[Bill Davis]

[Rich Rubasch] “What is good VO recording software? Where you might do some preprocessing before taking to the edit? We aren’t loving Soundtrack Pro (all Mac shop). Anything in CS 5.5 worthwhile?

And as for mics just for VO, I like the Neumann TLM 102 or 103. How about the Shure SM7? Rent and try them out first?

Any input appreciated.
“

Order of priority for making a difference in the quality of any VO.

A – the voice talent.

B – the script

C – the equipment.

The finest equipment in the world will get you nothing but a better reproduction of the voice and performance that hits the mics diaphragm. Nothing can change this fact.

A great voice and performance – doing a mediocre script – will always yield no better than mediocre results.

If you’ve got A and B taken care of – then C is actually pretty easy. The human voice is NOT a particularly difficult sound to record. It’s got very limited bandwidth to start with. It also expresses limited dynamic range (given a talent that knows how to do a proper VO they shouldn’t be all over the map dynamically unless the script calls for that.) and is a pretty basic recording task.

I’ve done more than a thousand paid VO’s in my career. I’ve done them using 50 different mics (Including dozens on both the SM-7 and the TLM-103 – With all sorts of signal chains – and they all did a fine job. The one I got paid the most for – and that ran the most – was done in my home studio using a classic kick drum mic (Sennheiser MD-421U) into a TEAC home tape recorder – none of which was standard issue in studio recording at the time. So take that for what it’s worth.

I know it’s popular to think that the “equipment” is what makes a VO pop. But really, like a good recipe for stew – it’s never one thing – it’s everything coming together.

And if the meat (the performance) is “off” – hiding that with more spices isn’t the path to a particularly palatable meal.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

Thirded.

(Is that even a word?)

Levelator is “normalizing” on steroids. Death on dynamic range in music, but for spoken content with a decent noise floor – it’s a quick, easy godsend.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

You do realize that since 10.0.3, X has maintained a 15 minute “Backup” auto folder and if you crash for any reason, the program will revert to that. So it’s pretty difficult to lose more than that unless you do something really truly distractive like make huge changes and then go past the next auto-save time increment?

Just saying.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Chris Frantz] “Guilty as charged. Still want a more advanced keyframe editor, grumble, handles, easy ease, grumble…
“

Mr Frantz,

Nice response. Light. Simple. Stuck to your arguments while appreciating that the tone might have come across stronger than intended.

Well played sir!

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Frank Gothmann] “Great ideas with big potential that never gets fully developed because it all is suffocated in oversimplification and the need to be different for the sake of being different. That plus often very sloppy software engineering, as if someone had lost interest halfway through.”

It’s clear you’re a software engineer. I’m not. So I’ll defer to you or others who’ve examined the code inside X and would know if it’s as “sloppy” as you’re publicly stating.

[Frank Gothmann] “And by the way: Core Video and Quicktime are totally different things. Core Video is NOT a replacement for Quicktime and never will be.
“

Fine. Core Video, and Core Audio, et all, are subsets of AV Foundation, – which essentially replaced Quicktime as the underlying video playback technology in the transition from Legacy to X.
I would have imagined that you understood that my fundamental point was the the many issues (like transition luminance value shifts) that were problems left over from Quicktime are no longer an issue in X because they jettisoned the old QT code that was causing them.

That OK to say?

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Jules bowman] “You can patronise us all you want about wearing flares”

Stop spinning.

I’m “patronizing” nobody with a thick enough skin to be called an adult.

I’m espousing a point of view. I give reasons for my thinking here all the time. You’re free to disagree all you like. But you’re not free to determine my tone when you can’t seem to “hear” it accurately.

I regularly note how people can do fine work using Premier, Avid and Vegas.

The hallmark of the closed minded is someone who can’t EVER find a single thing useful about a software package that suits the workflow of many editors as well or better than Legacy – and is starting to make some of us quite a bit of money – yet gets nothing but mis-information and derision from those who constantly prove that they don’t have much real knowledge of how it works.

Look, we’re still talking about it’s features a YEAR after it’s release. People here (and especially in the Techniques forum) are still trying to learn how to properly operate it.

That’s prima facia evidence that it’s not dumb, it’s not trivial, and its certainly not “broken.” Because if it was, none of us would would be using it. And we are.

The very first lesson I learned when I started writing for money was “write about what you know.”

I suspect I know somewhat more about FCP-X than you do – and I base that on the fact that I use it nearly every day and you’re saying stuff that runs contrary to my experience.

So please, follow that advice – or I and others who actually do understand aspects of this software more accurately than you will have to keep coming back to correct you. And it’s kinda tiresome.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

In short I don’t have “a” project library. I have several.

