General Topics Archive

Happy New Year!

– January 16, 2012Posted in: General Topics

Hello to everyone and Happy New Year! If you follow my Sumsound facebook page you’ll know I’ve been upgrading my studio and having a fine time doing that. Some news thats new and approved for the start of 2012…

Apparently Waves are sitting very hard on the fence about supporting the new ProTools AAX DSP format. Online conjecture is rife and many fairly reliable sources are saying that Waves are holding out to see what the uptake is of the new Avid HDX core systems (that replace the ageing TDM technology) before committing to any development. As far as mixing goes, I really dont care if I have a bit of delay in my system, but for folks tracking/recording big sessions with waves plugins this creates a bit of a pickle. Email them if you have strong feelings on the matter!

I wrote a comprehensive review of PT10 for AudioTechnology magazine recently- you can read it online via their site, page 64!

I will be teaching the Avid ProTools short courses at AFTRS this year, we are offering PT101 over 6 x Tuesday nights in Feb and PT110 over 3 x Saturdays in late March early April. Any Sydney readers, please spread the word to any family/friends who are looking to speed up their PT chops.

If you haven’t already grabbed Valhalla FreqEcho you’re slow off the mark – an awesome free plugin for 2012!

On the paid plugin side of things, Abbey Road are half price at the moment – IMHO their Brilliance pack is..well…yknow

Anyone out there using Paul Neyrincks VControl Pro? Stay tuned for some awesome developments on that front this year. Can’t say more at this stage but some very nifty features coming to it soon.

HDNative vs HD3: and the winner is…

– November 17, 2011Posted in: General Topics

So I just took delivery of a HD Native card yesterday. In talking to mixers overseas the general vibe was a HDNative card on a modern mac would be equal to a HD3 or greater. I was sceptical. I figured that many mixers (myself humbly included) are loathe to mix RTAS in amongst their TDM plugins so I figured they were comparing TDM only usage vs RTAS power and consequently seeing big disparities as they had never used their RTAS power before in any great way. There are delay comp issues going down that path, RTAS plugs have to be inserted before TDM plugs etc, all that.

So I decided to test my theory and get proper data once and for all. So I made a session on my HD3Accel rig called “MakeitCrash.ptx”

Yes, this test was all done on PT10 on Lion on an 8 core nehalem mac pro, 10gbs of Ram with the playback buffer at 512 and core usage at 10 cores, 99%.

So first I loaded up my tracks/voices to max, 192 of them. Then I switched on delay comp to long, 4k samples. Then I switched on all busses in the IO setup, 256 of them. Then I loaded as many auxes and sends and 5.1 outputs as I could before redlining the mixer. Now the 6 chip mixer was maxed out I proceeded onto inserts. I ran up TDM EQ3s on all the auxes in the TDM domain to avoid voice issues on audio tracks with consequent RTAS plugs (no voices left at this stage). That maxed my chips on all 3 TDM Accel cards, and then I went to RTAS on my audio tracks and started to insert RTAS EQ3s on 96 stereo tracks. Barely dented the CPU, so I started adding AAX native Channel strips.

The final session had most of the 96 audio tracks all running 5 instances of either EQ3 or channel strip, 2 sends and about 30 auxes with EQ3s on them as well and everything was redlining, but the session COULD play and was responsive without DAE errors.

Opening and closing the session – OMG, took forever. Opening it the second time I thought the machine had hung, it took about 8 minutes with no visual indication anything was happening.

So that was the TDM rig – I figured opening this session on native would come up with inactive plugs as it would be just using the equivalent RTAS power and would be missing the mixing/insert power of the 3 accel cards…what happened?

Firstly it opened snappy, within 5 seconds. Woah. Secondly everything was active. I pumped up the delay comp to 16K and I hit play….and got an error. So I went to my playback engine and bumped up the playback buffer from 512 to 1024 and cores from 10 to 12. Playback, no errors, all is good, snappy, wow…

How is this possible?!

