put anything you want here. It doesn't have to be stereo. In some cases, especially Aux Return 1 and 2, they can be sent into a "record" path were they would go back into your Pro Tools. But for the most part use it for gear that you simple want to listen to on your speakers.

The Aux Sends give you 6 mono channels out to whatever you patch. They are accessed on the Input channels themselves. This is an easy way to do something like send a stereo pair from Pro Tools to be recorded on a DAT or a Video Deck. I also put Pro Tools itself on a pair of Sends. It's for greater flexibility. I can't see myself using it much but it would allow me to loop a sound out a Pro Tools through the board and back in. Maybe I wind up with some amazing analog reverb unit. It could be patched into a channel insert and sent right back into Pro Tools for recording. That's the idea. As I said before about Direct Outs, it also frees up sub-outs.

You need the sub-outs for speakers. This is the third key idea. Typically I've set up 5.1 surround sound on mixers with 8 sub-out busses. Six for the speakers and 2 to go back into Pro Tools. But with this setup we've already handled all the paths back into to Pro Tools---and other gear for that matter. Put your left and right speakers on Main Out. Most other inputs like Aux Returns and Tape In all monitor by default on Main Out. Then use the four sub-outs for your 4 additional speakers, Left Surround--Right Surround and Center--Sub.

By using this setup I was able to extend the 1604 (16 ins, 4 sub-outs) to 22 Ins and 14 Outs. And I didn't touch the Control Room Outs which could probably be used for something else. Plus I have 4 open Ins right on faders on my mixer.

Now if only my video path were so easy.

Posted by Jon at 2:14 PM | Permalink

Recently I've been adding some new audio gear to my Pro Tools system. A couple weeks ago, I upgraded my speakers. I won't tell you what I was using before---it's a bit embarassing, and I'm supposed to be a "professional"---but my new Blue Sky speakers are awesome. (In all fairness to myself, prior to this recent purchase if I had to do really critical listening, I would do it on headphones.)

I spent last weekend and a couple days this week assembling a phasing dialogue tracks for a show that's just starting up. My friend needed a little extra help and I don't mind picking up a little extra cash now and again. Phasing dialogue tracks---especially after a fairly good assembly with a program like Titan---is pretty much just hours and hours of zooming in close on waveforms and nudging production into sync. If you want to get it done fast, there's not much actual listening going on. It's all done visually. That means you can listen to music to keep your mind active. So I've spent several days listening to my favorite albums on the Blue Sky ProDesk speakers in my room and I can honestly say they sound fantastic.

I got the 2.1 setup---two 5" speakers (that's the size of the woofer) and an 8" sub. They're powered so there's no need for a amplifier. Shielded so they won't distort your video monitors. (I'm using flat panels so this isn't an issue for me.) They aren't full-range speakers. They shelve-off pretty steeply below 80 Hz but that's what the subwoofer is for. They're designed to work together, and they're matched so well that I can't tell that the really low frequencies are coming from under my desk. In the future, I can upgrade it to a 5.1 by adding 3 more speakers and Blue Sky's own Bass Management system. The price is great too. Right around $1000 for the 2.1.

For years I've been using a little Mackie 1202 for monitoring. The ultra compact size was really nice. It didn't take up much desk space. But it also didn't have a lot of inputs and I kind of felt like I was sacrificing ease of use for a small size. With the new speakers and the potential of 5.1 in the future, I knew it was time to upgrade to the Mackie 1604. This is definitely the work horse of the digital audio workstation world, and I can see why. I spent nearly half a day plotting out my new audio setup with all the extra inputs and outputs. I think I came up with the ultimate setup. I'll post information on it a little later.

Of course after coming up with this great new audio setup, I had to patch it all through my new mixer. So I called up my buddy Sheldon at The Wired Kingdom to make me some custom audio snakes. His stuff isn't cheap but the work is impeccable and the quality is outstanding.

About a month ago or so, I stumbled across a little blurb on a microphone that caught my attention---the Studio Projects C1. I started doing some research. I read lots and lots of reviews from people raving about this mic. Not every review was glowing---but you also have to understand audio people---everything they use is great and everything else sucks. There is very little middle ground. (You'll get the same kind of responses when you talk to sound editors about the tracks on movies.) But at $200 it was pretty hard to say "no" to, especially since the microphone that most people compared it with, the Neumann U87, is a $2000 mic.

