Here’s what Paul has been up to over at Neyrinck!! Brilliant!!

Because a) theremins are awesome, and b) big things are awesome

a+b=

The IBC trade show is underway over in europe at the moment, and each day on the main stage of the Avid booth they are doing a “Technology Preview” of some features they are working on to incorporate into a future release of ProTools – no delivery date and big fat disclaimer on the head of this demo!

So the key new features they are working on:

AUDIOSUITE HANDLES – edits can be made to the top and tail of clips that have had effects “rendered”, MASSIVE time saver depending on how this is eventually implemented.

36dB Clip gain adjustment – a new clip based gain playlist seperate to volume automation – should help differentiate between dialogue editors work and mixers work in some respects. Long time feature request based on Nuendo features in years past.

Disk/Ram caching – super fast playback of big sessions, straight from ram. They say this helps with ISIS storage, I wonder if other 3rd party systems will see similar benefits? Fingers crossed.

Fades – REAL TIME! – no more fade files getting lost and having to be carried around

Crossfade view – showing ins and outs, responding to the clip gain, as you move regions around and update the shape.

Anyways, all good news from the “Gods of ProTools Development” – this video was a lovely Birthday present! Fingers crossed we see some of these features before too long!!

So the last few days I’ve been loitering with intent over at the Hordern Pavillion in Moore Park for the Integrate trade show.

Lovely to catch up with so many familiar faces and to have a well attended “drum mastery” clinic, thanks to all who attended and I hope you got some tips and tricks out of it.

However, I just need to have a rant – and since its my blog, I get to do that within reason…

So, “Mastering Engineers” for music. I’ll freely admit I was late to the session, but in the 10 minutes I listened to a panel discussion about mastering I heard the word “loudness” bantered around about a 100 times, and yet at the mention of loudness metering these Mastering folk’s eyes glaze over and they show disinterest for the most part (Rick ONeil the exception who is off to check them out he says).

How can an industry who, in the absence of vinyl for the most part, primarily be concerned with loudness of track after track and compressing and dynamic range NOT be using LKFS and loudness meters every minute of every day!! I just don’t understand how the music industry is working in such a vacuum that they are ignorant of trends in audio, changes in metering and the way audio is being worked with for broadcast transmission. Loudness metering is surely one of those fantastic great steps forward that should (in my ignorance I assume) make music mastering that much easier, more consistent and less political.

For Example

Band member A “we want that song louder”

Mastering engineer “how much louder?”

“Band member B “oh, you know, just a db or two”

Mastering engineer ” ok sure – the rest of the album is LKFS -14 and this one is -12, have a listen”

Band who cant really hear the difference anyway “Yeah sure, ok man thats good”

The meters never lie, they give you a the best statistical measure of how the human ear perceives the loudness of program material, over time – how can this not make the music mastering crowd jump up and down in excitement? RMS over time? WTF?? Why would you bother???!!! VUs??? FFS How is that going to help??

Maybe the Power of Greyskull is needed to move these Masters along with the times, or at least to get them to read some industry literature beyond the album liner notes and “thank yous” on the latest album by “song of the month, Chick 102″…

OK, perhaps overly harsh, but please, to the music mastering engineers of the world, read up on loudness metering, R128 and LKFS and LUFS. It may actually help you in your day to day work – and maybe, just maybe, it will be a tool to help manage the loudness war that many of you complain about?

My, my, what an interesting few weeks it’s been! Apple have launched their all new, ground up rewrite of their flagship video editing solution Final Cut Pro and dubbed it version X – apparently V8 and V9 went missing somewhere along the way (the most recent version was V7).

The hubbub has been that FCPX has significantly less features than its predecessor. Things missing:

That said, its price point has dropped to a measely US$299 – very much in the consumer price point. Consequently many folks are pointing the finger accusingly dubbing it IMovie X and mainly saying Apple have lost focus on the pro space. REALLY?? Colour me surprised, (cough ipad/iphone/ipod, cough)

Oh – and FCPX doesn’t have OMF/AAF/XML exporting options so their new flagship editor cant even collaborate with Soundtrack let alone PT – or earlier versions of FCP apparently. So it’s all created quite a mess and left the door open for Avid to pop in and say things like “um, hi guys, we still care about professionals”.