Basically the HD Native 64 bit engine must be that much more optimised that it absorbed the extra processing power of a HD3Accel!! I was gobsmacked and grinning from ear to ear. Most of the plugins running were AAX channel strips but there were bucketloads of RTAS EQ3 and even a few RTAS TL Space in there from memory. Cant wait to see what usage I get when they are ported to the new and leaner AAX format!! There’s also the possibility that RTAS and AAX running in a TDM environment was just not optimised much at all, regardless, the results were conclusive!

So in switching from my HD3Accel to a HD Native card what have I lost and gained? I’ve lost a few TDM only plugins like Dolby surround tools, Ampfarm, Echofarm, Heat – that’s about it that I use. What have I gained? 4 times the delay comp, an extra 60 audio voices, amazingly snappy session open and close and re-routing and apparently if I switch up to 16 cores at 99% likely more grunt than I need for your average aussie feature mix! I’ve also gained my now redundant HD rig to use as a stem recorder and thanks to PT10 and Dcommand multi-mode I can access both from my console.

I am very, very, happy right now. Looking forwards to my first big mix and throwing around some Channel strips willy nilly!

The session can be downloaded here if you’re interested in running the test yourself on your own system.

MakeItCrash

These be strange times…

– November 6, 2011Posted in: General Topics

Well! I just got back from my honeymoon in North America and there have been some odd developments in the last few weeks!

Obviously the death of the founder of the “Jobs-ian movement” was a big one – many apple store genius’ sitting on the sidewalk crying in SF made for an odd air to the city while my wife and I were there…(j/k)

Then there was the outcry over the upgrade pricing for PT10HD…Avid then did a backflip and are including retrospective upgrades for anyone who buys a USD$599 support contract, effectively knocking 40% off the price of the upgrade and including a support contract at no cost – but before they got there, SHEESH, the outcry! Having been using PT10 for a while now, its a great upgrade, fastest PT version yet and first post-centric release IMHO since PT7.2, well worth the price of admission, but for some of these so-called professionals, bitching and moaning about a grand, harden up. Its a tax deductible business expense and it seems like Avid are moving to a yearly upgrade pattern, although PT9 was only the end of last year. A grand per year to stay “in the club” and get bug fixes and decent features that we, the users, ask for seems like a decent deal to me.

On the back of all that, while I was in CA, Avid unfortunately let go of a bunch of staff, people I know and have worked with and deeply respect. It really felt like strange move and lets hope its not a knee-jerk reaction to their stock prices. Best of luck to those who got laid off, I truly hope you all land on your feet in these hard times.

On the night of my return to Aus, I managed to wrangle a last minute ticket in the Australian Screen Sound Guild award night and caught up with the local audio community – fantastic night, and picked up an award for my premixing on “The Missing Key” as well! It means quite a lot to me having only really just started on this side of the fence as a mixer rather than a PT specialist – knowing the gear and doing the craft are very different things as you all no doubt know, so this was a lovely surprise and boost for me Thanks ASSG!

Lastly, a massive thank you to the mixers who made me welcome at the various dub stages I visited while in North America. Lovely to meet Ceri Thomas (who has a great post centric blog), hang with Danny C and Erik Foreman at Skywalker (yes I got to see Gary Rizzo, Gary Rydstrom and Michael Semanik while there, quite a bit of mixer worship going on that day), then down in LA visiting Gary Gegan at AudioHead (an amazing facility full of history), the inimitable Jonathan Wales of Sonic Magic and the lovely Joe Milner of Puget Sound. Thanks so much to all of you for your time and hopefully we get to meet in person again one day.

PS – any readers in Sydney or Melbourne, the local Avid crew have asked me to help out this coming Tuesday in Melbourne and Friday in Sydney to run the practical demo sessions of PT10 at their local launch events, come along, hope to see you there!

PT10 and HDx cards announced

– October 22, 2011Posted in: General Topics

So after several “preview” showings the cat is finally out of the bag: PT10 is here and new HD cards have finally arrived!