This just came in and I haven't used it much. Just some test recordings of myself. I'm also not a record producer or engineer. I'm not laying down vocal tracks all day long. We mostly use mics to record sound effects. Every mic has different characteristics and very few are "bad". Ok, maybe that's not true. There are a lot of cheap and crappy mics. But the point is when you're recording sound effects using different mics give you different sounds. And sound for film is all about have lots and lots of different kinds of sounds.

I made up an album of some of the pictures I took of my new gear and posted it to my .Mac account.

Posted by Jon at 8:15 AM | Permalink

Now's the chance for the people of Los Angeles to see a bit about what those of us in the sound industry do:

Los Angeles moviegoers will have an unusual treat this summer!  The Motion Picture Sound Editors and American Cinematheque will co-present "Big Movie Sound Effects: Behind the Scenes and Out of the Speakers."

Here's your chance to see - and hear - how those cool sounds for big science fiction movies are made.  Dane A. Davis, MPSE, and Gary Rydstrom, MPSE, will present excerpts from their Oscar and Golden Reel Award-winning work as supervising sound editors/designers/re-recording mixers on THE MATRIX and JURASSIC PARK.  In addition to discussing the processes they used to create the unique aural effects, our guests will also play sequences from both films with the sound effects only in order to give a clear and rare demonstration of the craft of motion picture sound.

So come and give a listen to what remains in these classic movie soundtracks after the dialogue and music are removed.  Experience the rippling waves from slowed-down bullets, the roar of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and every little detail that gets lost in the final mix; as well as the stories behind them.

"Big Movie Sound Effects: Behind the Scenes and Out of the Speakers" will be presented in the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre in the Egyptian Theatre at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 14.  The theater is located at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, California. 

General Admission:  $9
Seniors 65+ & Students w/valid ID: $8
MPEG and other guild & craft organization members w/valid ID: $6

You can find out more about the Motion Picture Sound Editors at our web site: www.MPSE.org and the American Cinematheque at www.americancinematheque.com.

Made possible with support from Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, Worldlink Digital, DTS, and Dolby Laboratories, Inc.

Program subject to change.

Posted by Jon at 11:29 AM | Permalink

You call yourself an Assistant Sound Editor and you don't use BBEdit for EDLs and change notes? If you say that you're still using Vantage, I'm going to smack you. Microsoft Word is what you're using? Well, I guess I understand. We've all kind of grown up with that whole "Word is the program you use for typing things". But seriously, yuck. Maybe you just don't realize what you're missing.

How about this spiffy little header it puts at the top of all printed pages? Pretty nice, huh? Ever dropped a stack of Vantage change notes and then tried to figure out the correct order again?

I barely know where to start with all the great text-fixing features it has built-in. Just take a look at all the options on this menu. Pretty great stuff.

But it's real strength is in it's support for Regular Expressions and AppleScript. Regular Expressions are complex find and replace searches that are much more powerful than a simple "Find 'cat' and Replace with 'dog'". In my last post I gave an example of a Regular Expression that could be used in Soundminer to split apart text with the format of "Title Description" into two individual "Title" and "Description" fields.

Just today I was trying to assemble some reels of dialogue using Titan. The source DATs were loaded with the filenames like "001 004/05.L.wav"---meaning Sound Roll 1, Scene 4, Take 5. Unfortunately the EDLs listed the sound rolls without leading zeros. So it would say "1" not "001". Titan needs the EDL and filename to match so that things can be linked properly.

No problem with BBEdit and Regular Expressions.

Bring up the Find window. Make sure that "Use Grep" is checked. That's what will turn on Regular Expressions.

Type this in the Find field without quotes: "^(\d{3}\s{2})(\d{1}\s+)"

And type this in the Replace field without quotes: "\010\2"

Click the Replace All button.

In English you just told BBEdit: Starting at the beginning of a line (^) look for a group of characters, 3 digits followed by 2 spaces (\d{3}\s{2}), then look for a second group of characters, 1 digit followed by 1 or more spaces (\d{1}\s+). Return the first group (\01), add a "0" and then return the second group (\2).

This will find any single digit sound rolls in an EDL and add a zero to the head. Now you need to turn 2 digit sound rolls into 3 digit ones.

