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

I’ve been lucky enough in the last few months to have some small success and have made a decision to re-invest in my business, upgrading some gear, picking up a few new plugins things like that. I havent spent any significant money since I opened my doors nearly two years ago, so I consider it overdue!

So I’m hunting around for a deal on some new speakers and couldn’t help but have a rant about that experience. Read on if you find my ire and frustration marginally amusing, if not, tune in again next blog post…If you’re an australian distributor I urge you to read on, to better understand your clients perpective on your “salesmanship”.

I worked in pro audio distribution for years, I know the frustration of those companies who provide solid support to whoever calls them at whatever hour of the day and they never asks a sheckle for the honour of it. I also understand that distributors largely only get negative calls – I mean when was the last time you rang your reseller/distributor to thank them for a trouble free, solid product? It’s a thankless task being in the middle at times (oh except for the money in it).

However, you’d have to be living under a rock not to realise the aussie dollar and US dollar are close to parity – which makes for “cheap” products when shopping online from overseas stores. I mean A Current Affair have done how many bloody special investigations on the topic since we went over 90 cents? So can I be blamed for shopping around for a deal? I don’t think so, in fact I think its disrespectful to my family not to shop for the best deal to keep my cost of business economical – and more importantly I dont think I deserve a dose of guilt and a lecture on my evils from the local distributors…

I was given a great quote overseas where the landed cost of the goods, with shipping AND having rightfully paid the GST on the way into the country had the gear quite a few hundred dollars cheaper than the best price I could get locally. The locals didn’t have stock, had to check with other folk OS outside business hours to give me an ETA on stock, the turnaround was going to be significantly longer and yet they STILL had an angry tone and defensively asked me questions like “do you buy a lot of gear overseas do you!?” (the implication, HOW VERY DARE YOU!).

They went on to aggressively explain they provide EXCELLENT service, and that I can ask clients XYZ all about it….I’m sorry, but isnt that YOUR job? To SELL me? To convince of this supposed added value you provide? Why should I ring someone other than you to convince me to shop with you?? How about…

a) providing a written warranty document, outlining what added service support I can expect that differentiates your business from offshore businesses?

b) Provide some testimonials of clients in writing – maybe even, go forbid, on the same document above?

Or at the very least, leave your “sense of entitlement” to my sale out of your tone of voice when you try to convince to shop with you? It’s now a global market – you are NOT entitled to my sale, you have to EARN it. Calm yourself down, sell me, do your job and I’ll shop with you – but given a lovely, fast, courteous experience with overseas stores compared to grumpy, defensive, agressive locals who are demanding more money and providing little in the way of justification for the difference, is it any wonder more and more people shop online?

Manage your clients perspectives – “the truth” is subjective – this article is a buyers perspective and I urge local pro audio resellers to adapt to survive and to keep aussie dollars in Australia for all our sakes.

To all my Sydney subscribers/readers, the next Sydney ProTools User group night will be held in a weeks time, Tuesday 13th December.

Venue: AFTRS Mix theatre.

Time: 530pm for a 6pm kick off

We’ll be digging into the post features in PT10 in detail, looking over clip gain, disk cache and audiosuite improvements. Lots to talk about!

Also Avid have kindly given us a pair of headphones to give away as a door prize! Please rsvp on the Event at Facebook if you can make it.

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

a+b=

New, more polished, technology preview of future ProTools features and more of an overview of their current technology – more tidbits:  apparently up to 12 systems linkable via satellite tech coming! Being able to open multiple audiosuite windows at once – and they look much sexier! New GUI for Sci-Fi at the very least. Also “Group Clips” seem to replace Region groups – and they carry clip gain between sessions. BIG ONE – they were using ReVibe on a HD Native system – must be the long rumoured RTAS build coming!!

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?

Hi All,

If you’re in Sydney for the Integrate Trade Show, at Moore Park, I’ll be presenting a PT workshop going through Beat Detective, Elastic Audio and Tempo Mapping in detail. More info here

Andy Stewart gave me a call yesterday to confirm that Geoff Emerick of Beatles recording fame will be presenting alongside Richard Lush which should make for a great session.

Also right next door to Integrate is the Australian Film, Television & Radio School, the following sessions will be going on…

Mixing in Surround: AFTRS Head of Sound, Chris McKeith, explores and demonstrates aspects of making and mixing 5.1 surround soundtracks for film and TV. This session will be conducted in AFTRS’ state-of-the-art mix theatre, and numbers will be kept to below 20 attendees to ensure get your questions answered.

Advanced Mixing in ProTools: AFTRS Head of Sound, Chris McKeith, examines features and techniques using ProTools and ICON consoles for mixing 5.1 soundtracks. This session will be conducted in AFTRS’ state-of-the-art mix theatre, and numbers will be kept to below 20 attendees to ensure get your questions answered.

How Film Music Works: AFTRS Composer and Head of Screen Music, Martin Armiger, guides you through how to successfully marry the worlds of film and music.

Introduction to Location Sound: Aspiring recordists will learn the key concepts and hear/see real-life examples of where location sound has gone right and where it’s gone very wrong. Presented by Rod Pascoe.

Tickets are now available for all sessions and can be purchased from the Integrate website. Click on the ‘Seminars 2011’ tab for more. Hurry, numbers are strictly limited.

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!