So far, indications are that a HDx1 system is way more powerful than a HD3 and a 2 card system is hard to push into the red. The key thing is you now have a true hybrid system as the plugin format has evolved – AAX is here replacing and superseding RTAS and TDM. AAX is one set of code than can freely move between the host processor and the HDx cards depending on what you’re trying to achieve. In addition, the delay comp engine is now beefed up to 16000 or so samples – it even deals with real time pitch changes and denoising now!

To me, 10 feels like the first “post-centric” release since 7.2. You get the euphonic based channel strip, new field recorder workflows, disk cache for massive sessions and the ability to export “selected tracks as a new PT session”. Track count goes up again with sessions able to have up to 768 voice able tracks using a 3 card HDx system, making conforming reels/spools much easier. Disk Cache is also a massive boon – I was tempted to buy an SSD drive and see what gains it made, but this makes it redundant for most tasks. Admittedly it doesn’t help with samplers or video files AFAIK (yet) but for general audio performance its made PT feel amazingly sleek and light on the CPU.

Multi-mode on command gives me two rigs on my surface – who said ICON would get no love after the Euphonix acquisition!!

Revive and Impact will no doubt be released in the AAX format soon which will mean we can run them on non-HD systems! Cant wait to see that. We’ll have to wait to see if HEAT also gets ported.

I would post more detailed information right now, but I’m currently on my honeymoon! That said, I’m catching up with old mates at Avid Audio HQ in San Fran in a few days and will be sure to post any new info that comes to hand from that. Hope everyone is having a good October, loving my travels around North America atm!

Editing Bootcamp: Advanced nudging functions

– September 30, 2011Posted in: General Topics

OK – final video for this series on mouseless editing. This video goes into nudging regions, region start and end times and generally puts what we’ve looked at over the last 3 videos together into a bit of a workflow.

Hope you’ve enjoyed these videos and find them useful – the info is provided freely, all I ask is that you pass it on, let others know about these tips and tricks!

Power Editing Bootcamp: Keyboard trims and auditioning shortcuts

– September 30, 2011Posted in: General Topics

This video starts with the basics for keyboard driven editing and wraps with the more advanced shortcuts for auditioning a region/your selection.

Power Editing Bootcamp: Selecting and tabbing

– September 28, 2011Posted in: General Topics

Here’s part two on “power editing” (cant you just hear the delays and octave drop on that?)

EDIT: at 4mins I say that jumping to and selecting the next region is “Command + tab” but its Control+Tab (Im hitting control tab and that shows in the video, my mouth is simply telling fibs so ignore it)

Next part on editing and fades and nudging modifiers

Power Editing Bootcamp: Zooming

– September 26, 2011Posted in: General Topics

So this is a series of videos I’ve been meaning to do for a while on how to get away from the mouse when editing. It’s a bit lengthy so I’ve broken into 3 videos but the topics they cover work together to bring the best from a mouse-less workflow. (btw Apologies for a bit of noise in the audio, how embarrassing!)

Next video: tabbing modifiers and the importance of preroll and postroll shortcuts…

More ProTools next gen info from IBC

– September 14, 2011Posted in: General Topics

Another video from IBC, this one slightly less iphone…

“The first thing is for ProTools to play nicely with any network attached storage”…

MC6 decklink support?

– July 30, 2011Posted in: General Topics

As some may know, Avid hosted a big event in LA a few weeks back on the back of the FCPX release to re-iterate to professionals that they care, are listening, are developing with them in mind etc

Interestingly quite a bit from this event has appeared online and two nuggets made my ears prick up. The next big release, MC6, is 64 bit, has a new UI and a new audio tool. MC seems to be getting more PT like in its audio capabilities – and its going to be a 64 bit app…7.1 surround support for video editors…sighs…This may not be a good idea…(!) And where’s our 64bit audio app!!

For those who missed the release releases, MC5 opens QTs using AMA without needing to rerender to MXF, it also supports RTAS plugins, will export plugin settings via AAF and will also export the avid equivalent of markers from the video suite to PT9. All good steps towards better interop.

