We’ve all had the misfortune of having to cut off the end of a piece of dialog very abruptly in order to avoid an issue of some sort; there’s a clunk in the track, or the thought needs to be cut off for the sake of story, or someone else starts speaking over the first …
Normally we leave notes in our sessions using markers. It’s what they’re for, after all! But one big problem with markers is that they aren’t specific to any track; they just mark across the entire session at a given time. Also, you can’t stack two or more at the same exact timecode and read them …
There are a limited number of good tools for panning in surround. At the top end of the spectrum are fancy dedicated surround panner sticks like the JL Cooper AXOS panner for $800+ each. At the bottom end is the trusty mouse. In the middle are things like Neyrinck V-Control Pro for iPad. But these …
Continue reading ‘Quickly pan car-bys and other effects in surround mixes’ »
The CALM Act was passed in order to address the constant viewer complaints that commercials were louder than the programming, and that levels fluctuated wildly from channel to channel. People were tired of constantly grabbing the remote to turn things up and down. Now mixes delivered for broadcast have to meet a precise spec to …
Continue reading ‘Loudness Compliance Plugins, A Fatal Flaw’ »
Pro Tools supports a variety of surround sound formats, but of course the most common is still 5.1 surround. This breaks down into the standard channels of Left, Center, Right, Left Surround, Right Surround, and LFE. There are several different standards for how we can order those 6 channels. Let’s take a quick look at …
Continue reading ‘Pro Tools 5.1 audio track channel order’ »
There’s nothing worse than having your show fail quality control due to a tiny tick in the dialog. What a silly thing to reject an entire episode for! But sadly, it happens. And once the QC operator finds one tick, suddenly they are hearing ticks and clicks everywhere in your mix! Fortunately we now have …
Continue reading ‘Wash away clicks and ticks from your whole dialog edit at once with iZotope RX3’ »
These days the CALM Act mandates that TV programs and commercials all adhere to a standard specification for average integrated program loudness. That spec is -24 dB LUFS, where LUFS stands for Loudness Units Full Scale. It can also be referred to as LKFS. If you’d like to dive deep into the details of this, …
Continue reading ‘Quick and easy loudness compliance with Avid’s new Pro Limiter’ »
Like a giddy kid on Christmas morning, I couldn’t wait to unwrap offline bounce in Pro Tools 11. The new 64-bit architecture is nice, the smaller installation footprint is great, the expanded meters with a variety of ballistics options are superb, but no new Pro Tools 11 feature is more important for post sound than …
Continue reading ‘Bounce those stems faster than real-time with PT 11’s offline bounce!’ »
Post production sound is an inherently collaborative process. Sound editors always need to send their tracks to be mixed, but usually don’t send all the tracks from their session. They only want to deliver exactly what the mixer needs. Traditionally this meant saving your session as something else, deleting all the tracks except the ones …
Continue reading ‘Easily share just a few tracks from your session’ »
