Monster Blog - "audio"

• Cuesheets: The Way It Should Be

  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.

  December 7, 2004 audio

• Dealing With -37 Errors In Pro Tools

  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?

  November 1, 2004 audio

• Possible Pro Tools OMF Bug?

  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.

  October 19, 2004 audio

• Dealing With SCSI Devices Without A SCSI Card

  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.

  September 25, 2004 audio

• Running Tape In OS X

  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:

  September 23, 2004 audio

• The Software I Use

  We got moved in to our new office today without too much trouble. I'm sharing a very small room with the ADR editor but thankfully it's only for two weeks. Tomorrow I have to finish installing the necessary software on my computer. When I was at Universal I did most of my work on my own laptop. I would just have to jump on to the other assistant's computer to digitize picture. But it's certainly nice to have a full-blown Pro Tools sitting in front of me again.

  September 14, 2004 audio

• Playing Igniter Digital Picture On A DC30+

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

  September 12, 2004 audio

• Capturing Video For Pro Tools With Sync Audio In OS X

  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.

  September 3, 2004 audio

• The Day Everything Was Upgraded

  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.

  August 31, 2004 audio

• Pro Tools 6.4.1 For Mix Hardware

  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.

  August 25, 2004 audio

• First Mbox Problem

  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.

  August 18, 2004 audio

• You Gotta Love The Mbox

  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.)

  August 15, 2004 audio

• Hate The Tape

  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.

  August 12, 2004 audio

• This One Goes Up To Eleven

  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.)

  July 28, 2004 audio

• More At Eleven

  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?)

  July 28, 2004 audio

• A Couple Of Semi-Audio-Related Things

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

  July 15, 2004 audio

• The Sound Of His Voice

  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.

  July 12, 2004 audio

• New Toys

  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.)

  July 10, 2004 audio

• Mackie 1604 5.1 Surround Layout

  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.

  July 10, 2004 audio

• How To Make Those Big Hollywood Sounds

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

  July 6, 2004 audio

• Real Assistants Use BBEdit

  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.

  July 3, 2004 audio

• MTools To Soundminer Cleanup Tip

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

  July 3, 2004 audio

• Stereo vs. Binaural Recording

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

  July 1, 2004 audio

• Sound Convention

  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.

  June 19, 2004 audio

• Worldizing Sound With Altiverb

  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.

  June 11, 2004 audio

• Continuing The Deva / SD2 / BWF Discussion

  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!

  June 5, 2004 audio

• Number One Reporting For Duty, Sir.

  I've picked up some work helping finish up a movie that'll be a big summer release in July. Today I was conforming predubs, which is quite cool for me. I need to spend more time editing. My official title (not on this show, I'm just helping out on it) is First Assistant Sound Editor. You can think of me as the general manager of a store, while the Supervising Sound Editor is the owner. Or in the way I prefer to think of it: I'm Commander Riker to Cameron's Captain Picard. Basically I lead the away team missions and look quite dashing in my beard from Season 2 on.

  May 26, 2004 audio

• I Just Wanna Go To The Rock 'n' Roll Show

  Both Wednesday and Thursday night I saw Sleater-Kinney play El Rey here in Los Angeles. (I've mentioned this already.) They are such a great band. There had been some talk on the wordsandguitar mailing list that someone had recorded the Wednesday show. This morning I decided to check it out.

  May 23, 2004 audio

• Men At Work

  I had my first day back at work today. It was exhausting. Not that a ton of stuff happened. The first day after a chunk of time off is always tough. Inevitably during my free time I slip in the habit of staying up as late as I want and sleeping until whenever I feel like getting out of bed. When I'm working I usually follow a strict regemin of getting up at 6am and going to bed somewhere between 10pm and 11pm. These two schedules clash hard those first few days back to work.

  May 18, 2004 audio

• 15 Minutes

  In celebration of my going back to work, I'm going to let you in on a little secret...

  May 18, 2004 audio

• How Good Can It Sound?

  Stereophile magazine has published an article on iTunes. Most of it is yet another rehash of new features of iTunes 4.5. However the most interesting point is that the New York branch of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) is gathering this month to discuss the impact of portable digital audio players like the iPod using compressed audio files on the sound of music.

  May 4, 2004 audio

• One Step Beyond

  A Pro Tools update for everyone.

  May 1, 2004 audio

• Avid Quicktime Codecs

  This one is for me as much as anyone else.