Back on the MC6 news, there was also talk of more 3rd party support, they already opened to AJA and Matrox with 5.5, with 6 there is talk of Decklink support – YAY! That means my video satellite rig can use the same card whether I’m using PT host based to play QT movies or MC to play MXF media – I also wonder since media composer now supports QT playback natively if I should just use it from the get go for all video satellite tasks if it gets decklink support. One benefit that springs to mind is the ability to drag and drop the timecode effect onto a QT file to quickly get a burn in without the need to render it, as from memory the timecode effect is RT. Could be a better world again. Hopefully all the rumours are founded on some fact. Stay tuned.

Check out those surround panners?…

‪Production Sound Workflow with Pro Tools

– July 19, 2011Posted in: General Topics

Tom Graham from Avid shows the location sound workflows with field recorder files as it currently stands.

Worth watching/showing/sharing!

‪Production Sound Workflow with Pro Tools® – AGENT MX-Z3RO‬‏ – YouTube.

Affordable plugins to check out

– July 17, 2011Posted in: General Topics

Hi all, I’ve been getting a withdrawal from plugin purchasing of late, so I’ve put together a bit of a shopping list of RTAS plugins that I’ve used a few times on trial and intend to buy very soon. I thought you may be interested in them!

The standard plugin package that comes with PT9 is pretty good, there are only a few holes that need plugging up, so to speak. I would say a nice reverb is always a good addition to the plugin arsenal of any sound designer/mixer. Here are two worth checking out

Overloud’s Breverb – A lovely reverb, at around USD$266 it’s much cheaper than a hardware unit! Widely respected for its quality and very low CPU hit. If you’re on an older CPU it might be a good addition.

Valhalla Room – This reverb caught my eye a few months back. Super affordable at US$50 and the chap who coded it has a solid background in DSP before going it alone. Lovely to support the independents, and the tails on this verb are definately high quality – also the user interface is a joy to operate.

EQs and Dynamics

DMG Audios Compassion and Equality – These are a more premium EQ and Compression tool but still very affordable in the grand scheme of things. Getting rave reviews by the film mixing community for their versatility – a real scalpel to have in your toolkit.

Brainworx Digital – I love the Hybrid EQ from these guys. IT’s not overly expensive, sounds super clean and it maps onto the ICON in an awesome way – whenever you grab/touch the Frequency pot on your parametric, it isolates the band for you so you can hear exactly what you’re doing. Some brilliant MS plugins here also worth checking out.

Massey Plugins - One of the first plugin developers for RTAS to really set a price point that was affordable to everyone, ex Digi coder Steve Massey has been making great plugins for years now. His limiter the L2007 is super clean and gets a good workout around the rooms at Trackdown. A Must-have.

McDSP – One of the earliest plugin developers for PT and now with V5 they are available on AU as well as RTAS. Colin McDowell is an absolute gem in the industry and his products are brilliant. Their native bundles are really very affordable for what you get (USD350 for their native classic pack)

Creative tools

SoundHack plugs – cool, cheap, oddness and stretching and fun. Great to take you to interesting places…

AudioFinder – Yes, PT has the workspace browser to find and audition stuff, and thats all good and well, but for a measley USD$69 you can have a very serious sound effects search, manipulation and processing tool like Audiofinder. Integrates with Soundcloud, sample editing before spotting to the timeline in PT, and many other features we used to pay hundreds of dollars for. Also, one license is good to use on any machines you own, so in my case its good for home and work so its half price! Again, support the independents!

Lowender – Last but certainly not least, if you work with LFE channels or do drum and serious bass and want more down below definitely check out Lowender – a software emulation of the classic DBX120 hardware unit. The obviously benefit being automation ITB over the hardware.

Ohmforce – lots of crazy affordable plugins and synths with distinctive growls.

Soundtoys – a little bit more cash than the others listed here, but amazingly powerful and creative plugins. Their native bundle is really very cheap for everything that is included.

