Jean-christophe Boulay
Forum Replies Created
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That’s a mighty short crossfade! It can make a difference with a click caused by an audio region being cut wrong, as one frame is still 1600 samples. If you don’t have any clicks and are trying to smooth a transition, one frame is much too short. Clicks are best dealt with using fade-ins and fade-outs on the offending region, rather than a crossfade, anyways.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
The best test file is your favorite song. You’ve probably heard it a gazillion times on many different systems so you have a good reference. Most mixers I know dial themselves into a new environment this way. I’ve always got my favorites CD’s (well, thumb drives, these days) in my gig bag.
If you have both line and headphone outputs, use the headphone out.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
I have that combination on one machine here. It works fine. Running FCP 6.0.6 on a G5 dual-2.0 for SD and offline work.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Any PC motherboard worth its salt has an onboard audio controller, with multi-coloured mini-jack outputs on the back. These have at least a mic input (red jack), line in (blue plug) and stereo out (green jack) as standard. Quality greatly depends on which controller your motherboard is equipped with, and varies from good to truly-ear-splittingly-horrible. Headphones are plugged into the stereo out.
For best results and flexibility, an aftermarket audio interface is dearly recommended. Internal audio cards are almost dead these days. Most models are external USB or FW interfaces. For simple input and output, I’d suggest looking into M-Audio’s lower range, which gives great quality for very affordable prices.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
In the rally car, won’t they have radio headsets already? They usually do, so they can hear each other over the engine and wind, though I’m not sure with the type of rally you describe. If so, you could split that out and send one feed of each member to the recorder. The manner of splitting would depend on what kind of connections the radio gear uses.
If they don’t have headsets already, getting them some as Bob suggested seems the best option to me. My second choice would be lav mics mounted on their collar. Seeing this from the mixer’s perspective, a farther mic’ing would complicate separation of voice and ambiance and effects. The gear shift stick is just too far and off-axis, IMO. It’s better to have some slight clothes rustling to remove than a blaring engine. I’ve once received audio recorded by mounting small, very directional mics to the inside of the windshield and that sounded pretty good, too.
Being a creature who inhabits the cozy world of the studio, I couldn’t really comment on the recorder of choice, though.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Actually, the audio pro 100% guarantees he won’t be successful. We can remove many things from a recording but reverb emanating from what should be the main sound source is not one of them. You can diminish the room modes a bit with EQ or with some really far-out tricks, but it will never be clean. If you don’t really know what you’re doing and start playing with the dynamics with gates and expanders, you’re more likely to worsen the result. It’s better to have a constant room than one that comes and goes. ADR’ing it is your best (only?) bet at clean audio. The miracle department is currently closed.
Whoever invents the “echo-remover” plugin is going to make a fortune!
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
The Geekbench website has a listing of most, if not all, Macs. It’s just the raw Geekbench score, so is not all that informative. Still, the current X56xx-based models are a big leap ahead of last year’s X55xx-based models. You can always run Geekbench on your own computer to compare with your current system. How that comparison translates to FCP rendering speeds is unclear.
Results:
https://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/Run it yourself:
https://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Going from past experience, it’s doubtful there will be in-depth news on ProApps. With the invitations to the event featuring a lion, it’s pretty predictable that a new OS version will be announced, especially since SL was a mini-update feature-wise and Apple want to bridge the gap between OSX and iOS. Every time Apple has presented a new OS, it took out a good hour of the presentation. There won’t be much time left for other stuff, let alone all the ProApps line.
Then again, this is Apple, so whoever knows has a nuke-proof NDA and ain’t telling. We’ll see on the 20th…
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Mark is right on! APM Music are the publishers of the NFL Music Library, which is the production music bank from NFL Films. They should have it.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
While FCP lets you see the audio waveform in the timeline, you don’t have a control over the scale of the waveform. Still, the FCP default waveform shows the complete resolution, so if you see a block with clipped tops, that is all there is to show. You can make your audio tracks taller in the timeline window to see better, but you’re not generating better resolution that way. If you don’t see the peaks of the waveform, it’s probably because they’ve been chopped off by the clipping.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com