Boom Recorder is BACK!

In a world where your favorite tools get abandoned and you have to learn new ones, that often don't work as well, I am incredibly happy to discover that Boom Recorder is back, tanned, rested and ready for action.

Take Vos, the genius programmer behind BoomRecorder got persuaded to update and put it back on the market by the user base, and all those folks we kept recommending BR too.

It's been updated and works with Snow Leopard, so I can finally update my laptop!.

I'm not going to do a big review, there are plenty out there. Go to the site and get a copy.

To Motown or not to Motown - moved

Since this blog is really supposed to be about sound... I've moved the Big D posts to a new blog called.
Bug'n out of Babylon

http://bugnoutofbabylon.blogspot.com/

Music VS Music and the Coen Brothers VS low budget films

[QUOTE]... what i don't get is No Country for Old Men. i thought that was an excellent movie, but i distinctly remember that it didn't have music in it. i thought the lack of music was one of its strong points (i.e. they CHOSE not have music in it). however, the wikipedia article states "Music By Carter Burwell", did i miss something in the movie?[/QUOTE]

No Country had no "score", it did have music, but it was all practical.

The other thing to remember is that the composed music is a balancing act with the "sound'. A good sound track plays almost like scored music. In a perfect world the composer and the sound supervisor and or designer would work closely with the director early on. Unfortunately that rarely happens. Low budget films often make the mistake of over scoring the film. An audience doesn't like to be beaten over the head every minute telling then how they should feel about every moment. And as a replacement for a decent sound track music generally sucks. The music only seq in a big film is pretty rare. Even the biggest "score moments" generally have a fair amount of "sound" to anchor the audience IN the story.

Which is why the sound folks and the composer ought to be working together. The two big questions are, "What does the audience WANT to hear now?", and "What does the audience NEED to hear now?". Some times it's score, some times it's the FX (I'm assuming they always want and need to hear the dialog), and sometimes it's both.

Lets take a big Knights in armor battle sequence.
Prep for the battle Knights getting on horses, sharpening swords etc. Probably all sound. WE need and want to be involved in this prep.
THey ride out. Probably more of the same but music may start to creep in.

We see the massed army at a distance moving toward battle. Perfect score moment. We can't hear them anyway and we want to get geared up for the battle.

The armies approach each other. Generally a big score moment that builds (and has sound start to come in more) till. THe battle explodes. At this point a lot of films will cheap out and put heavy score over big parts of the battle. This is almost always a mistake. It pulls the audience out of the world on the screen and we WANT to hear and be apart of the action. So as long as the camera is in the thick of it I think it should be all or at least 90% FX. If you pull out to a god view then you going back in to score land.

Aftermath. Often effective to start with just the quiet aftermath sounds but the right score can also work really well here.

Low budget films will usually slather music over the whole thing and often music that wasn't composed specifically for that scene so the beats aren't even on the money. They do it because even a picture editor can drop in some music the director has found but it takes a sound editor and a library and a bunch of Foley and time to really cover the battle. But it's not nearly as effective and often outright distracting to just slather music on.

As always just my 2¢

Canon T2i fun And a new hosting site

My wife got one to try out and it's been fun to play with. Not exactly a sound post but this is what a LOT of low (and not so low) budget films are going to get shot on. Probably more likely he 7D but it's basically the same camera functionally. Anyway there is a lot of debate about camera presets for film and being a bit OCD I found a bunch on line and have them sitting on the computer. I'll thin the herd a bit and put up a link to the ones I think are useful/interesting.

And the other big news is that we moved to Bluehost for the website. Netfirms was OK but you couldn't pay for anything more than a year out and the email would go down periodically. We were going to switch last year and I didn't do it soon enough so we had to renew. The last year has been pretty stable but then I got the renew notice and the email went out for a couple of hours. Talk about bad timing (for them) so I bit the bullet and moved the site and the email etc. I have to say it went pretty smooth. We only had email down for about two hours in the switch and the site was down for maybe 15 min. THe only catch so far is that I upgraded my reels site and had it all snazzy and that didn't survive the switch. There is a file that has to be in just the right place and I haven't found the place yet. But that's pretty small since I'm sure it will get working once I spend some time finding what I did wrong. And BH lets you have lot's O' domains. You could sort of cheat with Netfirms but it wasn't smooth and we are planning a big reorganization of the site so independent sites were starting to get important.

The next step after getting the reels site fixed is to upload the latest version of MY site (the sound one) to it's new happy home and then switch the main site to ASKinc Studios. That's what it says now but it's really my sound site and we are planning to diversify and so the sound site will link off the main site but there will also be other enterprises that link off the main site.

Craigs list and Flagging

This is only tangentially related to sound...

Craig's list is a decent resource for the low/ no budget category films. BUT there is a group that flags everything that is non paying. Now first off "Gig" does not nec. mean it's a "Paying gig" so chill out. Some of these are scam artists but a lot of them just don't have any money. Now I see the indignation 'we should be paid". But in fact a real credit for some one with none IS a payment.

So two things.
For the posters, include some contact info in the "body" of the post so that news reader folks can contact you, even IF your post is flagged.

For you flaggers, Gig does NOT nec. mean paying. This is why you do hear things like "unpaid gig", and "paid gig". So get over it. We are all adults and can decide for our selves if we want to work for no money.

Cheating your audience, and why a lot indi's fail the rump test

I was asked the other day about Formulas for Dialog EQ, to make it sound professional.

There are no "formulas" for dialog EQ.  As a general rule there isn't much EQ on dialog other than rolling off areas you don't use, generally the high end and probably everything below 120 or so.  It depends a bit on what your delivering for, some formats can't handle bass (16 mm for instance).  Dialog is usually compressed a bit but much of that is done manually with fader moves.  The whole goal of the dialog edit is to get as clean a track as possible (you asked about the "Hollywood" sound) so everything but actual dialog will be cleaned out.  If it's an FX that might be of use in the mix it's put on PFX (production FX) tracks.  Room tone is used to fill the wholes made by all the cleaning.  Old school those tracks get sent to the mix where the mixer does any processing (EQ, compression etc).  New school the Dialog editors may be doing some of the processing.  It really depends on the post workflow and who is mixing and supervising.  The mixers will also use reverb etc to place the dialog in the space if it doesn't fit naturally (sometimes the set doesn't sound anything like what the camera sees) and to get the ADR to blend with the production sound.  Serious noise reduction and dialog surgery is more and more done in editorial because the tools have gotten cheap enough and time in editorial is cheaper than in the mix.

BUT that is only a small part of the "Hollywood" sound, though it certainly helps.  In the ideal post everything you hear in a big film has been thought out and put there for a reason.  Other than indi directors/ producers generally not thinking about sound past intelligibility they also tend to be not into "sound".  They generally have an aversion to anything that deviates from the picture edit.  They often essentially want you to clean up what the picture editor has done.  So even when there are the skills to do a better job a lot of times it is hamstrung by a director who is married to the track they have been hearing for months in the picture edit.  Sometimes it's because they spent a bunch of time "fixing" (working around" a problem that they should have left for sound to do.  Now they are so invested in the "fix" that they can't live with out it.  And sometime they are just super conservative in a strange way.  With most "big time" directors, well the few I have worked with and the many that friends have worked with, if you have some little subtle complexity going on in the track.  Say some TV or crying baby bleeding through the wall from the apartment next door.  Not loud or in the way but just something that shows we are in a real apartment and not a set.  They will be happy and in fact would probably be pissed that nobody had thought to fill in the environment if you didn't do it.  A lot of indi directors will go "there was no baby on the set, it's the city, it's silent".  I actually had a director give me the "silent city" thing because I had put some traffic out the window of this downtown apt.  I live on the outskirts of San Francisco so I asked him to follow me out side for a minute.  I'm about ? 4-5 miles from the heart of Downtown and the traffic was very clear.  I usually try to point out that it is THEIR film and what ever they want I'll try to do but they should do it for a reason because the "that's what it sounds like" is A almost always wrong (most peoples perception of what things sound like is very far off) and B, it's the weakest reason to do something in a film (that is not a doc.).  A film is not a "real" place.  Everything is designed and if it isn't then your failing your audience (unless you doing some Dogma style thing).  A film makes a pact with the audience.  You promise that if they will suspend their disbelief you will take them to a world where your film lives and take them on a journey.  They have put their trust in you to look out for their interests.  It might be a scary world or a warm and fuzzy world but it needs to have an internal logic and you MUST honor the rules of this world.  If you cheat or short change the audience they will feel betrayed and not be happy they saw your film.  This is not a Disney argument.  You can scare the crap out of them, fool them amaze them make them feel good or make them terribly sad.  What you can't do is make them sad and then laugh at them.  You can trick them but you can't cheat them.

Of course expectations also play into things.  If I go to a no budget screening my expectations are totally different from going to a big budget film.  If this were not the case everyone would hate most indi's.  So you can get away with a lot but you still can't cheat.  And most low budget films cheat their audience in terms of sound.

*** “The Rump test” was a term my mother used for when the audience starts squirming in their seats, a sure sign you have lost them and they know they are back in the theatre and have been sitting too long.

Sound Dogs - not the online site

Well I was looking at past entries and in mentioning the passing of my long time partner I failed to mention a new partner. He's just learning and he only had a year and a half apprenticing to the old master but he's coming along. He's kind of busy digging holes and looking for gofers at the moment...

But he does make some interesting sounds and he does have his quieter moments. He also makes one go out for walks and he wants REAL walks not the leisurely strolls that Bently could manage the last few years.

Anyway thought I would include him since I don't want him to feel neglected ;~) and he stepped up to the plate and took up residence under my desk. I think he felt he needed to "assume the duties". We'll see how much sound I get to squeeze out of him but for now he warms the feet. I guess the point is for the two people (counting me) that actually read this blog, having something that gets you out of the studio and into the open is a good thing. So go get something that does that. I like dogs and cats but a hobby might work?

Oh and his name is Monty.