> Its a good sign if I am too busy to focus on writing proper posts on this blog – I am obviously fully focused on the job(s) at hand ie delivering material to predubs…. and being ready for the final mix starting Monday week…. and more alt.projects than I have fingers on one hand… The consolation prize is detritus #XX but I’ll have you know HISSandaROAR Library 2 is on track & surprising even me with elements I didn’t know I needed until I was in the zone & was making them… I’ll have a promo vid for you in a week & maybe the whole new library not too long after…..
In the meantime heres a photo from one of the recording sessions:
> For any iPad early adopters this will be welcome news (via @Chris_Randall) “It’s official. The camera connector kit will allow class-compliant USB audio for the iPad.”
> AVID/Digidesign apparently developing a native/pro version of ProTools aka ProProTools Native – hmmm seems the post got pulled before I even got around to reblogging it here…. heres a bit of the hyperbole from the deleted article “TDM is dead. Digi knows this. A new version of Pro Tools will be out – with all of the HD functionality, but without TDM cards. All CPU based. Expect it this year, maybe even in Q3″ which sounds half bollocks – AVID arent about to shaft their HD investors, but if they were to ditch DV Toolkit & offer an upgrade to ProProTools Native I think people wouldn’t mind… UPDATE: bit more speculation here
> These lovely bubbles of sound are in similar territory as the penguins & that cello, but you don’t have to freeze your butt (or the rosin) off to appreciate it…..
> Creative minds are rarely tidy – good! I’m glad we tidied that misconception up!
> Sick of owning firewire drives? Buy a dock for raw drives & get yourself a Hudzee or six
> I bought a book that I can reccomend to anyone for whom the title instantly appeals: ‘Making SH+T Happen’
> How to define a problem – because defining it gets you more than half the way to solving it!
> In film post production, good organisation & management/coordination is literally worth its weight in gold & I always fear for the worst when I suddenly realise a film I am working on has no post production supervisor: the road will be a little bumpier & I will have to check twice & assume nothing about EVERYTHING, but mostly I feel sorry for the producer as they will end up wearing all sorts of hidden costs that a good post supervisor knows & makes producers aware of from day one…. And it must be the same times a zillion for VFX companies – if people start acting on offhand comments, much wasted work could easily be done…. So reading about Pixars modus operandi is fascinating… And I would love to know more about similar aspects of my very successful neighbours WETA Digital – I almost ran over two of them in the carpark the other day! And not because I want to but because my car is real & not rendered!
I came across these in my ‘archive’ aka one of those big boxes full of old stuff…
Apart from nostalgia I had two related thoughts:
1. the idea of a Protools installer arriving on a couple of 1.4MB floppy disks seems so implausible nowadays as to be laughable!!! How many GB was the PT8 installer?
2. the fact I’ve owned Max all these years you’d think I would have learnt a bit more of it than I have!?! It seems osmosis isn’t a good tactic when learning new software…
> Interesting article about the decline of the music industry via freeloaders here and even more interesting analysis by Marc at disquiet here
> Very interesting new plugins coming soon via IRCAM: SPAT – watch the videos (shot at MusicMesse for ProTooler blog) – the directional projection of the reverb source is a beautiful idea! Better start saving for this one: “EU1400 for the full package. EU800 if you only want the reverb” – yowzer!
Exactly a week ago today, I had that nervous sense of anticipation when you have a major record session happening that day. And at times like that I remember the words of some forgotten performer who explained that those butterflies in your stomach are important, because they keep you on edge & slightly worried so that you are fully prepared, double-check everything & make sure you can give it your best shot. Thanks butterflies!
So the reason for this kart recording session was primarily because the previous kart I recorded was too low revving; it was a 250 and the one I was now set up to record at the Mt Wellington track was a 125 that can rev past 12,000rpm! And it has a wild expansion chamber on the exhaust… so YES!!! its pretty damn LOUD!!! Spot the good Dad in this photo:
The previous Kart session wasn’t a total write off – I got some useable material, but in hind sight I realised the main benefit was experience. I doubt I would have been half as prepared nor got such great clean recordings from this session if I hadn’t already tried once before. So maybe thats a moral of vehicle recording; if the vehicle plays a prominent role in the film make sure you can have multiple access to it. Even if the session goes perfectly, when you are back in the studio cutting the material, you may discover you need to do a quick revisit to pick up a few specific extra sounds…
So the most difficult aspect on the first recording session was rigging the mics; when you see how small & low to the ground these karts are you realise two things: firstly there isn’t a lot of room for bulky gear, and secondly the engine, chain, wheel etc are all VERY close to your mics & cables – if something were to come loose eg a cable to get tangled in the axle, the results could be very dangerous to the driver…
So first I set about mounting the mics – on the last record session I got a lot of low end vibration which at times overloaded the mics, so this time we used a small piece of high density foam, and gaffer taped the mic (which was wrapped in polar fleece for wind protection) to the top of the radiator. I wanted to use two mics for a couple of reasons: first is paranoia – if one of the mics distorts then maybe the second mic will be ok… the other is for variation, so even though both mics are close to a very loud sound generator we mounted the other mic on the back of the seat & gaffer taped it to radiator hose. Obviously all of this was done with help & advice from the drivers eg how hot that does that radiator hose get?
