TV Technology - January 7, 2009 - (Page 24)

FEATURES get through this. Those strategies include: • “The ultra-standard precision monitoring environment,” where everything always meets spec and nothing ever changes, and so we can trust our judgment about the magnitude of any fix we might want to put in. • “The end user screening room,” designed to mimic a consumer environment, so we get a chance to perceive how end users might actually experience our work. (We can then run back to the “ultra-standard” room and dial in the corrections.) • “The mastering engineer,” who is a neutral outside specialist in predicting how productions will sound for end users. In all of these cases, all the interested parties remain pretty much involved right up to the point where the mastering engineer pronounces the work finished. Conflicts and disagreements are mostly resolved by negotiation, accommodation and consensus, coupled with (usually) a dollop of mutual professional respect. Just so you know, there is also a fine tradition of teeth-gnashing and rending of garments by all of the above parties INSIDE AUDIO Dave Moulton Who Do We Really Work For? F “rugged and dependable. the arrow system is Its operational characteristics are superior. It handles every demand I’ve ever made of it “ or the past few months, I’ve been exploring the mysterious relationship between audio levels and loudness and how those of us involved in audio production might get such things to be consistent and satisfactory for our viewers. Last month I got tripped up by Tim Carroll, who queried whether or not this is really our proper goal. He suggested that our real obligation may be to our producers, and to manage levels and loudness to their satisfaction. I promised to discuss this in a little more depth this month. Happy New Year, everybody! Paul Buscemi Chief Photographer WBZ Boston, MA. A CBS O&O WHAT HAPPENS IN THE RECORD/MUSIC BIZ I am involved in the music and record businesses, wearing a variety of hats, including those of the artist, the recording engineer, the producer and Our radio broadcastin’ cousins clearly have their own agenda, which is to improve listener satisfaction. a point of difference arrow camera support systems PERFORMANCE EXCELLENCE performance pan and tilt a wide range of camcorders Available in system combinations that offer Sprinter II, HD or Solo Tripods www.millertripods.com/arrow Email: sales@millertripods.us the mastering engineer. (Right now, I am also working on being a consumer loudspeaker manufacturer.) As a result of these varied experiences, I have a lot of perspective regarding the wishes, needs and abilities of the artist, the producer, the engineer, and a particularly favorite object of study, our beloved end user. I’m very familiar with and comfortable dealing with the struggles artists go through trying to anticipate how their work will sound to end users, while at the same time trying to successfully create their music in the first place. For them, it’s a little like Michelangelo lying on his scaffold painting that ceiling of the Sistine Chapel while worrying about how it’s going to look in future postcards. The point is, in that work we acknowledge that the artist (and producer) don’t have time, in the heat of production, to deal with these concerns, which relegates such concerns to postand post-post-production, where we have found it is far easier to struggle with them. We know that getting the music right for the end user is a problem, for a lot of reasons. We use a lot of strategies, often in tandem, to help us when contemplating the abuses subsequently encountered during radio airplay of their completed works of music. And here’s where the rubber meets the road. Our radio broadcastin’ cousins clearly have their own agenda, which is to improve listener satisfaction. They also have their own ideas about how listeners are best satisfied. They have essentially no interest in what the artist/producer/engineer/masterer had in mind or desired (I know this for sure, because I’ve actually been there, helping radio stations tweak “their sound”—it’s a fascinating thing to behold). Their only interest lies in what will get their listeners jazzed and also what will hopefully attract even more listeners desiring to be similarly jazzed. Now, does this sound at all familiar? A central tradition in TV broadcast production has been to look and listen ahead to what we think our viewer/listeners will experience. Unfortunately, we do this in anarchical fashion, in both parallel and serial streams of tweaks. Each of us in the broadcast flow seems to keep his/her hand on the spoon stirWORK, PAGE 30 24 January 7, 2009 • TV Technology • www.tvtechnology.com http://www.millertripods.com/arrow http://www.millertripods.com/arrow http://www.tvtechnology.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of TV Technology - January 7, 2009

TV Technology - January 7, 2009 NFL Enters a New Dimension Mobile DTV Looms Large in 2009 Contents A ‘Flexible Framework’ Doing More With Less ‘X’tra-Streamlined Finish Line in Sight for BAS Transition Ahead of the Relocation Curve DTV Transition Survival Guide ENG and the Lines of Communication DTV Transition Survival Guide Who Do We Really Work For? Obama to Expand Internet Access The Wizard Takes a Holiday The Solid-State Disk Revival To Light the Ear... or Not Hulu Gets It Right—the First Time User Reports—Video Servers & Recording/Controllers Reference Guide Product Showcase Classifieds Marketplace TV Tech Business

TV Technology - January 7, 2009

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