FCP 10.1.2 Where are you?

[Bret Williams]

Am I the only one that hears the scooby doo theme song when they read this post?

10 point one point two, where are you? We’ve got some work to do now….

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Bret Williams] “Am I the only one that hears the scooby doo theme song when they read this post?”

yes

😀

[Walter Soyka]

[Bret Williams] “Am I the only one that hears the scooby doo theme song when they read this post?”

[Jeremy Garchow] “yes :-D”

Bret, don’t mind Jeremy on this. Reading his last couple posts, I think this music follows him everywhere he goes! 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNv5sPu0C1E

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Craig Seeman]

I’m hearing the Car 54 theme myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5MkCAwupe0

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[Richard Herd]

[Walter Soyka] “how would you mix 11 simultaneous sources at the same time”

I know you asked Franz (and it was probably rhetorical); however,…

This happens all the time with a single engineer. It’s at the heart of the difference between a live mix and DAW.

Easy example, a live band that has a lead singer, three backup singers, kick drum, snare, toms, high hat overheads, guitar, bass, piano-low, piano-mid, piano-hi…maybe some horns. This can go on and on. To complicate things, a live mix also has a house mix and a monitor mix–often many monitor mixes. Very frequently, the monitor mix (aka stage mix) is literally an engineer working his or her magic, just barely hiding in the wings. (Anyway, the DSP is quite interesting also.)

In my scenario for X, each mic input is the same as a Role.

I would also want the drum inputs to be subbed to a Drums Role, same with backup singers subbed to a Backup Singers Role and some other subs, etc.

Here’s a gain staging solve example:

In a particular song, it’s really important for the kick and bass to pound through the mix more than anything else, even the vocals. No problem. Since they are defined as Roles, they can be sent to Submix 1, and everything else sent to Sub2 (or whatever secret sauce a particular engineer makes), so that the compression on sub2 is sidechained to sub1. In this way, anytime the bass and drum hit in sub1, the compression algorithm kicks and sub2 is ducked–in very very precise ways, measured in milliseconds, 1000 keyframes per second. For the audience, the experience would be heavy beats and low end, and in the right composition, people will dance.

A similar issue happens in film and broadcast, where there are SFX, Foley, Score, dialogue. Gain staging is that creative solve that aims at story and emotion of a mix. Because cinema audio is not actually live, the waveforms in the editing side of the daw behave as inputs. But, like in a musical composition, once the ins and outs are set (vis-a-vis, the musicians know which measure to begin and end on), the waveform timecode is essentially moot, and in X is set via the (P)IOPs. It’s also important that DAWs editing timebase can be in many forms, video frames, film frames, feet-on-film, beats, measures and time signature.

A bit more, here. In a cinema scene where a guy walks into a bar and orders a drink, there might be dozens of audio cues; his footsteps for example as he walks across the room. The gain staging, here, is what would the editor call that bit of Foley, so that it busses/sends to the Role he or she would want to treat in a way that best conveys the mood and story? Here’s where, above I can’t remember who mentioned, there could be some great opportunity to overlap between roles and keywords, where the keywords are “footsteps” but the Role is “Foley.” Suppose the story calls for the footsteps to be prominent, well, the editor might not want to revise the gain staging and role select the room ambience as as ROOM (all of the various elements) and then the Footsteps as their own Role, so the compression emphasizes the Footsteps.

in sum, Roles are a sweet way to contemplate and solve gain staging. Of course, anyone could give every audio element its own Role name and keep the old way of how tracks organize media. 😉

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Richard Herd] “In no way do I think it should be perfect, and by “perfect” I mean “a fully featured DAW, aka ProTools,” yet the audio in X needs to compete with Premiere CS6, “

I was being tongue in cheek about X’s perfection and lack therein. I was just comparing Pr CS6 which had a less than perfect software mixer if you needed to do any automation, and how people seem to get work done in CS6 without a clip mixer.

I’m not on the dark side Walter.

More often than not, this is the music going through my head:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHTnJNGvQcA

[Franz Bieberkopf]

[Walter Soyka] “… how would you mix 11 simultaneous sources at the same time in the real world, with only 10 fingers or only 8 faders in a bank”

Walter,

A mixer is (among other things) a kind of spacial organization, and an opening for multiple inputs for those who go beyond mouse and keyboard.

You can do it all with one fader but that’s a lot of extra clicking about or switching. Multiple faders allow simultaneous adjustments if you wish. I haven’t used more than two at once – but I have moved from fader to fader. I’m surprised by some of the pearl-clutching reaction to using faders for mixing – it’s great to be able to watch and listen and adjust simultaneously.

I’ll re-iterate that I’m interested to see a role-based mixer. I’m just skeptical about it’s implementation, and frankly skeptical that Apple will even bother with it.

[Walter Soyka] “Would you consider a track mixer and a clip mixer to be different things?”

I’m not warm to Adobe’s distinction (or implementation in two panels) if that is what you mean.

[Walter Soyka] ” I also would naively think that a DAW and an NLE could have good reason to be different.”

That seems to be a common sentiment here, but no one has explained why.

Here’s my feeling – NLEs are tools for arranging and refining audio and image in time. That’s a broad capability and there are specialized needs – motion graphics, colour, audio (to name 3 examples) all require specialized tools and the sophistication of those subsets is one of the ways NLEs are evaluated, and as I mentioned at the beginning, there are probably few who think a mixer is an important feature.

Some will argue that the features they don’t use are “superfluous” – that’s an ongoing characteristic of discussions here.

But when colour correction (for example) starts to get integrated into an NLE, there are certain people who immediately grasp that as a simplification of workflow and opportunity for more refined work. Others will simply think that “goes beyond” what an NLE is (or should be).

Part of what I react to is the idea that some users seem to embrace Apple’s “new way of doing things” in X, and then hold to very rigid distinctions of what an NLE should be (ie. video focused). I find that remarkably closed-minded. Hearing is one of (at least) 2 senses being shaped by any timeline.

This discussion began (for me) because Marcus said that beyond better use of roles he couldn’t see any advantages to tracks. There are other advantages to tracks, of course, but the audio mixer is a big one. A role mixer may address that, but then we’re talking about pretend software again aren’t we?

Franz.

[David Mathis]

LOL Never really thought about it at first, now the song is stuck in my head!

[Franz Bieberkopf]

[Jeremy Garchow] “FCP Legend’s audio mixing was … legendary… especially the ASCII audio filters with exactly zero real time feedback or measurement.”

Jeremy,

I have a list of issues with FCPs audio capabilities; I suspect you already know many of them.

I’m not sure which filters you’re referring to but some of them have real time feedback on parameters.

Franz.

[Jeremy Garchow]

You know what I’m saying Franz. FCP7’s audio mixing will go down with the Legend of FCS3.