The funny thing is listening to all the Avid buzz and how dated it is – most of the bloggers/reviewers commentators have totally lost touch with Avid and the changes at the company in the last 3-4 years since Gary Greenfield took over. Often saying Avid have been “on the ropes” and maybe they can “come back” since Apple have dropped the ball – thing is, Avid have been gaining credibility and respect since the GFC with their change of management but the Cult of Apple largely dismiss this sort of stuff. Gary G and Kirk Arnold and the Avid mgt team have been meeting with pro editors all over the world for the last few years and making products to meet their needs, exactly the opposite of Apple in this recent release, but I guess they simply don’t have the marketing budget to fight Apple on their ground.

Yes yes, I used to work for them and come across as a fanboy, BUT, Media composer has a non-destructive policy when it comes to field recorder metadata, MC passes markers in their AAFs, supports grouping clips of polywavs, stereo tracks support, RTAS plugins come across to PT9, the list goes on of things that Avid MC does RIGHT. NO, it’s not a perfect workflow (that’s a pretty shifting landscape) and Avid should be doing better with interop today than they are, regardless, it’s better than NOT working with an editor on FCPX who can’t export anything to you…

There’s a bit of buzz going about online referring to a new pro audio “cloud” service called “Gobbler”. This is partly created by their lovely web site and promise of easier online collaboration for all DAWs, and partly by their promise of free Gbs of cloud space for folk who sign up their mates, mormon-style (assuming the mormons give you a good offsite backup plan if you win over an infidel).

I’ve been using it a little bit the last few weeks in between teaching at UTS, and its quite snazzy – scans your HDDs, you tick the projects you want to backup and it takes care of it in the background. The only thing I couldn’t find was any information about how its reading my PTF file to figure out where my files are that need backing up. The KEY THING is that its ONLY backing up audio files that reside in the “Audio Files” folder inside the folder that contains the PTF you tick – Gobbler is yet to become a 3rd party developer with Avid so their can “Read” the PTF file format, so this is the only way it can work currently.

If you’re a fan, drop a line to your local Avid rep to suggest they partner with Gobbler, it would certainly make all our lives easier if we could use this service with the security of knowing its backing up all files REFERRED to by a session, rather than just the ones in the folder.

Oh, and if you want to use it to send files, it forces the recipient to sign up to Gobbler before they can receive the files, which is a bit of a bummer/limitation when sending mixes to clients.

Anyways, check it out!

Well, I have quite a bit on my hands coming up at UTS:Proschool. Tanny, our business manager, has managed to almost fill not just the usual 4 classes we run mid year, but nearly SEVEN short courses!!

Places are still available for those who act quick, and I might add that we are open to discussing “prior learning/experience” when it comes to which courses you wish to take if you want to try your hand at the 200 level or above. Not many schools run these courses, so it’s not common to get a chance to enroll in so many of them in such a short space of time, running in sequence.

Dates are as follows:

Pro Tools 101: 22 – 24 June, 9.30am – 4.30pm

Pro Tools 110: 27 – 29 June, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Please note these are taught at UTS/ 2SER radio studios

Pro Tools 201: 30 June – 1 July, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Pro Tools 210M: 4 – 6 July, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Pro Tools 310M: 11 – 13 July, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Pro Tools 210P: 20 – 22 July, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Pro Tools 310P: 25 – 27 July, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Please note these courses are taught in the UTS Bon Marche Building

Bookings and prices are available here

You can contact the school with any questions here:

Tel: +61 (0)2 9514 9931
Fax: +61 (0)2 9514 2296
Email: Fass.shortcourses@uts.edu.au

Check this out! New app from Avid that turns your Ipad into a music stand!! Awesome idea!

(Ta to Geoff McGahn for the link on FB)

http://www.sibelius.com/products/avid_scorch/index.html

Avid today announced PT 9.02 patch. Lots of stability improvements and bug fixes!

Avid 902 patch homepage

A couple of interesting notes from the readme (yes, I read them!)

Actually I started to copy and paste good ones as I hit them and after copying pasting so many I figured you wouldnt read them I stopped, I also realised at that point in time I was only 20% through the readme. So, in summary, MANY FIXES, MANY GOOD. If you care more, feel free to download and read the aptly named readme file as I did.

This month only, 2 hours of tutoring either online via skype or in the studio, only AUS$100. Session must be taken before Jan 31st. That’s a saving of 33%

HDV camera can be set up to show you my DCommand while we go through advanced automation topics or ICON navigation

Speed up your editing and get the most from your control surface!

Use this quiet time at the start of the year to get your chops up for 2011.

Drop me a line to book via the contact form.