Quote:
Originally Posted by joachim
I have the field recorder folder. No mix tracks, never.
Actually, it is two folders : one for a certain location and one for the rest. The first has metadata, the second none.
Why does an ingest and sync process needs to alter the names of an audio file ? I could understand a suffix to the original name, but not a completely different one.
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Were you the sound recordist for the duration of production?
Documentary usually uses sound to camera during production. It is done for two main reasons - documentary requires many times more footage to be shot than a scripted narrative of comparable runtime, so syncing everything in post is too bigger job. Also the nature of documentary shoots, particularly those with no or low budget, means directors will often draw on whatever resources they have available to them on any given day of shooting. Real life events rarely wait for camera and sound crews. As a result, inconsistency in footage can be common… including the methods used for sound.
Have a casual chat with the editors when you get a chance. They may well have been pulling their hair out too over this project. At the end of the day, their job is to construct a story out of the tens or hundreds of hours of footage they were handed. It isn’t really their job to maintain all aspects of metadata. Audio names will change in an AAF because editors will combine audio and picture and create a clip out of it. That clip then goes in their clip bin after being given a name that makes sense in the context of the story they are building. “PARIS10” doesn’t mean anything to an editor working on a documentary. Dates, places, people, events do. That clip name is then often carried through to the AAF audio.
If you have the original sound from production (not the files associated with the AAF from the editor), and it has no metadata in it, it may well have been recorded that way in the first place. Metadata is useful, but sound sheets, camera slates, and two pips still remain a standard for a reason. So too does sound to camera in doco.
Do some snooping. Chat with the editors. Find out how much the audio varied for them across the footage they were working with. Ask the production (not the editors) for a copy of the original production sound, and see what turns up.