Type this in the Find field without quotes: "^(\d{3}\s{2})(\d{2}\s+)"

And type this in the Replace field without quotes: "\010\2"

Click the Replace All button.

Now all of your sound rolls have 3 digits, leading zeros as necessary. All in about a minute. Try typing all those zeros in by hand and see how long it takes you. Plus the Find window allows you to save those Regular Expressions as Patterns that you can call up any time you need them.

I said that the second strength of BBEdit is AppleScript. Nearly all of its functions can be called from simple AppleScripts, including Find and Replace with Regular Expressions. That means you can make a simple "Add Leading Zeros To Sound Rolls In EDLs" Droplet. Drag your EDLs on to it and they'll all be fixed in seconds.

Other ideas for BBEdit, Regular Expressions and AppleScript are removing those ugly boxes that show up at the end of every line of change notes made by the new Avid Meridien systems. Or splitting Picture and Track changes notes into two files. Or even interacting with other programs like Word, Excel or Filemaker. How about searching a change note for the new LFOA and entering it into a chart in Excel? All kinds of things can be done if you just take a little time to learn.

Posted by Jon at 2:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (3)

This is based on a little tip I posted on the Soundminer beta tester message boards:

How To Clean Up A Sound Effects Library Ripped In MTools And Imported Into Soundminer

Anyone who has ripped the sound effects from a commercial CD library with Soundminer's Ripper program knows how great their data is. Anyone who has moved to Soundminer from MTools knows that the MTools data isn't anywhere near as cool looking. Don't worry, you can get things looking nice without too much trouble.

Make sure that you're displaying the following fields: Filename, Description, Source, Category, Notes, Designer, Library, and possibly RecMedium.

Make a new database and scan a folder to work with. If you screw it up, you want to be able to go back to your original stuff.

Bring up the Admin window from the Misc menu. Set the Designer field to the creator of the CD library---most likely either Sound Ideas or Hollywood Edge. Set the Library field to the name of the CD library---Citi Trax or Impact Effects or whatever it is.

Copy Filename to Source. If the CD library is from Sound Ideas the filenames probably all start with "SI-" and end with ".L". If they are from Hollywood Edge they probably start with "HE-" and end with ".L". Remove these from the Source field. You can either Remove 3 Characters From The Start and Remove 2 Characters From The End. Or do a Find and Replace with nothing. The remaining data though not identical to what Ripper writes will be very similar. For example, a file from Impact Effects that was ripped with MTools will probably be named something like "SI-IE01_04_01.L". After removing the extra characters the Source field would be "IE01_04_01".

I also like to note which files were done by MTools for future reference. I set the RecMedium field to "MTools" for that reason. (A good-sized chunk of Cameron's library was converted from Waveframe over to Pro Tools. I put "waveframe" in the RecMedium field of those files for the same reason. You never know when that information might be useful.)

If the description is all uppercase you can use the change case to Title Case function to make it much more readable.

With these few simple steps. You'll be very close to what a Ripper ripped sound file looks like. It's definitely a good idea to backup your data to the files themselves.

There's one other thing you can do to make things look even better. Most of the CD libraries from Sound Ideas use the format "Title [Lots of spaces] Description" in the Description field of their database. All of this information including all those spaces---which make the printed catalog look nice but which are messy in a digital database---wind up in the Description field when the CD is ripped by MTools. You can put the "Title" into the Category field and the "Description" into the Description field (and dump all those extra spaces) by following these simple steps.

This process will give you about a 95% success rate. The biggest problem you will encounter is data that is not consistantly formatted. I found that the Audio Pro library is a big offender in this area. This process looks for 2 or more spaces in a row. If there aren't 2 or more spaces between the Title and Description, it won't work correctly.

Again from the Admin window, copy the Description into the Notes field. (Or another long field that you're not using for anything else.)

In the Find / Replace box, check the RegEx box.

Type this into the Find field "(.+?)\s\s+?(.*)" without quotes.

Type this into the Replace field "\1" without quotes, and click Ok.

This will return just the "Title" part of the of the Description. Take a second and check to make sure it worked. Like I said, if there aren't more than 2 spaces or tabs in a row, this won't work. You might have to fix some by hand. When you're satisfied, continue.

Copy Notes into Category. Copy Description into Notes.

Type this into the Find field "(.+?)\s\s+?(.*)" without quotes, again.

Type this into the Replace field "\2" without quotes, and click Ok.

