Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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In documentaries M/E usually means “Mix Minus”, i.e., everything except the commentary and without dipping where the commentary would be. So a “Mix Minus” track on a programme without any voice over would be indistinguishable from the main mix (but it would still need to be there on tracks 3&4 and labelled as such).
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Yes, if the mic/converter makes the signal 24bit/192kHz, then that’s what goes down the usb cable and gets recorded. Personally I’m not (yet) convinced that the higher sampling rates have much to offer for the spoken voice over the standard 48kHz, using the higher rates would really depend on what your market requires.
IMO the advice to avoid USB mics is because the first USB mics were budget devices that were somewhat compromised in quality. That is changing and there are now some very good USB mics around so it’s no longer a hard and fast rule.
A couple of other comments – when deadening the room don’t forget the desk. A hard surface can cause reflections that interfere with the recorded sound, even just placing a cloth under your script can make a difference (it might be subtle but pro results = attention to every detail, even the minor ones). The other thing is that however good/ well set up your equipment is, the performance is critical and for me a big part of getting a decent performance is posture. I usually get my less experienced speakers to stand rather than sit for the recording and you might be surprised at how much difference it makes.
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It’s quicker to export in timeline settings and then encode to H264 with something better for that job than FCP. (See Shane’s suggestions).
Using Compressor or MpegStreamclip for encoding to H264 may not save much time end to end if you choose high quality settings and include the regular export from FCP, but they can do it in the background freeing up your FCP so that you can carry on working.
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Edit suite design has come up a few times on here so it might be worth doing a search
e.g. https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1127912
and there’s a really good article here https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/anatomy-of-an-edit-suite
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The 416 has been around for a long time so I wouldn’t buy anything older myself, because of the reliability worry of using something old.
When I thought the 416 was a bit pricey for me I bought a Rode, and it’s fine for my purposes (although today I would probably just buy the 416 – mics last a long time if you take care of them and a good one is an investment).
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Yeah, 48khz
16 bit or 24 bit depth -
“Balancing the RGB parade” is a red herring. That display can be used to help you keep things “broadcast legal” and can be helpful for identifying problems, but it’ll only ever be “balanced” when the frame has no colour in it.
Grading can only be done with your eyes looking at a screen that you can trust. Grading by “scope” is unlikely to ever get you the result you need.
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I always export onto the desktop in “same as sequence” settings and then use Compressor to transcode to the format that I want to deliver (or MPEGStreamclip if I want a fast conversion and am willing to drop the quality a little). I find it’s much quicker doing it that way than transcoding on an export from FCP.
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It’s been a long time but IIRC you’ll need different decks to play back low band and high band tapes, however, I’m sure that we used SP decks which used to play back high band as well as SP. Umatic-S was the same recording as Umatic but using a smaller cassette (I can’t remember if you need a particular deck to accept the tape, sorry).
I have a feeling that there was a way to get a playback of low band tapes in a high band (or SP) deck if you used a TBC that connected via the Dub connector (but that might have been a bit of local engineering cleverness rather than something official), but I think you should probably be looking for two decks, one standard Umatic and one SP, and I also think you’ll get best results using a TBC (which will require an external B&B sync gen).
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What you need for editing are speakers that reveal what’s in the recorded sound really accurately rather than ones that sound good, so I always go for speakers that are sold as monitors rather than ones with “hifi” pretensions. Also, I would seriously recommend balanced cabling since edit suites (at least, any system more elaborate than a laptop) are notorious for causing interference in unbalanced cables and you need to know that what you’re hearing is what’s on the recording, not being added in the room (and remember that when choosing a break out box as well).
I don’t know the AudioEngine speakers, so I can’t comment about them, my current favourites are Genelec (which are probably a bit pricey for your budget), but I’d recommend adding the KRK Rokit (RP5 or RP8) to your shortlist
https://www.krksys.com/krk-studio-monitor-speakers/rokit/rokit-5.html