Dave Bergan
Forum Replies Created
-
Take a look at CatDV. https://www.squarebox.co.uk/
-
Geez, ok, I was wrong, I already saw that. Excuse my attempt to bring up something that might be helpful. I won’t let it happen again.
-
Ok, fine. Though according to this is implies it is a video signal
https://support.apple.com/kb/TA27705?viewlocale=en_US
Besides, because he isn’t going to a broadcast monitor anyway, and DCDP has always played smooth for me it seems like a reasonable idea to bring up. But whatever…
-
Were you using the Digital Cinema Desktop Preview feature or connecting the DVI out as a second monitor. I have found it works well, especially in this type of setup. DCDP does send a video signal and not just a computer signal.
Dave
-
I have a never used ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT pulled from an early 2008 Mac Pro, which apparently is compatible. Not sure if it’s enough of an upgrade but you can contact me off list if interested- davebergan at gmail.com
-
You probably do need to adjust the levels manually with keyframes and not rely on normalize. You need more control that what normalize gives you. Though now I’m curious about the accidental 16 tracks. Is it 16 tracks of the same audio, like 8 stereo tracks of dialogue? Maybe some of those should be taken out.
You can email me off list too if you like, davebergan (at) gmail.com
-
Not being an “audio guy” I don’t have any ground breaking advice. Hopefully you are working on a station that has at least good quality audio monitors, it’s not advisable to just use headphones for a final mix. Don’t rely on normalizing, once you have you base audio level decided, listen to make sure the volume between the clips sounds the way you want, not just that the peaks hit a certain level. In cleaning, don’t completely take the sound out. Like, if there’s some noise in between sentences, be careful of silencing it out. It’s probably better replace it with clean room tone.
But really, for the most part, trust your ears.
-
I would, it’s supposed to counter a gain increase when using two mono channels rather than one stereo, though I don’t know the technicalities behind it. I am betting you did see a jump in overall levels so watch your meters. You can also set the pans on the clips or tracks to 0 if you want them mono. But seeing that you’re at the end of a 2 hour piece, I’m not really sure you need to switch the dialog to mono. If you’ve been doing the whole project with stereo dialogue, and everything’s been fine, changing at the end might just add to the confusion. And remember, you’re making the whole timeline dual mono (mx and sfx etc.), not just the dialogue.
An answer to an earlier question too, I’d clean up between sentences after Levelator.
But I will say something else about Levelator, which may nullify my input, and certainly add to the confusion. It was created by two guys making a podcast so they could easily normalize, noise reduce and make it sound better. So it seems to have been created to be used on one recording, which I think it does a great job of. I use it for short pieces (5 minute web videos) with voice over that was recorded in one session, maybe two. I only use it on the VO track, I don’t use it on the live video with dialogue in the project. I do have a hard time imagining using it on a dialogue track for something that is 2 hours. In other work, even a short film, I don’t think I would use it. One reason being, if you have someone far off camera, you don’t want to bring them up to the same level as someone close to the camera, and since Levelator uses RMS peaks, it would. Which goes back to what Michael said in the beginning, you don’t have the control over it.
I’m sorry if I’ve muddied the waters on this, my mind went off on a tangent. You said you were running out of time, I’m sure by the time you’ve read this you are out of time.
-
I’m sure it’s fine, and if you zoom in on it my guess is the flat parts won’t be flat. It doesn’t look too pretty but as long as it’s not clipping, which that won’t be, and it sounds good, then go with it. I’ve seen worse and there was nothing wrong with the audio or how it sounded.
-
Not sure what “trimmed from the bottom and are flat” means. I’ve never seen anything unusual with my output file from Levelator, and with no user controls I don’t think you can do anything wrong. They do use RMS levels, so if the waveform peaks looks flat, it shouldn’t be anything to be concerend about.
Of course you need to be at certain levels, but don’t be too worried about how the waveform looks. Really the bottom line is does it sound good?