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.

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?

BBEdit Printed Page Header

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.

BBEdit Text Menu

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: “102”

Click the Replace All button.

BBEdit Find and Replace Window

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 (1), 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: “102”

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.

BBEdit Find Pattern Menu

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.

MTools To Soundminer Cleanup Tip

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 “(.+?)ss+?(.*)” 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 “(.+?)ss+?(.*)” 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.

Stereo vs. Binaural Recording

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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 problem is that it got stripped on due to a transfer to a FAT16 disk, and that you still had the resource fork.

I found this German company, Spherico, that’s written several programs for dealing with sound dailies and Final Cut Pro. Most of the programs are about bringing all the functionality of the Avid to Final Cut Pro. There is one however called CopyRestore SD2 which does the same thing as my AppleScript. It will copy the files off the DVD-RAM at the same time. Maybe it’s cooler. I don’t know. Like I said, no Deva movie to try it out on yet. It’s also $25.

They have another program BounceUsII which plays multi-channel Broadcast Wave files (BWF). Plus you can display and edit the metadata. Do mix-downs for editing against a “comp” track. Convert to and from SD2. And it’ll spit out XML for importing into Final Cut Pro. It looks pretty cool. I’ve been trying to play with it using some BWF sound effects with metadata, but it keeps giving me strange AppleScript errors. Not sure what I problem is. Anyway, you might want to check it out and see if you have better luck.

There’s another handy program I came across called BWAV Reader which shows you all the metadata and other information about Broadcast Wave files that you drop on it.

BWAV Reader Screenshot

It has this very tempting “Edit Metadata” button that when clicked simply pops up a “BWAV Writer will do what you want. Contact the author.” window. I checked the website and there’s not BWAV Writer program there. Looks like I’ll have to send him an email.

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.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to say more stuff about movies I’m working on, while I’m working on them. But not today. Today as most days I’m just a little cog in a very large wheel. Don’t get me wrong, I love the work I do. Playing with computers all day long. Recording cool sounds and doing weird stuff to them with effect processing units and special software. I find it fun.

It isn’t really all that glamorous though. I was just talking to a friend about this yesterday. There is the mystique about this town that I’ve noticed when talking with people from other places–like when I’m visiting my family in Boston. “Oh! You work in Hollywood! How exciting!” is a typical kind of response I get from people. And yes, it’s exciting but not in the way people would think. It’s exciting because I’m doing what I love to do. It would be the same for someone who loves teaching, or accounting, or whatever career they really get into. It’s not like I hang out with Steven Spielberg all day and tell him how his next movie should feature a monkey and a robot battling to the death on distant planet run by the decendents of ancient ninjas who were abducted by aliens a thousand years ago. (Though now that I think about it, that would be pretty sweet.)

Occasionally I meet actors when they come to a stage to record ADR if I’m not busy with something else. But that’s usually nothing more than a “Hello, nice to meet you.” Perhaps a handshake. When I worked on “Down With Love” I was able to go up to Renee Zellweger and after the the customary, “Nice to meet you,” I did get in a “Could you sign this please.” But only because she needed to sign her Exhibit G so that she could get paid. (And actually it was Sarah Paulson playing Vikki Hiller who I found so enchanting on that picture. Shaking hands with her was like a dream come true. Sarah, if you ever happen to read this, go ahead and click on that “Email Me” link in the corner.)

Mostly it’s about playing with computers. And collecting lots of electronic gear. It’s definitely a job for boys who like toys. (Or girls. Girls who like toys, I mean. Sexual preference has very little bearing on job satisfaction in the sound industry.)

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.

For those who aren’t in the know, the SK Depot is an FTP site with lots of live material from Sleater-Kinney. (If you want to check it out, I suggest you take a look at the mailing list for the latest address, username and password. It changes occasionally.) So I popped in over there and downloaded the show. I noticed that there were a lot of shows in a .shn format. I wasn’t familiar with it so I decided to do some research.

Now, hours later I gotten into the audiophile groove.

After I wrote my initial analysis of Apple’s Lossless Codec, I got a lot of traffic from websites like Furthur Network and the Grateful Dead mailing list. I didn’t investigate things too far then, but now I kind wish I’d looked into it more since today I wound up on many of those sites that linked to me.

There seems to be three main lossless audio codecs that are the most popular: FLAC, Shorten (.shn), and APE. I’m sure there are many others, including Apple’s, but those are the ones that I encountered the most in my research today. There are also lots of other articles, webpages and whole websites dedicated to these things. I’m going to focus on the Macintosh OS X side of things. Though others might find a few things interesting.

If you encounter files in any of these formats you need to know how to deal with them. (As a side note: audio files compressed with a lossless codec are really good. They’re larger than MP3s but they sound exactly the same as the CD, DAT, or other media they were made from.)

iTunes only supports Apple’s Lossless encoder, so if you want to play the files you’ll need MacAmp Lite X. Unfortunately development on this program stopped years ago. Fortunately Josh over at The Arctic Lounge has archived the last versions of MacAmp Lite X including the FLAC and Shorten plug-ins.

