Film Production Sound Tips & Field Recorder Workflow with Pro Tools 9.0.3

[Tom Graham]

Hello Post DUC peoples,

My latest blog about making an independent movie is live for your reading pleasure and it contains two videos I think you may find useful.

1. Production Sound Tips from a Post Production Sound Supervisors POV.
2. Field Recorder Workflow with Pro Tools 9.0.3 that showcases how to get to the other channels/microphones from the AAF Mix Track. (To my knowledge, this is the first ever video to demonstrate this huge time saving feature in Pro Tools).

http://community.avid.com/blogs/avid...ie-part-6.aspx

Thanks for your support!
Tom

[Craig F]

Nice Tom but, there are ways for Media Composer to strip the Metadata.
A video on the correct and incorrect way to handle the audio in Media Composer so this will work would be useful.

[Tom Graham]

Originally Posted by Craig F

Nice Tom but, there are ways for Media Composer to strip the Metadata.
A video on the correct and incorrect way to handle the audio in Media Composer so this will work would be useful.

Sounds like a solid idea... I'll see if our Audio Post Guru Scott Wood can do a short screen capture on how we did the Media Composer side of things.

As I mentioned in the blog, you will want to ignore any rendered audio files from Media Composer - this causes potential mismatches. The cool thing is, once you get the AAF with rendered audio files from the video editor, you can then import it twice (once for the Field Recorder Workflow without any rendered files) and then separately (once with rendered files to hear what they intended and possibly keep in the temps and onward).

Cheers...

[Brent_Sydney]

Awesome work Tom!

[Mr.Ed]

Originally Posted by Craig F

Nice Tom but, there are ways for Media Composer to strip the Metadata.
A video on the correct and incorrect way to handle the audio in Media Composer so this will work would be useful.

I second the request for a video on the actual steps to handle MC audio when expanding tracks to Protools.

I know that 16 channel deva audio files as well as some of the Cantar recorded files do not play well with MC (in terms of Meta data being preserved once imported into MC). If the picture department loads in all the individual ISO tracks into Media Composer and then you hand those files to the Sound Department as .MXF files from the MC media folder, not all the appropriate meta data exists on those files, Ptools will not correctly expand the tracks in that scenario. A Deva and Cantar rep mentioned that some of there meta data is stored in the .iXML fields which Media Composer does not support) A established workflow and recipe would be greatly appreciated.

As far as I can tell at this moment in time, the only true and tested workflow is importing in the raw production audio from the original discs into a pro tools session and using TITAN for the assembly.

[MIKEROPHONICS]

3rd that big time
Often Avid editors don't know what settings work for PT and we don;t know MC well enough to help them when it doesn't

[sound01]

Originally Posted by Craig F

Nice Tom but, there are ways for Media Composer to strip the Metadata.
A video on the correct and incorrect way to handle the audio in Media Composer so this will work would be useful.

+1

Great video. I think most of us have been aware for quite a while the power and wonder of alternate channels. But getting the picture department to start ingesting the media correctly on the first day of shooting is another matter!!

[Charles D. Ballard]

Originally Posted by Tom Graham

“Video without audio is just surveillance.” —unknown

I don’t know if this is the true origins of this statement, but a number of years ago I was at joint meeting of SMPTE and AES that was held at one of the dub stages at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. The topic was digital cinema and DLP. (To give you an idea of how long ago, at the time I believe there were 10 houses in the United States that had a digital projector).

During the introduction to the meeting, one of the SMPTE guys repeated the line, “Television without picture is radio.” When David Scally, who I believe was President of the Los Angeles chapter of AES at the time, addressed the group, he made reference to that line and said, “SMPTE often reminds us that television without picture is radio, I’d remind everyone that television without sound is a surveillance camera.” I loved the line so I wrote it down and have often repeated it.

The statement came off as one of the many witty quips that Dave was famous for. I don’t know, because I never asked, if he got that line from someone else, but he certainly had the wit and talent to have come up with that on the spot. I, therefore, suggest that unless we have evidence to the contrary, we accredit that line to him.

[Charles D. Ballard]

P.S. Great post and I agree on a video for the MC side of things.

[Frank Kruse]

All you need to do on the MC side is a referenced OMF/AAF to maintain the metadata. There's nothing else the editor can do.
Mos importantly the sound recordist needs to enter correct meta data because it can't be changed once imported into the avid.

frank.