Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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You really need to contact the channel.
Broadcasters have very specific requirements for the files to work with their servers.
A universal standard hasn’t really been established yet, but MPEG2 MXF files in OP1a format seem to be the most usual at the moment, probably with video at 50Mbps or higher and audio uncompressed 48kHz, 16 or 24 bit.
You want to have as few transcodes as possible between origination and transmission and you definitely don’t want to let the quality settings be any lower than those above at any point in the chain.
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You could try using an expander effect, in principle you can set the threshold a little higher than the background noise and put more gain in for louder sounds, i.e., the speech. Alternatively, you could use an expander in noise-gate mode (or use a simple noise gate) to reduce the gain for sound below the threshold level, setting the gain for the speech manually, then mixing in some background noise on another track to even that out (because your gated track will sound rather unnatural if you don’t).
Either way, my experience is that it’s quite fiddly to find the sweet spot that sounds “right” though. TBH, keyframing gain levels can often get a better sounding result but that’s enormously time consuming.
Good luck.
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I’m a lot closer to your way than what you’ve picked up. I don’t always rename clips though, but I will separate them into bins by subject matter set the bin view to large icons. I often find it useful to put similar subject shots onto a sequence to skim through but I don’t tend to match frame to the rushes to edit – I put that sequence video up onto video layer 2, then mark in/out and copy/paste from that sequence to my edit, so that the b roll goes above the sync shots (I’ll eventually drop them down to layer 1 when I’m happy with the cut). Just a habit which might not suit everyone but it can be quite quick to do it that way.
TBH, I’ve always found the idea of approaching a predominantly visual media as spoken words illustrated with wallpaper rather odd. The way I’m cutting my current project is to edit the story visually (my action has been mostly filmed mute), then add sound effects (starting the sound design), then the contributors’ interviews, then we’ll write the commentary because we don’t really know what commentary we’ll need until we get the first rough cut together.
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Well, when you turn a progressive picture into an interlaced one you split it into two fields, so 4 frames would be 8 fields, so what it’s doing is (very basically speaking) replicating every fourth field so that every other frame becomes a frame and a half in duration, so to speak. So by splitting a series of 2 – 3 -2- 3 fields into pairs, you get five frames out of the four you started with.
If you do that in origination you ought to remove the pulldown for editing as it can cause problems later.
OTOH, as it only does the pulldown in SP mode, which is 25Mbps, so why would you ever use that? HQ is 35Mbps, which is usually acceptable for broadcast, if not exactly in broadcast spec (which is 50Mbps minimum over here).
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I used to like Hollywood Edge, I bought some BBC discs a few years ago which are still good for atmos/backgrounds but not so much for spot effects, now I mainly go to SoundDogs. Having said that, it’s surprising how useful the effects that were bundled with Logic Pro can be with a bit of tweaking and I have a bunch of backgrounds that I recorded myself.
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[DaSol Debbie Lim] “I know you have to use dynamic angles and fast, tight cuts”
tbh, that sounds very “film making by numbers” – what you have to do is decide how you’re going to portray the action and film the shots you are going to need to do so.
IMO, you needn’t be strict about crossing/ not crossing the line as long as you have the shots to cut yourself around, effectively carrying the audience to another pov. Think about the way your shots will cut together. Don’t “just move the camera around” across the line, but don’t be inhibited from moving across by the “rule” that one should stay on one side. Try to remember that all rules are really only guidelines, very useful but not inviolable.
I’ve never really liked the term “180 degree rule” and would encourage a more sophisticated understanding of lines of action. As soon as you have more than 2 characters you have multiple lines of action and the relative dominance of those lines changes as events develop, for example, if you have a shot which is looking over character A’s right shoulder, cutting to a shot looking over A’s left shoulder can work at one moment but be wrong at another moment.
There’s an old maxim “if your shots aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”. Take the camera to the action, don’t try to bring the action to the camera.
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Well, I’ve worked with some dodgy old crap over the years, but I still have a soft spot for Alice mixers, ART tube mic preamps and Drawmer compressors. [That probably gives away my background at the BBC.]
I used to like Rogers (etc) LS3/5a speakers, mainly because you could put them pretty much anywhere and trust the sound they produce, very situation independent (unlike most ported designs). But I can’t believe the price people pay for them second hand now – they’re good when you get used to them but they’re not THAT good! I’m mainly using Genelec’s these days.
BTW, speaking of the BBC, with the closure of Bush house, you can see the kind of dodgy old crap has kept the world service going for the last few years by looking at what they’re auctioning off – https://www.ppauctions.com/auction.php?id=71
(to be honest, there’s a handful of nice-ish old mics there but I wouldn’t give house room to most of it!) -
You can run 2 edits off one set of media if the media is on an xsan. I’d suggest making a separate project for each video, then you’d avoid having to open the same project on more than one system at a time and the possibility of the project becoming too large (both can be problematic).
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A couple of peripheral odds and ends:
Metering – I use ppmulator with audio hijack pro on the mac, can’t recommend it highly enough.
Headphones – give it some thought, you need a good response, closed back and also comfort. I can wear audio technica ath m50 all day!
Monitoring/talkback – mackie big knob, it just sits there and works.
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Shane has it spot on.
But I would add that I’ve had to make changes after the sound dub and this is what has worked for me:
Go back to the final timeline and create a full quality vision track (we used to redigitise a playout to tape, but a full quality quicktime is fine). Put that on a new video track.
Create new audio tracks and lay in the mixed sound tracks and mute everything else for now.
Do your edits, revealing the original video clips and unmuting the source audio to remake the audio mix around your editing points.
When you’re done, re-export the sound as a new omfi and send that to the dubbing mixer. It’ll allow them to remix only the places which have been edited rather than the whole track again.Obviously if it’s a massive recut it wouldn’t be worthwhile doing that but for a few changes it can be the most time efficient way of going about it.