X is installed on my laptop and on my desktop.

I keep a few small projects on each – mostly simple “motion graphics” or “move on stills” projects since these take up little space and are easy to load and work with.

I keep my primary editing repository on a Firewire 800 drive. This stores the past half dozen to ten or so projects I’m currently cutting or that are “hot” projects that will require revision. These drives not only have the projects, they also house disk images of the clips used to create the edits – or if the project needs to be”on deck” – I might have X copy the clips into the event library directly. Depends on how “hot” the project is.

The way X works, the moment that Firewire drive is “mounted” X sees it and loads the projects up immediately. Any self contained with media copied directly into them are totally “live” immediately. So as not to clog up my RAM, I keep other projects on this drive as “reference” projects where the project is seen and skimmable – but not “loaded” by virtue of keeping the clips in Disk Image archives. These will only fully “populate’ if I open the images into the desktop via double clicking their disk images in the finder.

The next group is my “second tier” projects. They reside on Backup Drives. Those might be USB-2/3 or eSata drives. (I use whatever is cheapest at Costco or Frys.)

All of these drives have their own Project and Event Libraries. They also have disk images of the source files that were captured to create the projects.

I typically mirror this “second tier” project group across two drives for safety.

Anything I need to work with TODAY pops up ready to edit the moment I attach my primary storage FW800 drive. If it’s clips are in disk images, I can group select and double click them – and they open fast and the event browser re-populates with the content, ready to go. Not quite as fast as the projects with clips copied directly into the events, but fast enough to launch during a phone meeting to make real-time changes.

If I have to work with the second tier projects, I just plug those drives in. The project library and timelines load up – but I might have to “open” the disk images if I need to make changes – a process that can take maybe 10 to 20 minutes if I have a dozen 16 gig CF cards of source footage that have been imaged for the project.

I generally do not keep any large projects on my laptop or desktop’s “root” drive. I keep them on outboard drives. Firewire 800 portables for the projects that require active work. Less costly desktop standalone drives via USB or eSata for archiving.

That’s it in a nutshell.

(I’m also a bit obsessive and usually use the “Duplicate” command to mirror projects onto tertiary drives if they are particularly valuable or complex.

But that’s essentially what I’m doing as of now.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

I’ve got to totally agree with this post.

Most editing software has always been the equivalent of basic 3-chord Stadium Rock from the 1980s.

Fills seats and gets those tickets sold.

But most people eventually refine their tastes and go looking for something a bit more challenging.

I’m more a Jazz fan these days myself. Maybe that’s why I enjoy working with FCP-X so much?

(couldn’t resist.)

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Don Scioli] “No way he would have done hat was done what was done with FCPx.

I sure hope Apple can continue to “think different” without him, but I don’t know.”

Speculation of the worst type.

You do realize that there are some of us who are using it daily that firmly believe that FCP-X is the absolutely best thing to happen to video editing in decades, right?

Apple tossed out a lot of very tired thinking that benefited only those with workflows designed around workflows less and less relevant to modern editing (like analog compatibility) – and replaced them with new-era thinking like elevating the database to near equivalency in operation with the editing engine, enabling superior new technology like Core Video over an aging Quicktime engine -and looking forwards rather than backwards in terms of how people actually shoot, edit and deliver video in the modern digital era rather than how they did it in the 1980s.

I know there are still people who MUST work like they’ve always worked. And bless them there are plenty of great approaches for those how want to do that. Premier and AVID to name two.

But please, there is only ONE tool being offered today that makes serious breaks from the conventions of the past and celebrates a new approach for the future. That you’re stuck a year later seeing only what the death of Legacy took away – and not understanding anything much about what Apples decision might represent for all editors in the rapidly approaching future – is a sign that you may be stuck in a rut of your own design.

Jobs didn’t disrupt and revolutionize by clinging to the past. He always looked to the future.

He Okayed X, overtly or implicitly by hiring and promoting people like Ubillos and the X team.

And his gift to them was the same one he used to promote the Mouse, the iPhone and the iPad.

The willingness to take chances to make things better.

I’m betting in 5 years we’ll all look back and see that whatever the editing landscape looks like, it looks a hell of a lot more like X than it does like X’s competitors.

We shall see.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Andrew Richards] “Two of NVIDIA’s new flagship GK104 GPUs on a single card, with 4GB total vRAM and 3,072 total CUDA cores between them, and it pulls as much juice as a 27″ iMac (300W).

Beast.

Best,
Andy”

And think of the money you can save on a coffee warming plate – just set your cup over box with the card and you’re good to go!

300 watts? Yikes.

Time to switch to an all LED studio light strategy to balance out the energy profile!

Still for you big iron devotees this has to be excellent news.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor