Jean-christophe Boulay
Forum Replies Created
-
You don’t need an external mixer for surround work in ProTools. And your wallet really doesn’t want you shopping for a surround desk! You do need the proper monitoring environment and signal chain, though. Surround mixing is really not an easy task. Depending on the means of distribution and target listening environment, there are a lot of parameters to take into account. I can’t even graze the subject here. For any project including a surround mix, you absolutely need a pro mixer. Besides, for most surround formats, you need to encode in either Dolby Digital or DTS and I doubt many video houses have a DMU in their rack. And that also means your mix room should be Dolby-approved and your monitoring system calibrated by the Dolby technician.
So it may work out for temp mixes to do it yourself, but for final product in most surround formats (be it HDTV, DVD, HD-DVD, game cutscenes…) you’re going to want a good sound engineer with a proper facility. Many producers and directors still don’t take that into account in their budgets, but it’s time they get used to it.
JC Boulay
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
ah ha!!!
we’ll have a pint in your honor! thanks.
JC
-
You really do need to have one of those guys in front of the mic. When you do, there is nothing special to do to get that ballsy voice. If you don’t have one, you should be boosting a little bit of lows and highs while tracking (both with shelving filters). You want your talent way up close to the mic, using two pop filters if necessary. You should instruct him to push out the sound with his stomach, not his throat as he will most probably try to do. That just sounds cartoonish, not authentic. Once recorded, using a multiband compressor to compress the low-mids and lows more than the rest of the spectrum and then boosting those bands by the same number of dBs you get on gain reduction will get you someway towards giving balls to your VO. Won’t turn Mickey into Isaac Hayes, but goes some way to making the talent sound bigger.
The ideal is to get someone with that voice. Tracking those guys on big speakers with a really good big mic tingles my spine every time.
-
First off, it is compatible.
The MultiBridge Pro seems to have a pair of XLR analog outputs, from what I found on their website. You’d be plugging that into two line inputs on the Mackie. The line inputs on that desk are on 1/4″ connectors so you’ll need cables that go from XLR-F to 1/4″-M. Do not plug into the XLR inputs on the Mackie, as those are mic-level. You’ll have to pan your first channel hard-left and the sercond one hard-right to get a stereo image, and you’ll have to level both faders by hand, as there seems to be no stereo channels on this Mackie desk. Since you won’t be moving that around, just tape them into place. So now your audio gets into the desk and to its stereo output.
Your Yamaha speakers are powered so you don’t need an amp. just plug your desk’s left and right main outputs to your left and right speaker inputs. Both outs and ins are on 1/4″ connectors in your case. Power up from the inside out (ie: CPU, then desk, then speakers) and set your levels through your desk input channel faders (which you then tape), the desk output fader (which is now your monitoring volume control) and your speakers’ input trims.
Basically, the Mackie will serve as a volume control. That’s one big volume button! You could wire the Multibridge audio outs directly to the speaker inputs, but that would mean all volume control must be done in the computer, which can be a major pain. If you have a little budget, many very affordable monitoring boxes exist that would insert between the computer and speakers and give you simple volume and channel controls. The first to come to mind is: https://www.mackie.com/products/bigknob/index.html though more affordable and more complex solutions exist.
Hope this gets you through the process of setting up the system. May the sound-Gods be with you and may the system work on first boot.