Avid Blind Listening Event

– June 7, 2011Posted in: General Topics

So I received an email from Avid a few weeks back inviting me to a “Listening Event” at Studios 301 in Alexandria, Sydney. I thought it would be a good chance to check out the SSL control room over at 301 and listen to a few converters against each other. To be honest, I think this obsession with AD/DA and jitter and preamps is all quite unhealthy and detracts from much more important details like mic choice and placement and room acoustics, but sure, I’ll go along and have a listen.

Well. Damn them. They up-sold me. We had 4 converters, labelled A,B,C,D to evaluate on various tracks. The video below tells a bit more about how the rigs were technically setup to ensure a proper comparison. To my ears, straight away, A sounded lovely, big and wide with a really solid bottom end in the middle of the field. B was very nondescript by comparison, I couldn’t tell when Stuart was switching from the source to the B converter. C was brittle, harsh on vocals, the high mids were just boosted in a way that was unpleasant to the point where I couldnt feel objective about D after hearing C!

So the converters were:

a) Apogee Symphony

b) HD I/O

c) 192 io

d) RME fireface

I’m rather upset with my 192s now… To my ears the standouts were the Symphony and the HD IO but for completely different reasons – the Symphony sounded flattering, “enhanced” and easy to work with whereas the HD I/O was so transparent it didn’t seem to be there! Personally, I’m one of those guys who likes the idea of purist audio, a clean path, uncoloured, so I wont be rushing out to buy the Symphony any time soon, but I’m definitely budgeting for an upgrade on my I/O.

Damn them. Who’s going to explain this to my wife?!

Speaker Calibration tutorial

– April 22, 2011Posted in: General Topics

If you’re a student working on a short film, there’s a good chance you need to hand over your project to a sound mixer to balance everything to standard film levels – in order to submit it to festivals or for broadcast or burning it to a DVD.

The one thing that will save you much time in this process is calibrating your home studio to the standard level used by professionals, so your work is prepared with the right gain structure and the mixer can then build on your work and finesse it, rather than starting from scratch.

This tutorial walks through the simple steps involved in calibrating to 79dBSPL, a commonly adhered to standard for editing suites and small rooms, for film and TV mixing.Calibrating your speakers to 79 will ensure you keep 20dB of headroom in your mix, plenty of dynamic range, suitable for a wide range of projects – as opposed to the generally held belief that “as close to zero without hitting it”!

Key point, a few folks have asked where to point the SPL meter: either straight ahead or at the roof, holding it at arms reach where your head would normally be when you’re mixing – ie “the mix position”.

Adding movement to drones with SoundToys

– April 11, 2011Posted in: General Topics

Here’s a 12 minute epic video demoing ways of using the SoundToys plugins to add movement and interest to drones and ambiences. Love their plugs, lots of tweakability and great tone. Worth checking out.

Get An Entire Structure Orchestra Library FREE

– March 10, 2011Posted in: General Topics

Kind offer from Russ over at the Air users blog for anyone who has Structure or the Instrument Expansion pack:

Get An Entire Structure Orchestra Library FREE .

PT9 Mix window features

– February 2, 2011Posted in: General Topics

This is a short video showing how version 9 has sped up routing in the Mix window…
Hopefully show a few tips to help routing to and from busses and other tracks.

Sync’ing Quicktime Movies

– December 24, 2010Posted in: General Topics

Here’s a short tutorial video of how I tend to get Quicktime movies in sync with the timecode in my PT session. Wouldnt it be nice if QT movies were timestamped??

Have a great Holiday Season to all!

Neyrinck V-Control released!

– November 15, 2010Posted in: General Topics

Check out Paul Neyrinck’s latest project: V-Control for ipad to control Pro Tools. Paul is a consumate professional, in touch with the high end industry (his regular product lineup are surround encode decode solutions) and his ipad app looks designed exactly to suit most common needs beyond the keyboard and mouse.

Already, early adopters are praising the responsiveness of the implementation, good news and at only US$59 it’s EXTREMELY affordable!