Maybe you don’t want to listen to those files in MacAmp. Maybe you want to listen to them in iTunes or your iPod. Then you’ll have to convert them. Scott Brown has written a great GUI for the command line versions of the FLAC, Shorten, and APE converters called xACT. With this you can easily decode your files into AIFFs or WAVs. And from there you can make MP3s, AACs, or Apple Lossless Files in iTunes. (Set the encoder you want to use in the “Importing” section of the Preferences. Highlight the AIFF or WAV files to convert and select “Convert Selection” from the Advanced menu.)

Another side note: there are many different methods for converting CDs or AIFFs or other audio into MP3s. Many people consider the LAME encoder to be the absolute best. This is not the encoder that Apple uses in iTunes. Blacktree has released their iTunes-LAME Encoder for those of you who want the best sounding audio possible in a lossy format.

I downloaded several lossless Sleater-Kinney shows from the Depot and converted them to Apple’s Lossless format so that I could listen to them on my iPod. Here are some of the statistics:

Los Angeles, CA 05-19-2004 – 70:24
712.3 MB AIFF / 372.2 MB SHN / 337.9 MB ALC (1 / 0.52 / 0.47)

Berkeley, CA 05-31-1997 – 40:15
407.1 MB AIFF / 216.5 MB FLAC / 200.5 MB ALC (1 / 0.53 / 0.49)

San Francisco, CA 08-07-1998 – 57:08
578 MB AIFF / 338.3 MB FLAC / 339.1 MB ALC (1 / 0.59 / 0.59)

San Francisco, CA 07-01-1999 – 73:17
741.7 MB AIFF / 413 MB FLAC / 416.6 MB ALC (1 / 0.56 / 0.56)

Cambridge, MA 05-17-2000 – 76:51
777.4 MB AIFF / 505.1 MB FLAC / 508.7 ALC (1 / 0.65 / 0.65)

This shows several important things.

  1. The space savings of lossless audio is significant.
  2. I got much better results than with my initial test of “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”.
  3. There isn’t a radical difference in size between Shorten, FLAC, and Apple Lossless.

And now the cool part…

There’s tons of lossless audio out there on the net for you to download. I’m not talking about Kazaa or other sharing networks where you are illegally downloading copyrighted material from other people’s computers. I’m talking about live concert recordings (bootlegs) of bands that don’t mind fans sharing the love. Of course a lot of it is jam bands: Grateful Dead, Phish, Rusted Root, Widespread Panic, and the like. You need to look around a bit more to find other bands, but it’s there. Have fun with it.

Resources:

15 Minutes

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

I’m on the “S.W.A.T.” DVD. Yeah, you know the movie. Colin Farrell, Sam Jackson & LL Cool J. You can see me out in the desert recording guns for the movie.

  1. Pop in the DVD
  2. Select “Special Features”
  3. Select the Next Arrow “>>>” for the second page
  4. Select “Sound & Fury: The Sounds of S.W.A.T.”
  5. Select “The Sounds of S.W.A.T.”
  6. Select the Headphones
  7. I first show up at about 1:28.

Jon & Cameron preparing to record guns for S.W.A.T.

That little featurette tells you a little bit about what we do. Plus there’s some cool scene breakdowns where you can listen to how we divide up the sounds for predubbing. (It’ll work in stereo, but a 5.1 speaker setup really shows off our stuff.)

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.

We spent a couple hours in a spotting session for the movie we’re working on. The picture editor wants us to punch up the sound a bit before he shows the cut to the director on Monday. So a lot of it was fast forward through sections. “This is fine. Our temp FX are working here.” That kind of thing. Then there’d be moments like, “This car chase is ok, but it’s not great. See if you can help it a bit.”

It’s a 7 reel show right now. Typically reels are no more than 20 minutes long. Most dramatic features are 6 reels at release and most comedies are 5. It’s not uncommon early on for a show to be a little long while they figure out what’s working and what’s not.

I got the videotapes and loaded the first 4 reels in the computer. And I converted the OMF exports of the editor’s audio tracks to Pro Tools sessions. (Tomorrow morning I’ll have to finish loading the other videos.)

We set up a Pro Tools system at Cameron’s house several months ago, and moved certain things from the office there because we weren’t working for awhile. We knew we had to bring some of that back to get this job done so we took off about 3pm to go back to his house and gather those drives and CDs up.

We also had to record some sound effects that the editor wanted after the spotting session. So we spent several hours in the afternoon rolling cans along the floor, making hinges squeak, and bumping luggage around on the sidewalk. Tomorrow I’ll load that DAT into the computer and master the sound effects we recorded.

It’s good to be back, and tomorrow will be fun. After getting all that new material into the computer, my job is to figure out all the backgrounds that are necessary and cut them into place.