Digital Video - April 2008 - (Page 38) AUDIO SOLUTIONS improvement, but still not practical for mixing a film. The problem is that real-world mixes involve moving lots of faders at the same time, with some tracks getting louder while others get softer. If you want to crossfade two tracks on the screen, you have to fade one down in real-time, rewind, position the mouse on the second track, push it up in real-time, and then possibly redo the first fade while you’re listening to how the combination actually sounds. It can make mixing even a simple project painfully slow. back fades you’ve already recorded, while you’re perfecting those on other tracks. It may all seem complicated — box A sends commands to software B to emulate what was originally programmed as mouse action C, which is then sent back to A for user feedback — but it gives you the best of both computerized and traditional mixing. The image seen here shows the whole process graphically. The hand is pushing a fader up for one set of music tracks, on channel 5. Meanwhile, fades already written on tracks 7 and 8 are playing back. HARDWARE CONTROLLERS While your computer has only one mouse and can move only one on-screen slider at a time, most of us have plenty of fingers. So manufacturers developed hardware controllers, with multiple sliders and knobs that can be moved by different fingers simultaneously. Behringer’s BCF-2000 is a simple one. While it’s about as big as a laptop and costs less than $200, it can add real mixing control to most audio programs and many NLEs. The controls on it that look like a mixer are actually digital encoders. Each time you move one, the box sends that movement to the computer via USB, where a system-level driver sends it to the rubber bands and on-screen faders. When you play back — and here’s the great part — the rubber bands talk back to the controller. Tiny motors move the faders, and duplicate what you’ve done with your fingers. This doesn’t affect the sound, since there’s no actual audio in the controller, but provides visual and tactile feedback. Almost all controllers include transport buttons and knobs that can be assigned to panning or adjusting effects, and many have a jog/shuttle wheel to save mousing while editing. Some controllers also include good quality multichannel audio input and output, so you don’t need a separate box for that function, and connect via FireWire. Many controllers have sliders for just eight tracks in their base configuration. Since a film can involve dozens of simultaneous tracks, these controllers use bank switches that assign the eight to different groups of tracks at a time. You can program all of the dialog, then move over on the “console” to adjust sound effects or scoring. Good audio software even lets you set up custom banks of track, group and master faders, all recallable from the controller. It’s the modern equivalent of the old Hollywood practice of premixing, where all the dialog tracks would be mixed to one piece of magnetic film and all the sound effects to another, to simplify the final mix. Except there’s no quality loss from multiple generations, and it’s easy to go back to change a premix later. Switching banks can get confusing, since you have to keep track of which fader belongs to which track. Many controllers put an LED or LCD readout above each fader to report what it’s currently doing, based on track names you assign. This saves time and confusion in a complex mix, where you’ll frequently be switching banks while a scene is rolling. AUTOMATION MODES Most software is pretty smart about deciding when to play fader moves and when to record them, even if you’re making changes on a track that’s almost complete. Better programs give you a choice of how they make these decisions, even when tracks are nominally set to write new automation data. Touch mode keeps a track in play mode until you actually grab a fader. If you leave a fader alone, it moves up and down according to the track’s rubber band. But when touch with finger or mouse, it senses that you’re there and redraws the line based on current movements. When you let go, the volume goes back to any levels you previously wrote. This makes it easy to record small changes Latching mode works like Touch, except once you’ve touched a fader, its volume stays where you left it until you stop the transport. Use it to revise a scene you’ve already written. Overwrite mode writes new data for selected tracks as soon as you start the transport. You can preset the opening of an entire scene with the transport stopped, then record all its faders at once. Trim mode scales any existing fader movements based on where you’ve set the fader. Use this if you’ve recorded a complex automation sequence with a lot of fades, and then want to make a particular element louder or softer without having to remake each movement. MOUSE MIXING Even if you’ve got a control surface and lots of responsive faders under your fingers, there will be times your fingers haven’t moved exactly the way you want them. You might have done an elaborate transition between two scenes perfectly, but missed where the picture dissolves by a few frames. Or you might want to adjust the level of just a single word or note. That’s when it pays to remember that your software is really using control points on rubber-band volume lines, even if you’re accessing them with virtual or real faders. Here are some techniques for fine-tuning those points. DV Excerpted from “Producing Great Sound for Film and Digital Video” (Focal Press, ISBN 978-0-240-80970-0). (c) 2008 Jay Rose; used by permission. More details and links to discount sales at Jay’s website: www.dplay.com/book. www.dv.com WORKING WITH AUTOMATION What makes automation so powerful is that the computer plays 38 dv april 2008 http://www.dplay.com/book http://www.dv.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.