  April 30, 2004 audio

• Lossless Is Good

  If you keep up with Apple developments at all you probably already know that today is the one year anniversary of the iTunes Music Store. In honor of that Apple released iTunes 4.5 and Quicktime 6.5.1.

  April 29, 2004 audio

• The Quest For The Knob

  t goes without saying that the most important thing about an audio workstation is that you are able to hear what you are working on. This often leads to the continual quest for the best sounding speakers and headphones. The question that those of us who work in the sound field don't always think about is "What is the best mixer to use?"

  April 22, 2004 audio

• Digital Audio Field Recorders

  For many years the DAT recorder has been standard for both timecode and non-timecode field recordings. Now that Digital Audio Workstations are supporting file standards beyond the 16 bit, 48 KHz limit of DATs, it makes sense to look at other options. I was able to check out 3 cool new recorders at NAB.

  April 22, 2004 audio

• Amazingly Colossal

  Insanity! The NAB trade show is huge. Think of something big. Now think of something that could beat up that big thing. Now triple the size of that. You're starting to get the picture of just how big this thing is.

  April 20, 2004 audio

• I'm Leaving On A Jet Plane

  In just under 3 hours I will be getting on a plane for Las Vegas. The NAB geekfest awaits me.

  April 18, 2004 audio

• My God, It's Full Of Stars.

  This is cool. Beethoven's 9th Symphony time stretched to 24 hours with some really sophisticated software. (A standard performance of the 9th Symphony is usually just under 74 minutes. The original CD standard was set so that an entire performance could fit on one disc.)

  April 17, 2004 audio

• Someone's Knocking At The Door

  It looks like we worked out part of the problem we were having with the Digidesign Core Audio Drivers that came with Pro Tools 6.2.3. If you remember from my earlier post, we are trying to use this on an officially unsupported system: PowerMac G4, OS X 10.3.3, Pro Tools 6.2.3 software, and Pro Tools | 24 Mix Plus hardware. I haven't really used the OS X core audio drivers before. I didn't realize that there was a Core Audio Setup program in the Digidesign folder. Once we ran that, and selected the proper interface, everything seemed to work fine. There is still one little bug though: both Pro Tools and the Core Audio Driver think that the 888 | 24 that is hooked up to the Mix Plus cards has 16 channels in and out. (Not the 8 that it actually does.) If haven't tempted fate to see what would happen if I selected Outputs 9 through 16.

  April 15, 2004 audio

• One Part Panther, Two Parts Sound, Mix Thoroughly

  I spent most of another day with Cameron today. Dana, his wife, is always making jokes like "So when are you moving in?" They are such great people.

  April 9, 2004 audio

• Another Day Another Doc

  Session drummer turned aspiring filmmaker, Gary Gardner, met with Cameron and I today about a documentary he's been working on for the last two years. It's about an LA jazz club called The Baked Potato which opened in its doors in the early 1970s. Practically every jazz musician has played that club in the past 30 years. Gary was recently able to interview Lou Rawls about his experiences at The Baked Potato. I suspect he still has a ways to go before he gets this whole thing pulled together, and even though I'm not a jazz fan, this is one exciting project.

  April 7, 2004 audio

• The People Behind The People

  I had a meeting yesterday about a documentary. Denny Tedesco has been working on a documentary about his father, Tommy Tedesco, one of the most prolific Los Angeles session guitarists, and the other session musicians he worked with. People like Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye. The Wrecking Crew as they came to be known.

  April 4, 2004 audio

• Digging For Sound Effects

  Yesterday I was shown a demo of a great sound library program called Soundminer. It's very exciting: 58 metadata fields, SQL search functions, Rewire support for multichannel monitoring, Quicktime support for auditioning against picture, all kinds of fun stuff. But I get ahead of myself...

  March 31, 2004 audio

• Sync? What's That?

  Did you know that these cool new LCD and Plasma TVs add a delay into the video signal? Well, they do. I'm no expert but I would imagine it has something to do with converting the analog video signal to a pixel-based digital display.

  March 23, 2004 audio

• The Big Picture

  This isn't strictly an "Audio" entry. In fact it's more of a "Video" entry, but I since those two things are often tied together I thought I would include it here as opposed to "Musings" or "Star Trek" or something.

  March 21, 2004 audio

• Deva Sound Files and Damaged Resource Forks

  A lot of sound recording for film and television is moving to the Deva II hard disk recorder. They've been around for several years but if the recent conversations I've had with production mixers are any indication, we fear change.

  March 16, 2004 audio