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Walter Murch 2015: FCPX, Avid, Premiere Pro

Walter Murch speaks openly about the state of play of the major editing systems in use in 2015. In the aftermath of the end-of-life of the original Final Cut…

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My old R-09 moves into retirement and makes way for a Zoom H4N. Handy recorder to have in the bag. Here’s to recording LOTS more sounds in 2016. 

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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better...

Samuel Beckett

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Pro Tools 101 - 15 Tips

#5 Ways to hit record

i. Record button  then PLAY or;

ii. SPACEBAR

iii. Command + SPACEBAR

iv. F12

Finally, there's the one that I always use:

v. [3] on the numeric keypad

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If everybody has a book in them, some should keep it there.

Ewan Murray

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News and blog site for professional audio broadcast, music recording, live sound, audio postproduction and games sound

An old-ish interview with Nicolas Becker. He did a great session at the School of Sound event in London earlier this year, and I've been interested in his work and approach ever since.

His idea of mixing Foley live is one that I've been incorporating into my work Foley mixing work with Image and Sound Factory. It would be great to have the time and luxury of four or six microphones, though. Maybe one day!

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Pro Tools 101 - 15 Tips

#4 Marquee zoom  

I rarely use the Marquee Zoom. It's just a good habit that I never got into. So I am personally going to remembering to Alt + Zoom (with the Zoomer tool) to finally start putting the Marquee Zoom to good use.

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Pro Tools 101 - 15 Tips

#3 Numeric keypad mode

The numeric keypad is a small minefield for performing a number of operations really quickly. If you're on a laptop, or your keyboard doesn't have a numeric keypad, there are software enablers that will allow your keyboard to function in this way. 

Some of the things you can do are:

Rewind [1] Fast Forward [2] Record [3] Enable Quick Punch [6]

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Audio at BVE

It seems like I’m not the only one who feels that BVE could do more to improve its audio offering to visitors. Whilst I’m not suggesting a name change, let’s be honest - the fact that BVE stands for Broadcast Video Expo should make clear to potential visitors where it’s priorities lie. That being said, even with audio taking a backseat in the whole scheme of things, improvements can certainly be made.

One critical issue I found when I visited BVE in 2014 (and which was reiterated by a visitor in 2015) is that the layout of the exhibition hall doesn’t do audio any justice. Whatsoever. Specifically when it comes to the masterclasses, which often include audio examples that require a reasonably pleasant listening environment. In addition to rendering some of the masterclasses close to useless, the fact that a good listening environment doesn’t exist for the audio masterclasses only serves to reinforce the impression that audio is featured as an add-on. They would never, for example, have video examples shown through a projector with poor resolution, or where shadows were blocking significant areas of the screen etc. and so it seems clear to me that more attention should be focused on how the main exhibition areas can be separated from the masterclass areas. This would make all masterclasses more enjoyable to attend. 

For what is essentially a trade show, it’s right that there is a heavy emphasis on products, or ‘kit’. As someone working in sound post, the products I am mostly interested in - aside from software plug-ins - are microphones, mixing desks and controllers, monitors and, hard disk recorders. 

It has been said that the most fun part of BVE is the networking. There are plenty of opportunities to informally prod and pry, to bump into acquaintances and make new connections, and in its current format there isn’t anything that needs changing there in my opinion.

In seeking to provide a better audio offering, one thing the organisers of BVE could do is to canvass opinion more widely, and try to get feedback directly from those who would benefit most from any changes. 

BVE 2016 will take place at 23-25 February at ExCel, London.

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Nothing man sound design

Still from Nothing Man

Introduction

Nothing Man is a low budget feature film directed by Stephen Gallacher. Every project brings its own challenges, and I am really looking forward to sinking my teeth into this one.

First of all, it’s the first sizeable project on which I’ve taken on the role of Supervising Sound Designer, which offers the chance to take some creative risks. Second, it was filmed around my old stomping ground of York, so there are good memories associated with that.

I have to say that a lot of the organisational preparation that I have done for this project so far has been based on reading John Purcell’s modern classic, Dialogue Editing For Motion Pictures. There’s a heck of a lot more than just dialogue editing in there. In fact, it’s a pretty neat summary of audio post-production workflows for film and television in general. Plenty for a budding Sound Supervisor to grab a hold of.

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Difference between Sound and Audio

A pretty good way of summarising the difference between sound and audio. What do you think?

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Supervising Sound Editor’s Starter Kit 

All set for a new project: 500 sheets A4 paper for printing scripts and treatments, index cards for scene mapping, highlighters and coloured tabs for categorising sounds and themes.

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Week 8: Wwise Online Certification

The final lesson in the course was all about optimisation, and it began with a powerful reminder:

“game audio integration is really an exercise in the art of doing more with less.”

Wwise includes a number of different methods for ensuring that you complete your audio work to the best possible standard whilst at the same time giving the user the most rounded game play experience, and that you do this based on the constraints of the game system, and the other demands of the game.

The Wwise workflow is geared towards you getting the desired soundscape, then worrying about the mechanics of audio optimisation later down the road when the creative work is done. However, it’s something that you should always bear in mind as you’re going through your creative work. 

1. Audio file conversion

You could try compressing the audio files. This will almost always work, and you can A/B test the quality against the original file, and only use certain types compression (or ‘Conversion Settings’) for certain Actor-Mixers. In fact, you can use ShareSets - a saved pre-set - and apply that to certain sounds, or Actor-Mixers. 

Applying the ‘SFX’ Conversion Settings ShareSet to the ‘Weapons’ Actor-Mixer. 

