Movie scenes, especially action sequences, are influenced by the sound effects added in post. For example, in a fight scene the punches can be off by a foot or more but what really sells the illusion is the sound effect of a hard, fleshy hit.
Lots of research has gone into placing the right sound effect at the right time, but what if a completely different sound effect was applied? Would it change our perception of what we see on the screen? That is what Adam Ecker and Laurie Heller sought out to answer. What they found was that depth perception is influenced not only by visual phenomena such as shadows, binocular disparity, and object size, but also by sound. Good to know especially for those action scenes.
Late Show with David Letterman music mixer Harvey Goldberg likes doing things the old fashioned way. He has a background in studio mixing, which helps a great deal with his current job. Every night, Goldberg is in charge of mixing both the house band with Paul Shaffer, as well as the musical guest... and he's still rockin' it analog.
Goldberg uses a massive (by broadcast standards) 80 input console, which he divides down the middle, allotting 40 per band. He has conceded to record everything digitally to a pair of 24-track RADAR units, which he feels are " the closest thing there is digitally to the warmth of an analog tape deck." Surprisingly, Goldberg says he has a harder time mixing the CBS Orchestra, than whatever band he met 20 minutes ago.
All this info was provided by Dan Daley over at Studio Daily, who had a chance to talk with Goldberg. Honestly, his article will be appreciated by by those of you who are much bigger audiophiles than I am. Still, it's interesting to read about all the gear, setup, and intricacies of a show like Letterman. For a link to the complete (and fantastic) interview from Studio Daily, click READ below.
Besides the actual invention of movies itself, the next best innovation was adding sound to the picture. How they did this is probably a little hard to comprehend in this day and age let alone in 1929. Fleischer Studios, the animators of Popeye, Betty Boop, as well as Superman, made an educational cartoon to explain to the world how sound becomes joined to motion pictures.
It is certainly entertaining to see how they captured sound waves and transferred them to film. And the beauty of this piece is it is in the public domain so you can download a very high quality MPEG-2 version and do whatever you want with it. Lucky for us, the Vintage Tooncast has gone through all of the trouble of converting it to a Flash movie so you can watch it in a jiffy. But if you want to download a beefier version, then check out the Internet Archive.
P.S. If you like classic cartoons like this, the Vintage Tooncast has quite a collection.
Guy Cochran from DVCreators.net reviews the Rode to recording package. If you are looking for a kit that has everything you need to capture great sounding audio, then listen up. This comes with:
(1) RODE NT1-A Microphone
(2) EVENT ALP 5 Biamp Powered Monitors (studio speakers for the laymen)
(1) PRESONUS INSPIRE Firewire Audio Interface
(1) STEINBERG CUBASE LE
(1) SONY ACID XMC
(1) PRO PAK Software Suite
(2) 10' premium RCA cables
(1) 25' premium Mic Cable
(1) RODE TRIPOD tabletop mic stand
(1) Comprehensive Setup Manual
At the end of the episode Guy gives you a taste of what it sounds like and it sure sounds beautiful. What would you expect to pay for something like this? $2,000? $1,000? How about $750 from the DV Creators store. He certainly makes a persuading case.
The Levelator has grown up since we first posted about it a month ago. It's now out of beta and has a whole new look. Gone is the Java interface that's shown in the earlier post and it now sports a snazzy new native UI for each platform. They've tweaked the algorithms, using "challenging" audio files that users sent in to test with, plus improved the handling of background noise and stereo files. You can find a full list of changes here. This little program comes in very handy for quick audio fixes and best of all it's free and available for Windows and Mac (universal).
Adobe has made available a 2nd public beta for Soundbooth, free to anyone willing to give it a download. Some of the highlights include:
The Lasso tool in the Visual Healing task is active
Many new effects added (including EQ, Reverb, Compressor, & Dynamics)
Copy and Paste between audio files
Mix paste audio into and between audio files
High-quality time and pitch shifting
Normalize button now "Louder" button--multiple clicks apply hard limiting
Click and drag the CTI to scrub
Auto-heal cut/paste boundaries to eliminate clicks on edits
AutoComposer saw many improvements
Familiar Adobe tools panel
Many performance and usability tweaks throughout
Of course one thing they didn't fix is the support for PowerPC Macs. But I guess you kind of expected that one, right? More details about the changes in beta 2 can be found at CreateDigitalMusic.com
It is also worth mentioning Adobe unveiled their new application icons, that perodic table looking Sb you see up there. See the rest of them at John Nack's blog.
I never paid much attention to Soundtrack Pro for whatever reason, but I digress. This helpful tutorial will get you started on sending audio from within Final Cut Pro to the application, removing some noise, and bringing the sound files back into FCP. Of course, this is not the end-all be-all tutorial for correcting for noise in your audio, but it will help to give you a better sense of how you can use Soundtrack Pro in conjunction with FCP to have better control over the quality of your audio. Useful stuff.
Who better to come up with a road warrior setup for audio recording than a popular voice-over actor. After a bit a trial and error, Harlan Hogan came up with a setup that allows him to do his work pretty much anywhere. He follows the logic that for good sound you don't need to be inside a sound box, the microphone does. Checkout the setup he came up with and it might spark some ideas for your own version. While he may use this as a portable solution, something similar will work as a more permanent solution for those of us who don't have official sound booth areas to work in.
sync.sound.cinema is a blog dedicated to bringing news on different elements of audio production. As we all know, audio is a bit of an unfortunate underdog when it comes to the filmmaking process. People love to talk about their shiny new cameras with 24p, HDV, etc., but the audio end of producing films seems to play second fiddle to the overall artistic process, despite its great significance. Anyway, it's nice to see a new site devoted strictly to sound, and hopefully it will shape up to become an important resource.
There's a good podcast over at Digital Media Insider about portable recording devices. The discussion with Mark Nelson centers around what to look for in a portable digital recorder. A nice added feature is in the production notes where you'll get the details of the equipment and software used to create the podcast and how it was all pulled together. Good stuff worth checking out.
The title is misleading because I am pretty sure that Pro Tools is not on Linux as of yet. But good news Mactel-based audio people! DigiDesign has released Pro Tools 7.3 which is now compatible with Macs equipped with Intel processors. Pro Tools is the industry standard with audio. I know many sound designers who were not going to upgrade to the new Macs till Pro Tools became compatible.
For more info on new features, check out these video one & two (Flash video). Besides compatibility, there aren't any major new features, a lot of interface improvements. Free upgrade for existing users.
I was catching up on some podcasts today and heard the guys on TWIT talking about using The Levelator on the audio for their podcast. Of course I had to go check it out. It is a little software app that adjusts variations in audio levels within an audio file. Just drag and drop your audio file into The Levelator's window and it spits out a new version of the file with the level variations reduced. I tried it out on a clip I had where one speaker was pretty loud and another spoke very soft and it did a pretty good job on it.
This is not an audio editor and there aren't any settings to adjust. It's being promoted in the podcasting world, but there might be an occasion where you need a quick fix and don't feel like busting out the big gun editor. It's free, and it's available for Mac and Windows.
At some point, Apple updated its OS for Intel Macs to include ambient noise reduction preference. This is a helpful tool if you are recording sound directly to your computer or around it. When you decrease ambience, the OS lessens the fan noise somehow. If you have one of these machines, you can find the option under sound prefrences (Apple icon>system preferences>sound).
This is as easy as it gets for Do-it-yourself (DIY) projects. If you are in need of a microphone stand and have no cash to spend, a regular metal coat hanger could work as an acceptable solution. Just fold the hanger into a diamond shape, attach the mic on the open end, then bend in half with the bottom triangle acting as the tripod. Perfect for scratch voiceovers.
Late Show with David Letterman music mixer Harvey Goldberg likes doing things the old fashioned way. He has a background in studio mixing, which helps a great deal with his current job. Every night, Goldberg is in charge of mixing both the house band with Paul Shaffer, as well as the musical guest... and he's still rockin' it analog. 
Besides the actual invention of movies itself, the next best innovation was adding sound to the picture. How they did this is probably a little hard to comprehend in this day and age let alone in 1929. Fleischer Studios, the animators of Popeye, Betty Boop, as well as Superman, made an educational cartoon to explain to the world how sound becomes joined to motion pictures.
Guy Cochran from 
Adobe has made available a 2nd public beta for 
I never paid much attention to Soundtrack Pro for whatever reason, but I digress. This helpful 
Who better to come up with a road warrior setup for audio recording than a popular voice-over actor. After a bit a trial and error, Harlan Hogan came up with a 
There's a good 
The title is misleading because I am pretty sure that Pro Tools is not on Linux as of yet. But good news Mactel-based audio people! DigiDesign has 
I was catching up on some podcasts today and heard the guys on 
At some point, Apple updated its OS for Intel Macs to include ambient noise reduction preference. This is a helpful tool if you are recording sound directly to your computer or around it. When you decrease ambience, the OS lessens the fan noise somehow. If you have one of these machines, you can find the option under sound prefrences (Apple icon>system preferences>sound).
If you've been working with the audio editor Fission, version 1.1 was just released . New 
This is as easy as it gets for Do-it-yourself (DIY) projects. If you are in need of a microphone stand and have no cash to spend, a regular metal coat hanger could work as an acceptable solution. Just fold the hanger into a diamond shape, attach the mic on the open end, then bend in half with the bottom triangle acting as the tripod. Perfect for scratch voiceovers.
