Chris Harlan
Forum Replies Created
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[Jeremy Garchow] “It went from A-Ha moment while drinking coffee in a situation that was obviously beyond Bob’s control, to you must edit in a pristine bordello with a cleaning service while trying to avoid getting your eyes plucked out to be a professional.”
No, it didn’t go there. Or rather, if it went there, I missed it. HOWEVER, I would be ver interested in seeing it go there, so if you can steer it that way, I would be most appreciative.
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Running metaphors! Got the marathon on your mind? Only three weeks. I was going to run it this year, but I’m not quite ready. I think I’ll do Santa Clarita in the Fall, though.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “i am sitting here right now, at home, on a very small desk with headphones on, editing three spots that end up on the TV in the States and Europe.
Am I going to finish it here? No.
But I am editing, and it’s an older laptop.
I am having no issues creatively.
“Me three. And I dig it.
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[Charlie Austin] “But TV? Seriously? You’re telling me I can’t mix audio on a laptop with headphones for a broadcast TV signal that’s ultimately likely to hit a transmitters “brick wall” limiting? Really?
I do a fair bit of work that ends up on major market radio and network affiliate TV. And so far not a SINGLE person anywhere along my distribution chain has EVER said that my mixes don’t do just fine. ”
I’m not saying it can’t be done, of course it can. I’m simply saying that a mix done on headphones will sound totally different on a TV (or whatever). It might be fine, or it might suck… you just can’t tell. “
Charlie’s right. You can do a simple mix with headphones, but past that, you can’t rely on it. You run into all kinds of problems with distorted frequency response that tend toward overly colored, overly warm mid tones, misrepresented low tones and dead spots in stereo imaging. I use headphones all the time–I have a nice pair of Beyerdynamic 880s–because they let you pick up on all kinds of detail and garbage that I might not otherwise easily notice, and they make a valuable component to a mix, but unless you balance them out with a good pair near-fields you are asking for trouble. I also throw in mid-rangey consumer speakers, like those on a on a Macbook Pro, to get a taste of what I’m hearing as most others will hear it.
Certainly, if you are aware of the problems, you can make mental adjustments and educated guesses. I do that all the time, as well. And, monitoring meters also helps. There are also a couple of nifty plugins like Redline’s 112DB, that help with imaging and some of the dynamic range. Overall, though, once you’ve passed a certain complexity of mix, it is a bad habit to get into.
Over the last three or four years, I think every mix I’ve rejected was rejected because the preditor that turned it in to me had mixed on headphones, and the problems are so specific that I can easily identify them as being from a headphone mix. The three biggest problems are: 1) too little volume of a bass or mid-range track that carries the rhythm of a piece because the color of that frequency is so much brighter over head phones than on speaker playback, 2) jarring sub-bass artifacts that aren’t audible at their actual frequency over headphones, and 3) VO that is mixed at too low a volume because the bass of the voice talent seems higher and louder to the headphone wearer.
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[Charlie Austin] ” If they could… …get rid of the tracks they’d be on to something! ;-)”
Like sending everybody else to Avid?
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Agreed. This is largely what the track v. trackless argument is about.
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[Bill Davis] “I guess I’m kinda missing how having a bunch of tabs open in Legacy and switching between them is functionally so different from having a dozen projects in your Project Library and being able to call them up at will.”
For me the difference isn’t when things are tabbed, as much as it is when multiple sequences and multiple Canvases are open all at the same time and spread across several monitors. Or even layered across a single monitor. I realize that a lot of people aren’t aware that you can do this, but it is one of the more outstanding features of Legacy. Premiere lets you do it too. When I’m working in Media Composer, its the single thing I miss the most, though pop-ups and the delightful source timeline go a long way to mitigate that.
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[Charlie Austin] “Hopefully they’ll make the project “history” buttons stickier, then it’s kind of a non issue.”
Yes. This works very nicely and very quickly on both the Source and Record sides of Avid, and does a lot to make up for only being able to have 1.75 timelines open at a time (I DO like the Source Timeline quite a bit, and wish other NLEs had something like it.) Also, being able to open multiple sources as pop ups is nice. So, yeah, I agree that a responsive history button helps quite a bit, and might even be preferential on a laptop.
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Hey Bill, I’m not sure what “dangerous” means, but I hope I became that some years ago. I definitely keep an eye on X, and I promise you if it ever feels like a good fit, I won’t hesitate to jump in.
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[Herb Sevush] “My workflow is to go thru generations of timelines, each one a reduction of the previous, until the final show emerges. Whenever the need to re-look at other material comes up you just pick the most appropriate timeline – anything from the previous version all the way back to the original assembly.
“This, generally, is how I work as well, though slightly modified. On the Sizzle I’m working on right now in 7, for instance, I started with a TB and a half of source material. I use bins to generally organize materials by show, categories of SFX, etc., and then I begin collecting material in theme/palette-based time lines which actually function as scrubbable bins. I then hone these timelines to finer, tighter versions, which I then use as scrubbable source “bins” for my actual project timeline.