2. Using Multiple Soundbanks

A Soundbanks is a collection all the information; events and sounds, along with their associated automations and customisations, used by the game, and which are loaded into the RAM allocation at run time. One way of optimising game audio performance is to create separate Soundbanks for game stages that are only needed at specific times. The most common example is where you have different game levels. By creating a separate Soundbank for different game levels, you can make sure that only the sounds that you’re going to need for the level being played are using up RAM at that time.

Cube is the example game used during all the Wwise exercises, and below is an example of using two Soundbanks; one for the main part of the game, and another, DCP_enter_the_core - which is quite RAM heavy in its own right - having its own Soundbank.

Two Wwise Soundbanks used to lighten the load

3. Voice priority

Wwise allows you to kill voices - that is, audible sound sources - based on a volume threshold (so that sounds far away that are barely audible will not be ‘voiced’ and therefore allow the conservation of both RAM and CPU.

To guard against important voices getting killed unintentionally (say, a main character dialogue), you can assign sounds with a priority. This works on a scale of 1-100, where a priority of 1 has least priority and a priority of 100 has the greatest. Be aware that this denotes the priority given to voices within the same Actor-Mixer. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of skillful and creative ways to maximise the juice you squeeze out of your audio, based on whatever system restraints you come up against.

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Week 7: Wwise Online Certification

Following directly on from last week’s tutorials on audio signal flow, Week 7 of the Wwise 101 Online Certification course focused on mixing. I would say that of all the topics covered so far, ‘Mixing in Wwise’ is the most difficult to explain properly within the scope of the course tutorial. The simple reason for this is that to get to grips with mixing, even on a simplistic level, requires the following:

• Sufficient audio material to work with • Time to select an appropriate game stage or game level • Time to preview the audio material and set mixing objectives • Time to implement and refine the mix 

Without the time and material it is doubtful that the mixing concepts will make complete sense. However, despite this, I did gain a valuable introduction to thinking, planning and executing an audio mix within Wwise.

Soundcasters

Soundcasters are a simple way to have multiple ‘play’ transports available on cue. A soundcaster session can collect together events, sfx objects and busses for instant playback. One could, for example, load in a ‘Player_Death’ event, and then separately load in to the Soundcaster all the sfx objects and music cues that comprise the event. This would give you a great opportunity to play the event, whilst previewing - and making simple changes to - individual sounds within the event. You can create different Soundcasters to preview different aspects of the game and gameplay, and get a quick feel for the balance of desired game events.

Although mainly designed for previewing rather than mixing (at least, I think), Soundcasters can be used to re-balance the volume and low pass filter of key sfx object and audio clusters (such as busses).

Example of a Soundcaster transport in Wwise

Mixing desks

The Mixing Desk view offers a similar feel to what one might expect with a traditional linear DAW mixer. This is where you can insert effects, return effects using auxiliaries, and generally perfect the subtleties of the interactive game environment and game play.

As with Soundcasters, different mixing desks can be created easily, which gives an ability similar to layers on a hardware mixing console, which mean focus can be applied to particular aspects of a mix.

Example of a Mixing Desk in Wwise

Control surfaces

Another feature is the ability to map key mixing parameters to a MIDI control surface - any MIDI control surface. I grabbed the nearest thing I had to hand, an Axiom25 MIDI keyboard, and was able to keymap a few simple parameters. In this way, one can preview and mix and, profile and mix; playing through the game level and making mix changes in almost-real time.

Control Surface Settings in Wwise

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Week 6: Wwise Online Certification

This week I was on terra firma pretty much: audio signal flow. Being familiar with DAW audio signal flow meant that all that needed to be done here was figure out the workflow and features that are particular to Wwise, or any game audio middleware.

                           Actor-Mixers and Audio Busses in Wwise

This is the of audio, shown in Wwise’s Designer view. Actor Mixer groups audio together at a more micro game level (in the screenshot above you can see that, for example, the main characters moves and grunts are collected together in a ‘Main Character’ Actor-Mixer), but no audio actually passes through this type of ‘group’ or ‘container’. What you can do with Actor-Mixers, however, is to create ‘parameter offsets’ (for voice volume, LPF and perhaps a few others), which offset the value of each object contained within the Actor-Mixer by a preset value. 

All audio is routed within the Master-Mixer hierarchy where audio is grouped together on Busses. Lower-level ‘sub-busses’ can be created, as you can see in the screenshot above (where an ‘SFX’ sub-bus has been set up within the ‘Environmental’ buss). Plug-ins are applied to all objects within the bus, although individual objects can be set to override particular effects processes, should that be desired. 

In the screenshot below is a typical example of a Wwise plug-in, in this case the Wwise RoomVerb. Whilst processing effects applied to individual sounds can be rendered as such when the Soundbank is being generated (to save CPU for other tasks), in this instance the reverb was being applied to certain areas of the game environment. Essentially, defining ‘zones’ where this additional reverb would be activated. 

(Although defining these zones would be set by the game programmer, the sound designer would need to set up the effect for use and define it as a ‘Game-Defined Auxiliary Send’ rather than the more conventional ‘User-Defined Auxiliary Send’.)

                 A reverb being set up on the Auxiliary Send ‘env_corridor’.

Finally, the Schematic view gives a clearer representation of how audio flows and is then summed by the Wwise architecture, as you can see in the screenshot below.

                                      Schematic view in Wwise

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What a Dinosaur’s Mating Scream Sounds Like - The New Yorker

The game No Man’s Sky poses a question for its designers: how do you imbue a universe with sounds from dinosaur grunts to whirring star-ship engines?