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And first day of premixes!
This week: atmos premixes (3 days) and violence (2 days)
Next week: vehicles (2 days) and general FX (3 days)
Week three: foley premix (3 days) and vamprie premix (2 days)
Week four: final mix
Week five: final mix, screen, changes & print master
Week six: deliveries…
(week 2 & 3 are dialogue/adr premix weeks too, on another mix stage)
Yahoo!!!! Great to be mixing…
The New Zealand Film Festival is on here at the moment & i’ve got a dozen tickets booked – highlights so far include a couple of very good animated short films & a documentary that was simultaneously sad & beautiful… check them out:
3D Animated Short: BURNING SAFARI download QT here
Stop Motion Short:Ten Thousand Pictures Of You download QT
Documentary: Manufactured Landscapes watch trailer
Following up on the LINE YOUR ROOM UP post a while ago, for this post I have called on a brilliant dialogue/ADR Supervising Sound Editor & friend Ray Beentjes
“I work with film dialog a lot and started getting upset at how bad the Quicktime Pictures seemed to be running in ProTools. I was using a good Dual Processor G4 Macintosh and an Aurora Igniter video card. Previously we had got great results from OS 9 and the Aurora Fuse video card but it wouldn’t work in OSX. I had splashed out good $$ on the (Digi Recommended) appropriate gear but the setup was not working well.
A chap by the name of Richard Fairbanks who pops up on the Digidesign User Conference from time to time had started developing a device called “Syncheck” and I bought one.
It’s a simple enough device that allows you to measure the sync difference between Picture and Sound. It achieves this by the user playing a ProTools Session containing a Quicktime movie with white flash frames and associated audio file which has beeps aligned to the frame edges of the white flashes. As you can see from the picture the device has a simple readout that tells you if the picture is ahead or behind sound and how much. You simply adjust the Movie offset in quarter frames and hey presto your pictures are running in sync with your sound. The delay shows up as an led bar graph column. Less dots… less delay.
So you might say, big deal. I checked out my rig. Oh dear, my $1500 Igniter card played pictures anywhere from 1/4 to a frame late, randomly. No wonder it was hard to judge sync. An Aurora fuse card on an older OS9 Mac gave about 1/4 frame delay in picture. Not so bad and it didn’t drift.
I ditched the Igniter card and moved to a G5 Macintosh and started using a $50 DVI to Video adapter running of my dual head video card that came with the G5. It has a 1/4->1/2 frame delay too but no drift in that delay. A 2 quarter-frame offset is all that’s needed and it runs better than my Igniter card any day. Note that this offset was calculated using a standard Sony 29″ CRT television set.
Richard Fairbank’s company can be found on the web at :-
He’s tested a number of devices and posted the results on his site.
Since that time I moved on to a new Apple MacPro Dual 2.66 Ghz Intel based machine which came equipped with an NVidia 7300 Dual-link DVI video card. The performance of these machines is such that it does not tax the CPU of the machine to play fairly hi-res Quicktime movies even whilst running huge ProTools sessions. I started to enjoy the crispness of Quicktime movies played out on a second DVI LCD monitor. They are also ideal for displaying true 24FPS movies without any of the flickery images you sometimes see when using a CRT television monitor. Currently I’m running a Dell 30″ LCD monitor for ProTools with an Apple Cinema display reserved for picture playback but I’ve been spoilt by the big-monitor bug and so another 30″ monitor is on the shopping list. The quality of these new huge LCD’s is amazing and I see no reason to go back to television sets again. Another colleague uses a 30″ domestic LCD TV set that has a DVI input and this is giving him great results. Once again, check the sync offset with a Syncheck.
I seriously challenge anyone who works in SoundPost to check it out. Unless you’ve got the Digi Mojo Box then YOUR PROTOOLS QUICKTIME MOVIES ARE NOT IN SYNC unless you’ve running some kind of offset in the Movie offset window. Even if you are using Mojo you need to check the video latency introduced by your monitor.
Picture delay is like latency in Digital Audio. It’s always there….. you just have to know how much.. and correct for it. Most folks have a different opinion about sync and it’s nice to have a device to actually measure it. Trying to convince people that this adjustment needs to be made is difficult as it can often seem like you are being critical of their ability to judge sync. But the results after sync correction speak for themselves.
Remember if you are using an Plasma, LCD TV or 100 HZ widescreen CRT TV set as a monitor you WILL have a delay induced by the latency inherent in these devices. This will delay the picture you are viewing by up to 2 or 3 frames!
Ray
I am well aware it is standard practice to mix films in stems – its a simple matter of busing & monitoring the buses combined correctly. So for example when we final mix a film it is usual pratice to mix & record to at least four stems eg DIALOG 5.0 FOLEY 5.0 FX 5.1 & MUSIC 5.1
BUT I have been wondering how common is it to mix to stems when mixing music? So any music engineers/producers/mixers – how often do you print stems of your music prior to mastering? how many stems? do you do it all in one pass? multiple passes?