This will return the Description part. Again, check it to make sure that it returned everything correct. (You might wind up with extra spaces at the head of this new description. You can use the Remove Characters From Start function to get rid of them quickly.) When you're satisfied, copy Notes to Description and erase the Notes field.

That's it. Definitely back up all this data to the sound files.

Those funky looking things you typed into the Find and Replace fields are called Regular Expressions. They can be a bit tricky to learn but they are amazingly powerful. Definitely worth a bit of study. You have a great command-line Unix version installed with OS X called "grep". If you fire up your terminal and type "man grep" at the prompt you can read all about it. Google would be another great place to look for information. There's also a book by O'Reilly "Mastering Regular Expressions" that might be useful.

Posted by Jon at 10:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Yesterday, Boing Boing posted a link to an article about surround sound research at UC Davis.

This new technology is a very interesting extension of binaural recording. Binaural is a two channel format that mimics the pick-up pattern of the human ears.

Stereo is two channel as well but it recreates a "wall of sound". To record in stereo, you take to two mono microphones and position them in a "v" shape. The point is the head of the microphones. They should be at a 90 degree angle to each other. The heads should (obviously) be pointed at the sound source.

When played back from stereo speakers, a stereo recording creates, as I said, a "wall of sound" that is projected out from those speakers. Closing your eyes and facing the speakers, you could imagine the sounds happening just in front of you. Listening to a stereo recording on headphones places that plane of sound in your head. Put on a record that features a lot of stereo panning like Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon". On headphones, you'd swear the sound was moving right through the center of your head. Here's a little bit of "On The Run" from that album so you can see what I mean.

Binaural recording, as the article points out, typically uses a dummy head with microphones placed in the ears and positioned at the same angle as human ears. There are also "stealth" binaural recording rigs that put tiny microphones in what appears to be walkman-style headphones. Wearing the "headphones" puts them in the proper location for binaural recording.

The biggest difference between stereo and binaural recording is that binaural can only be played back on headphones. Listening to binaural recordings is like really being there with sounds going on all around you. It records in 360 degrees, so recording a sound of someone walking behind the dummy head would sound exactly like someone was walking behind you when listening on headphones. If you play a binaural recording back on stereo speakers it sounds really strange. It's hard to exactly put your finger on what's wrong but you can tell that something isn't right with it.

This new technology from UC Davis records 8 or 16 microphones positioned in a circle, and during playback mixes the relative strength of each signal in real time based on the positional data from a worn sensor. With normal binaural, the previously mentioned sound of walking behind you would always be behind you no matter where you turned your head. This new technology would allow you to turn your head around to "see" who was behind you and you would then hear the sound of walking as if you were looking at it.

Fascinating stuff.

I worked on an IMAX movie called "T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous" that had a limited amount of binaural sound in it. Being a 3-D IMAX movie, you were given goggles to wear which would make the 3-D images look correct when you sat in the theater. These goggles were much larger than the standard red and green paper ones that you often get for these kinds of things. There were actually tiny speakers in them that were positioned directly over your ears when properly worn.

When we were on the dub stage mixing the movie, we would actually have to wear these goggles (minus the 3-D lenses) so that we could properly mix the sound for that channel. For those who are curious, it was actually wirelessly beamed to the headset via an infrared signal. The idea was that 3-D visuals plus binaural sound should really place you in the movie. However I found that the soundtrack was so loud with the music and the dinosaurs stomping around that even with the speakers right next to your ears, they were easily drowned out by main speakers in the theater. It was an interesting concept that wasn't quite realized.

In March 1999 I recorded a rock show at a little club in Los Angeles called Dragonfly. A band I knew said it was ok and I was very excited about the prospect so I showed up with 2 different DAT rigs and a video camera. Two of my friends came along to help me manage it all. One of the DATs included a stealth binuaral headphone setup. During one of the opening bands, I had my friend who was going to use the stealth rig, go practice using it. He didn't quite understand the concept and he moved around alot. Put on some headphones and you can hear the vocals and instruments move from ear to ear in this recording as he looked around from side to side. (One of the best reasons to use a dummy head instead of a live body.) You'll notice two things from the recording of Candy Ass covering The Runaways' "Queens Of Noise". First, unlike the Pink Floyd song above, when the sound moves it doesn't pass through your head---it "rotates" around you. Second, if you listen on speakers, it doesn't sound right.