V-Control Pro Features:

Audition Pre, In, Out, Post
Scrub/Shuttle Pad
Zoom Switch Quadrant
Assign I/O And Inserts
Select Window, Edit Mode, And Edit Tool
Zoom Presets

LE8 to PT9 Bootcamp – everything old is new again

– November 11, 2010Posted in: General Topics

So if you’ve come to a PT9 upgrade from LE8 or Mpowered8 (or an earlier version) you may well be new to all the “traditionally HD only” features that are now included in PT9, so here’s a recap of some of those features:

Comprehensive Session data Import options

Copying and pasting Automation

Automation “Write to” commands

More to come, stay tuned…

PROTOOLS 9!!!

– November 5, 2010Posted in: General Topics

Comparison chart is here

It’s for SALE RIGHT NOW at the Avid web store!!!

US$250 for an LE “download” upgrade, US$349 for a HD “download” upgrade. BIG installer, big download.

Top features at a glance…

Freedom to use your own IO/AD/DA hardware with PT9 software.
ADC without HD hardware – STANDARD.
Eucon support implemented – hints of more features to come. No longer use HUI!
96 tracks standard, 256 busses standard (YES 256!), 160 auxes standard…
Timecode ruler and Digitranslator and MP3 option as STANDARD
Destructive record and Quickpunch modes as standard
Markers in Media composer can be imported into PT9 as memory locations!!
Any RTAS plugins and their settings used in Media composer 5.x can be imported into PT9!!

With an existing Complete Production toolkit you also get:

ICON support, VCAs, all HD automation features, surround mixing, and 192 voices of playback!

One other thing – a PT9HD auth on your ilok will behave the same as a PT9auth plus a CPTK auth. SO you can take your ilok with you from your HD studio and open PT9 native with all your HD features and use your laptops audio outputs (or anything else) to edit bit sessions on the go…Very tidy solution to the customer feedback that came in after the Micro was released.

My take?

Avid are listening and doing everything they can, as quickly as they can, to make their clients happy. It’s a pretty big day!

One thing people are talking about is the ADC is “limited” to being the same as a HD system, ONLY 4096 samples are compensated for automatically. From my point of view I think it makes sense to pick this as an achievable goal with their first “port” of HD over to native so they have clean session interop between HD and native. Moving forwards, who knows what they will do, but to think they would give native a bigger ADC cache than HD out of the block is a bit naive IMHO.

The new Media composer interop features will be a big help – particularly using markers in MC and bringing them into PT9 as mem locates. Suddenly we have another way to talk between video and audio – yes, AVID are bringing better interop to market. It’s been a long time coming but we’re seeing the progress they are making as a single company, rather than Avid/Digi. It’s good times!

Omissions? Faster than real time bounce, freezing tracks, better RTAS performance, all stuff we’ve been harping on forever about, but how can they implement most of these native/host based features without first porting their software over to a host based paradigm? One step at a time, and I for one and happy to renew my trust in them as it really looks like they are heading in the right direction.

Well done Max, Bobby, and every developer who’s been working so hard at Daly City to make this release happen. Well done!

More info on PT9:

Press Release

PT9 home page (from what I can tell)

Avid at AES staff blogs, updated frequently during the show

PT9 thread on gearsluts

Workflow: Laying up sessions from other DAWs

– October 11, 2010Posted in: General Topics

Here’s a quick video showing a way to get continuous wav files across from Logic/Ableton/Garageband/Reason etc into PT for remixing.

HD Native has arrived!

– October 7, 2010Posted in: General Topics

After months of conjecture, rumoured leaks (they obviously couldn’t be confirmed) and flame wars on the bulletin boards, Avid have come out of the darkness to announce a milestone release – Avid ProTools HD Native. Basically a host based system (no DSP Accel cards) that can connect to the new HD interfaces (that are expandable up to 64io) with all the features of PTHD (automation features, track counts, VCA faders, etc) AND automatic delay compensation for RTAS plugins AND extremely low latency!

The way it works, is a PCIe host card allows you to connect to your HD interfaces (including Sync HD, its got a digiserial port) using the new mini-digilink connectors, launched with the new Avid interfaces.

