Archive for May, 2009

So how many of you out there have run ISDN sessions? Recording a Voice over remotely? Streaming the talent from one city to another with an ISDN box at both ends?

Its dead technology. Read more below after enjoying this instructional video about voice over recordings:

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s this thing called the “inter-ma-web” and it connects lots of places too, so the smart coders over at Source Elements created a plugin for Pro Tools called Source Connect. It allows a CD quality stream of audio (and TC!) to be pass 2 ways between two PT rigs connected by decent broadband connections. By decent, I used to have it running on a 256k out and 1500k in ADSL connection and it worked great, with a 300ms delay, which for a VO is bearable.

Sournce Connect was susceptible to drop outs depending on your internet connection, so they have developed a new caching technology (with SC 3.x) to go back after the recording and fill in the gaps with Auto-Restore and Auto-replace functions! Well cool!

They also have a plugin for one way communication that would be handy for quick approvals with multiple parties. Its called Source-Live and it sets up a stream from your PT rig (from an Aux out to the plugin) so that anything you play in the studio can be heard by the email recipients who connected to your stream with windows media player or itunes!

I’m hoping to get an interview with Rebecca from Source Elements in the near future and she can talk us through their various SW with a demo.

A second piece of technology that works very well with Source Connect is Digidelivery. DD for short. DD allows the owner of the box (its a rack mounted server) to send large media packages over their outband internet connection as simply as email. Its integrated into PT and Avid Media composer directly from the file menu, so you can simply DD a PT session and it comes up with the dialogue box similar to a Session session copy as – ie would you like to include media, videos files, etc as tick boxes.

These systems have been used together for remote VO records, where source Connect allows for the director/producer to give the talent feedback on their recording from somewhere else, and at the end of the session, the local PT session recording is delivered to them uncompressed via DD. Tidy workflow!