Usually when a composer delivers his premixed music to the mix stage for a films final mix, it is in the form of several stems eg as a minimum: Lead instruments 5.1, Percussion 5.1 and Supporting instruments 5.1 but my question is more relative to mixing music for its own sake eg making an album.
I mainly use ableton LIVE when writing/making music but much prefer to mix in ProTools so it seems like a very sensible way to get from one application to the other without using Rewire (which means losing VST plugs) or printing track for track & losing the feel of it….
Heres a few links I have been reading in the process of finding a good methodology for mixing my own music, but I’d appreciate suggestions from your own experiences…
Electronic Musician: divide & conquer provides some good tips re methodology
“Splitting your mix up this way gives you the flexibility to adjust the levels of the subgroups after the fact, making it possible to deal with most after-the-mix change requests….. The next thing you need to decide is what stems to make. Your decision might depend on which levels you’re most unsure of, or it might be linked to a particular musical style. Noted mixer and three-time Grammy winner Tony Prendatt suggests always doing a bass stem for R&B and hip-hop tracks since bass levels are so critical in those genres. In his most complicated mixes, Prendatt admits to preparing as many as ten stems, including separate string and horn stems….
In my experience, the most contentious issues in a mix are the vocal levels, so you will definitely want to create lead-vocal and background-vocal stems. From this point, you could simply create one more music stem that includes everything but the vocals, or you could separate the music further and create drum, percussion, bass, and instrument stems. Some situations might require even more divisions.
It’s best to create the instrument group by muting everything that’s not in the group, rather than by soloing things that are in the group (see Fig. 3). It might seem that soloing would achieve the same result, but unfortunately, all solo functions are not created equal. Some DAWs have a solo master that produces a different level from the master output; others change every soloed instrument into mono. Additionally, a soloed channel might not include the signal from the effects returns, depending on how the software is configured.
One thing to watch out for is the signal from prefader sends. If you’re muting tracks to isolate the ones targeted for a particular stem, and you’re hearing ghostly effects returns from tracks you thought you’d shut off, remember that the prefader effects live on after the track is muted, so you’ll have to turn off those sends as well…..”
tip#6 from sound bites dog
“Build-in safety mechanisms in case your listening/mixing environment is less than accurate…..mix stems (aka “seperation” mastering). Mix stems are usually 3 stereo tracks that contain groups of frequency-similar instruments. For exp: Stem 1 is all drums, percussion and their respective reverbs. Stem 2 is all vox, back ups, and their respective reverbs… Stem 3, gtrs, bass, keys, etc. The key to working like this and maintaining sync between the tracks is keeping the length, beginning, and end of your bounces the same. This mix option enables the mastering engineer greater flexibility…”
REEQ Mixing & Mastering
“A stem is a bounced audio file, containing a submixed group of audio material. for example, guitars, drums, or vocals. the majority of serious musicians these days can write, produce & mix their music from within a home project studio but don’t have the mixing experience or great outboard gear to make their mixes compete with professional mixers working in professional studios. by providing us with the multitrack stems, (normally 8 stereo files – guitars, bass, drums, keys, vocals, backing vocals, FX1, FX2) we can take your work to completion making use of the best eq’s, digital converters & audio summers available in an acoustically treated environment. we will maintain the identity of the original production but give it the extra polish that sets it apart.
& from the same source
Stem Preperation Procedure
1. do a great mix of your song – make sure you are happy with relative levels, panning & balance between instrumentation and vocals.
2. decide grouping of stems – the main consideration is to intelligently group instrumentation & sounds to give us the most flexiblity
example one: rock band – 8 stems
kick (mono)
rest of kit/percussion (stereo)
bass(mono)
lead vocal (mono)
lead vocal fx (stereo)
backing vocals (stereo)
rhythm guitars (stereo)
lead guitar (mono)
example two: electronic club track – 12 stems
kick (mono)
snare(mono)
loops (stereo)
percussion (stereo)
bass (stereo)
pads (stereo)
sound fx (stereo)
vocals (mono)
vocal fx (stereo)
backing vocals (stereo)
lead synth (stereo)
arpeggiated seq line (stereo)
3. bounce stems – bounce each one from exactly the same start point in order to ensure that they’ll all be in sync when lined up in our software program. we can accept wav, aif and sdII audio files at either a 16 or 24 bit depth. in the interest of keeping the quality as high as possible though, if your song was recorded at 24bit, bounce the stems at that bit depth, don’t bounce at 16 bit depth. we can accomodate sample rates from 44.1khz to 96khz.
4. please label all stems clearly