Interestingly, the specifications state it runs a 64bit floating point mixer, is this a potential step up or sideways from the 48bit fixed mixer on the existing PCIe Accel architecture? Fixed bit processing makes for less “rounding off” of data to the nearest binary integer, so it was always sold as superior to floating point, but if you throw in that extra resolution of 64bits, even with floating point holding it back, it will be interesting to do listening comparisons to the summing between the two systems.

For those in post, there was a link to the Satellite technology page from the HD Native home page, so I guess we are to assume its all good to go to lock up native rigs with HD rigs – Can anyone say cost effective video satellite/dubber? The US dollar value of their gear puts a HD Native system with a MADI interface and Sync HD for $10.5K. Throw in a Decklink card and you’ve got a 64 track native dubber with HD picture playback for around US$11K (plus a CPU). Not bad value really! For a comparable system before this release you’d need a minimum HD2 core instead of the native core and the difference in price would be US$7.5K. That’s a pretty big saving! (maybe you could afford to renew your WUP or something?)

For a cost effective surround edit suite, the bundle price WITH an OMNI interface (7.1 monitoring system built in and 2 preamps) is US$6K. Open HD sessions immediately – VCAs, all your automation features, syncing and dubbing options if needed. I mean, 6K in Australia would barely have gotten you a 192io a few years ago (when the dollar was down, admittedly).

Interesting times! I wonder what else they’re working on??

Grabber shortcuts

– August 10, 2010Posted in: General Topics

It’s been a while since I made some fresh tutorial videos. I thought I might start with some fundamentals of quick PT operation.

Starting off with how to move regions around with precisions, using the grabber tool and your cursor position, in combination with keyboard modifers.

Dolby E with Paul Neyrinck, Part 2

– May 19, 2009Posted in: General Topics

Hi all,

Here is the second part of the interview with Paul where he goes into more detail about Dolby E.

Paul Neyrinck Interview Part 2

Is ISDN dead?

– May 13, 2009Posted in: General Topics

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:

Pirates...

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!

Pro Tools 8 Australian Tour

– April 5, 2009Posted in: General Topics

Hi all,

Sorry for the lack of new material coming up at the moment – hopefully get some new vids up soon.
The delay is mainly that I’ve been on the road showing PT8 to the Aussies and once I get through that I’m off to NAB, then back to NZ to continue the tour – no rest for the wicked…

Next week are the Sydney and Melbourne events, hopefully see some of you there!

New plugs!

– March 7, 2009Posted in: General Topics

Well – those of you in music have probably come across the famous SPL Transient Designer in your travels. Its a fairly unique device, playing around with the envelope of your sound, specifically the attack and release. Wouldnt it be nice that if you bought one of these devices, you could use it many different times? Wouldnt it be nice to make it change levels and follow your needs automatically as the program content changes?? Yes!! Its a plug in, signed off by SPL with SPL engineers, for TDM!!
SPL Transient Designer Plug in
This plug has been created not only by the engineers at SPL but in partnership with the coders responsible for the utterly brilliant Brainworx plugs.
There’s an interview on the Audio News Blog here
Other brand new SPL plugs can be demo’d here

Not only has this happened, one of our favourite plugin makers, Colin of McDSP has released some more plugs in his “best of breed” family. Specifically catering to the Retro stylings that are so in demand these days. Lots of info on his site, here…
McDSP Retro Pack

Spanning disks with large trackcounts

– February 26, 2009Posted in: General Topics

Of late, Ive seen quite a few clients get themselves into corners, with poor system performance due to track count issues and large sessions. There seems to be an assumption out there that you can run 100+ tracks off the average 5200rpm Firewire drive…that is simply not the case! In this video I show how easy it is to manage the process of spanning your session across multiple hard drives, explain a few caveats, and show how to bring it back to one volume for backups etc