It's not a very good example of binaural recording. I know. But it's the best I could come up with easily.

Posted by Jon at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Terry Pratchett has a running joke in his Discworld books about narrative conventions. For example, due to “narrative convention” every carriage wreck (it is a fantasy-based series) ends with a lone wheel rolling down the street. On a similar note, after the “Star Trek: Enterprise” season finale, I mentioned how much I’m sick of the currently popular narrative convention that heroes can out-run an explosion.

Many people may not realize it but film sound is full of conventions as well. And some of them drive me crazy! Anytime a wide expansive shot of the ruggedly beautiful wilderness is shown (particularly if there are distant mountains), you always hear a red-tailed hawk cry out with a distant “Screeee!” In fact speaking of animals, pretty much anytime an animal is on screen it has to be yammering away. Non-stop noises from them. I can’t necessarily speak for everyone, but my two cats are quite content to not make a peep for hours on end.

But the one thing that drives me completely up the wall is that computers in movies have to constantly be making beeps and boops. If my computers made half as much noise as movie computers make, I’d have thrown them out the window and declared myself a Luddite.

The movie term for computer sounds is “telemetry”. It sounds all slick and cool, but the fact is in terms of sound, movie computers haven’t progressed far beyond the multi-colored flashing lights and the spinning reel-to-reel tape of the sci-fi movie computers of the 1950s. I am on a mission to get rid of computer telemetry in movies. Computers can make noise—they do in real life. But it should be the whir of the fan, the purr of the CD-ROM, the chatter of the hard drive, and the tick tick tick of the keys.

So it was with great pleasure that I spent today playing around with real-world computers sounds and making “Hollywood” computer sounds with them. Take an actual close-mic recording of hard drive chatter and mix it in with a quieter reversed version of itself to get an interesting effect. Run a broadband noise reduction on various fans to greatly reduce the white noise and to expose the unusual metallic tones of spinning motors. Things like that. Hopefully some producer or studio executive farther up the chain of command won’t say, “Hey! Where are the beeps?”

This is something you all can help out with. Next time you’re sitting in a theater watching a movie and you hear annoying noises coming out of the movie computers, jump up, hurl your tub of popcorn at the screen, and yell “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Ok, maybe that won’t help. But it would be pretty fun to see.

Posted by Jon at 10:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Recently we've been working on new movie and using Altiverb to place sound effects within their environment. What a great piece of software! There's a new version 4 that's recently come out.

Instead of grabbing all those sliders like Wet / Dry, Decay, and Pre-Delay and trying to find settings that sound like a real place, Altiverb actually takes the sonic characteristics of an environment and applies it to the sound. Using a starter pistol or a tone sweep to make some noise, and recording the sound inside a particular place like a church, a car, or your bedroom with one, two or four microphones, Altiverb will analyze that sound and make a church, car, or bedroom setting. This is called an Impulse Response. Then when you want to take a recording of something like someone singing and make it sound like it was done in the church, you selecting the "church" setting. Easy and very, very cool.

Altiverb ships with a lot of pre-set environments like various churches, cathedrals, music studios, auditoriums, and a whole slew of home and office places. You can download more from their website. And I've found a few other websites with other pre-sets that can be downloaded:

Altiverb.DAW-Mac.com

Fokke van Saane's Altiverb Impulse Responses

And of course you can go and record your own!

Posted by Jon at 5:23 AM | Permalink

I've been getting quite a bit of traffic to my website the last couple of days from both the DevaII mailing list at Yahoo Groups and the rec.arts.movies.production.sound newsgroup. Hello all!

It seems that someone posted a link to my article on dealing with Sound Designer II (SD2) sound files on the FAT16 DVD-RAMs that you get from a Deva II field recorder. (And the problem of losing the resource fork.) I hope people have found it helpful.

I still don't know for sure if Apple has fixed the FAT16 DVD-RAM driver in the OS. Two versions of OS X, 10.3.3 and 10.3.4, have come out since I wrote that piece and I haven't started a new Deva show in that time, so I haven't been able to test it. And the report I filed at Apple's Bug Reporter lists it as "Closed/Duplicate" which just means "Yes, we know about it and someone else has already told us about this."

The AppleScript I wrote to fix the broken resource fork problem could be modified to fix a broken resource fork on any file really. Assuming the pr