Jean-christophe Boulay
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Stephen,
Your overall workflow makes perfect sense to me but, as a mixer, that’s quite a lot of audio tracks to receive. Don’t be too hesitant to make decisions and scrap audio clips that would obviously not be of use in the mix. I’m thinking mainly of scratch audio or any clips that were recorded but are at unusably low levels or contain no audio.
Remember that any time spent parsing the AAF in the mix process is on the clock, so making a few decisions while editing could be financially beneficial as well. Sorting four stacked clips of audio is pretty standard on doc projects, seven could be a bit much. Unless all audio material is pristine and/or relevant, then choice is what we like.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Sound Mixer
Studio SFX
Québec, Canada
http://www.studiosfx.ca -
Hi Chuck,
If I was mixing such a project, I’d chuck out anything you could’ve recorded on location anyways. There is little way this could be done simply by mic’ing while staying in budget. This is foley or sound design territory. If you want to convey a sense of exasperation of the neighbour’s steps, you’ll want to go a bit beyond reality anyways.
I’d start with footstep samples, with heels on wood probably, filter out the high frequencies a lot and add a low-end “thump” sound on top. That would be my starting point. I’d go with some room reverb, probably a bit over the top depending on how grounded or “before and after” the shot is. It’s about layering other sounds and dosing at this point, but this is not such an easy effect as there are many variables involved in how we hear sounds through floors and walls.
Sure thing, steer towards effecting your recordings or searching for step samples, many of which can be found under CC license online.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Sound Mixer
Studio SFX
Québec, Canada
http://www.studiosfx.ca -
If you have your video and audio cut at the exact same length in the proper format, I’d go for FFPEGX’s Mux function, under Tools. You provide locations for your audio and video files, it muxes them as .mpeg. As with most things FFMPEGX, it can be a bit finicky but if you have all your ducks lined up, it works perfectly.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
The RAM access limit is a limit of all 32-bit software. There is no getting around it. There could possibly be a way of programming plug-ins with memory servers to access their own RAM like some audio plug-ins did a while back, but each one would itself be limited to 4GB. The only way to get around it is to rewrite the software as 64-bit, which Apple did when they came up with FCX. Even if there were a way to patch it, I imagine whoever put in the coding time would like some kind of monetary compensation for it and the legacy FCP user base is getting smaller and smaller.
If it was legal (it’s not), possible and profitable for someone to do it, it would’ve been done already is what I’m saying.
There is no future in a legacy software with no upgrade path. As long as the legacy version fits your needs, it works fine, but that doesn’t seem to be your case anymore. Bitter pill, I know.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Once partitioned, they are individual drives to the OS, so each needs its individual space reserve if you want one.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
You need a minimum of breathing space. Try filling a drive to the gills and the read and write speeds will plummet when you get to the end. On today’s high-capacity drives, you can maybe go under the usually-quoted 10% but low space will affect speed on any mechanical drive.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Hi Noam,
First off, yes all the partitions of a drive mount at the same time. Of course, you have to remember they are actually one drive so any concurrent i/o operations on different partitions will be bottlenecked by the drive’s mechanism. I personally find it clearer for cloning smaller drives than creating folders and it will confine some HDD structure errors to a smaller portion of data. On the other hand, any writing between partitions on the drive is a copy operation, not a move. Since the partitions share the read/write mechanism, this copy can be slower than between two separate drives. It’s something to keep in mind when deciding if partitioning makes sense in your workflow.
Each partition is seen as completely separate by the system, which means you have to keep breathing space on each partition individually.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
The iLok drivers that let the software read the authorization on the dongle can do stuff like that when installed in another user account. Some components are installed in the user folder so a different account can not acces them. If you have the iLok dongle plugged in while you use FCP, installing the latest versions of the driver and client software from the iLok.com site in the FCP user account could well be the remedy.
The installers can be found at https://www.ilok.com/download-ilok-software.html.
It’s the driver you really need, but I recommend installing the client as well.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Hi John,
Is it possible there isn’t only a stereo audio track in your Quicktime file? If you open it in QT7 and open the Movie Properties (cmd-J), there should ideally only be one Sound Track. When you select it and go to the Audio Settings tab at the bottom, you can see where each channel is assigned, the track’s volume, balance and basic EQ. If you have two mono tracks, one with music and the other with VO, and the VO track’s settings are out of whack, it could explain your results depending on the player software used in each case.
Extracting the tracks and mixing them to a stereo mix would be your best remedy in that case. If you have a single stereo track, I’d look into audio wiring issues in the system it doesn’t work on.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Hi Kevin,
Normalisation increases the gain of the audio so you may well simply be hearing the raised noise floor that is subtle at the original gain. After normalizing, if you reduce the gain of the normalized file to match the level of the source, do they sound identical? They should. I have trouble seeing how this operation could cause artifacts as it is simply a gain bump to bring your audio’s highest peak to the desired level. I’d first try normalizing using other software to isolate the issue to either the source audio or the actual FCP normalisation. If it isolates to FCP, cleaning prefs could heal it. Maybe.
I would question why this is part of your workflow, though. Since the gain change is based on peak level only, which can have little relation to the average level, especially if there is mic handling noise involved, it is not that useful. Adjusting the gain while you edit or mix to your desired output level, which you’ll do anyway with normalized files, saves you an operation and ensures you work on the source material. If the material goes to audio mix, we always prefer to receive non-normalized audio. Just a though.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com