Expand tracks by Timecode with Concert recordings

– February 23, 2009Posted in: General Topics

See the notes under the video…

This topic relates to the Expand tracks by timecode feature, that was introduced in PTHD7.4cs5.
It allows you to automatically “conform” your tracklay session (large contiguous files recorded at once) to an edit made by someone else – in the demonstration, a video editor (Media Composer).
So, you have recorded the discrete tracks of a concert, plus a 2-mix. The mix gets given to a video editor along with all the video material. They do a cut of the concert, and hand you back the cut of your original mix file.
With the Expand tracks by Timecode feature, you can now expand out all the discrete tracks, matching the edit to the 2mix given to you…So you can say, bring the bass to the front of the mix when the camera is on the bass player, bring the guitar up front similarly etc rather than a static mix throughout the clip.
As Venue and PTHD systems are used in the field to record more and more concerts, this workflow is a powerful addition to the options for post production of those projects.

Caveats:
1.I handed an embedded AAF over to the video guys with my mix files in them
2.They handed me back a referenced AAF – which I then relinked to the original Mix files in my audio files folder of the concert recording.
3. All files in the session must share an identical “Creation date” in the Project browser. If you have extra files in your session, addition overdubs etc, they may well be expanded as well, giving you many extra tracks that are probably undesirable. It just looks for any region with matching timecode and puts it onto a new track, that’s all. That could encompass alot of material in your session if you are not working with a pure tracklay of the concert.
Hope that’s useful!

Comp edit workflow in PT8

– February 15, 2009Posted in: General Topics

Hi all,
Sorry for the delay between vids, there’s been alot of changes at Avid of late and Ive had to travel quite a bit to keep up with it all!
You’ll find a video below that explains the new comp edit workflow in PT8, how to rate a take and how to filter your takes in the new playlist view. Hope its useful!

PT8 Comp edit workflow from Brent Heber on Vimeo.

Great bookmarks

– January 29, 2009Posted in: General Topics

Hey all,

Just an interim post with some great resources Ive stumbled across lately.

Firstly, a fellow blogger from the UK, Mike Thornton, who is writing on topics relating to Pro tools and the Media industries. You may recognise his name, as Mike is a regularly contributor to Sound on Sound.

http://protoolsformedia.blogspot.com/

Secondly, for those with more of a music focus, the lads from the AIR group are running their own blog specific to those virtual instruments and software tools such as Structure

http://airvirtualinstruments.blogspot.com/

Avid have recently launched their own version of the mighty Digi User Conference, the Avid Community portal. Its great, with tutorial videos, news and a bunch of good people already involved:

http://community.avid.com/

For more Media composer tricks than you can point a stick at, I recommend the Edit Blog

http://www.scottsimmons.tv/blog/

Lastly, Michael Phillips of Avid has had his own site, 24p, up for a long time:

http://www.24p.com/reference.htm

Hope these are of use! More on Structure coming soon, its been a busy week and Im off to LA on Sunday.

Structure for Post I

– January 23, 2009Posted in: General Topics

OK, so Structure for Post won the poll, having 25% of the votes. First off, there are two key features for Structure that are great for post production, drag and drop of samples from the timeline to create MIDI patches and secondly support for Surround sound. Check out this video first and I’ll add to it with post examples in my next blog:
Mapping FX in Structure to your keyboard…

Drag and dropping samples into Structure – they MUST be WHOLE FILES is the trick!

Elastic Music beds (pt2)

– November 24, 2008Posted in: General Topics

Hi all,

Following on from my last blog topic on changing tempo of elastic music, this video shows a simpler way of creating dynamic changes, without resorting to tick based audio and the tempo ruler.

Each have their benefits. Using the tempo ruler, you can effect multiple tracks at once. Using the warp marker function shown is super quick if its just a single track you need to adjust visually.

Elastic Music Beds pt2 from Brent Heber on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

Elastic Music beds (pt1)

– November 19, 2008Posted in: General Topics

Hi all,

The video below outlines two possible ways of manipulating the tempo of a piece of production music to easily fit it better to picture. I’ve since thought of another way of doing this and will follow on with a second video on this topic shortly.

Elastic Music Beds from Brent Heber on Vimeo.