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Audio levels on “National” spots-A general rant
Just a quick rant in the morning today.
As part of my job, I often have to tag National spots with local dealer tags, usually car spots. I’ve noticed lately that the audio levels on the tapes from the agencies are way too hot. One dealer that we work with usually orders Betacam SP dubs of the spots. I’ve received spots for Subaru, Volvo and BMW in the last few weeks where the audio levels on the SP tapes are pinning the meters on the playback deck. Obviously, the analog tapes are being made with the levels recorded on the digital masters. These dubs rarely have any bars and tone on them either. In the rare cases where bars&tone are present, the levels of the spot almost never match the levels of the tone. When the playback is set to the tone as a reference, the spot is always MUCH hotter. Video levels are all over the place as well. And these are now low budget local spots but spots that come from the national agencies.
When I spoke to the marketing person for the dealership about possibly getting a Digital Betacam dub rather than an SP tape, she informed me that the only formats available to the dealers are Beta SP, VHS, 1-inch and 3/4-inch. I can’t even remember the last time I got a 3/4-inch tape for production. We keep one 1-inch and one 3/4-inch machine in the racks “just in case”, but I haven’t even turned them on in a long time. I think they still work…maybe I should check.Years ago, when I worked as an editor at a large post house in Chicago, our QC guys were fanatical about levels and standards. If it wasn’t perfect, it just didn’t leave the building. The same went for the dub houses. They USED to pay a lot of attention to quality. Sadly, I feel that those days are over. When it comes to Quality Control, just about anything goes these days. With every agency doing production in-house or everyone with a spare room at home doing production on a desktop system, the art of video standards seems to have died. Garbage in/garbage out.
Too bad since this is still a business where the details matter. Now days, a venue will put just about anything on the air. With the exception of the larger networks or cable channels, it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Anyone still remember how to read a scope or check for gamut error? I didn’t think so. Sad…
OK, that’s it for the Old Guy rant-of-the-day. I’ll get down off my soapbox now and get back to work.
Tom -
8 Replies
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This drives my wife crazy at home too. And what makes me mad is the difference in levels between HD network programming in Dolby Digital vs. when they go breaks and the commerical spots are in analog. The audio levels are so much louder, even I have to scramble to grab the remote.
Unfortunately, this will go on for quite a while… Arrgh!
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
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I have worked at television stations fro 15 years before I set out on my own. Most of my time was dubbing these same spots into the house system. This happened way before digital. I can remember this being an issue back in 1994 at a local ABC station. I also remember something coming from a production house on the national level and the audio was out of phase. When mixed there was nothing but the levels were moving individually. We had to get a production team together, union shop, to use the studio audio board to fix the problem before we could dub the spot. QC has always seemed to be an after thought.
I feel your pain.
Scott Robinson
President
Take 2 Productions, Inc.
https://www.take2productionsinc.com -
I’ve been seeing this for years Tom.
Either people are completely ignorant and think everything
is supposed to be cd level (peaking at 0)or they just don’t give a $hit.
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The people you are referring to are… CLIENTS. Some of my clients demand that the levels are cranked so that their spots stand out. It always puts me in a bad position. I tell them they may get rejected the stations QC dept, but, you know what, they never do.
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
[Ernie Santella] “The people you are referring to are… CLIENTS. Some of my clients demand that the levels are cranked”
when they do that I point to the VU meter on the beta deck
showing distortion.that gets them in line immediately.
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My clients all think their Editors and Directors. They listen to the playback and approve it. As Tony Soprano says… “Whadda gonna’ do!” Not in this economy. The market tanked another 450 today. I’m lucky to still have clients.
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
Ever try to get a PBS station to play something of yours? I don’t know anybody that passed the PBS QC on the first try:-) I also remember doing betacam dub runs and getting a call from one guy out of 200-odd stations, complaining that his copy has to have audio on just one particular track, because his in-house automation system used the other one for beep tones, he was sending the dub back to us to “fix” it, because he didn’t have time to erase one track. I asked him in all innocence: “But don’t you erase whatever is on that track during the process where you add the beep tones anyhow?” He hung up on me.
Buddy, I’m having enough trouble making 200 perfectly identical copies on one standard, now I gotta remember you need the low-sodium kosher in-flight meal instead?
I feel your pain, brothers. I think there’s plenty of blame to go around. Analog formats handled overdriven audio more gracefully, plus the decks often had limiters that were left on all the time, so you had some room to mess up and yet it could be saved at the end of the chain.
With digital there is no soft fail: you clip, you’re lost. But my own experience has been that it’s not easy to make the transition even if you had a decent analog background, many things like levels and procedures for audio are different, and documentation is scattered and confusing, Db meters don’t act the way we’re used to… you need to often buy a specific book to learn how to set things up right. Then once you finally do, the next bozo to use the gear will change everything on you:-P .
Also, the kids these days, as they say, don’t get any grounding in such details at school: since for so long some invisible someone or an unseen hardware device has been making up for bad settings down the chain, some people in production don’t really ever learn how to set up their system to proper levels in the first place, and don’t really have a sense of, or respect for standards. They’ll compensate by cranking an amp for the near field speakers instead of the waveform on the timeline. I like to point it out to our high school interns when a local cable spot comes on with audio buzz because a too-high white level is crowding the audio subcarrier. THEN they start to get a glimmer of why standards are important.
I blame Premiere:-) (grinning) Many casual Kids and “auteurs” consider bars, tone and slates and counts to be merely visual appendixes to their work, they are the kinds of folks that use Premiere’s academy leader on the front of their home movies to “make it look professional”, with no clue what the academy is or what leader is for or what a 2-pop is. I’d rather there be no bars or tone on a video than tone and bars unrelated to the actual program levels. You get a more honest setting by using actual program levels, if the editor didn’t set proper signals to start with. I’m tired, gotta go hang a fresh onion on the old belt.
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