I bought a bag with me to put the recorder in, but also to contain any spare cable – ideally I needed some very short mic cables eg 1m, but all of mine are more like 4m so I knew I’d need to route the cables, gaffer them in place & then safely wind them up & secure the spare cable beside the recorder. You can see the bag lieing open in front of the radiator in the photo below.
Now a word about the recorder – you might think I’m nuts but I decided to use a DAT machine as the onboard recorder. I have a few good reasons, firstly because it worked well in the past – we used the same DAT machine to record the onboard sounds for Burt Munros V Twin Indian and got great results, and as this session was critical (& expensive to repeat) I did not want to be experimenting. I also know a friend had a bad experience using a hard disk recorder when recording onboard Formula 1 sounds – the G Forces & vibrations caused the hard drive to produce errors & stop recording. I understand the solution to this problem is to transfer the OS onto the CF flash card & disable the hard drive, so recording to the CF card too… I will give this a try when I have spare time to experiment eg on my own car or something, but I wasn’t game on this session. I also wanted to use my Sound Devices 722 to record exterior moves at the same time as the onboard recording, so DAT it was! The DAT machine I have (a Tascam DAP1) has built in switchable -20dB pads which I used from the start as those dynamic mics produce a hot signal which will distort the mic preamps, even with the input gains turned down. A sidenote: you can see distortion in the meters – on the first kart recording, I did a first run without the pads in, but with the input gain turned down so the level was peaking at -12dB or so… As soon as I stopped him to check the recording, I rewound & hit play and before I even listened I could see the meters went rapidly up to -12 and then had practically no dynamics or movement in the meters. It was like they were smacking into a brickwall limiter and thats exactly what was happening, but it was happening BEFORE it got to the recorder side of things. After turning on the -20dB pads & turning up the input gain to compensate the levels similarly went up to -10 or so, but there was dynamics & movement in the meters. Experienced soundies will already know all of this but for everyone else, be very aware that loud sounds can distort the mic preamps BEFORE they become a digital signal. So while your meters are nowhere near clipping, you may well just be cleanly recording an already distorted signal. Accordingly every record kit should contain some inline pads!
Heres a photo of both mics rigged & ready to go:
So……. what’s it sound like? Well small high revving motors like these need to be warmed up, so there is a ritual of starting them while they are on their stands & then blipping the throttle for a while. Along with warming up the motor this also gave me a chance to check levels etc… I recorded this on both the onboard DAT and my 722 with Sanken CSS5 mic, so I’ve synced up the recordings & I switch mics on the video so you can hear the difference in tonality. There are also some shots from on the track, where I repeat the footage switching mics each time (please excuse the shaky cam – its hard recording sound & shooting video at the same time!) I’ve also added captions identifying what mics you are hearing – Onboard Mic 1 is an EV RE27, I need to check what Mic 2 is… Last time I used an AKG D112 but it really captured too much bottom end (which is what it is designed for)
Obviously when we premix these scenes the dubbing mixer will EQ and compress the onboard mics… And I have another whole stem of FX dedicated to onboard tyres, movement, vibration etc… Serious fun! Next week we are doing Ambience & then Foley predubs, so it will be mid the week after before we crank up the Kart FX in Theatre 2 at Park Road Post – I can’t wait!!!
ps I’d really appreciate hearing about others experiences with onboard recording in similarly tricky situations – I wish I could find that article about people recording F1, I’m pretty sure it was in an old Mix magazine…. A solidstate recorder would be the ideal…
> I’ve posted about the hilarious unhappyhipsters site before, but they’ve recently been running a competition for readers to subtitle a photo and some of the winners are brilliant – in particular this one literally made me LOL
> Apologies for lack of posting, its our last week of editing before predubs so we’re in mission critical mode… I shot some great video of the Shifter Kart session I did in Auckland last week including some footage of how I rigged the mics on the Kart, so will get that sorted this weekend. The session was the best yet & I don’t think I would have got such clean onboard recordings without the previous experiences, so hopefully you can learn from my experiments without having to make the same mistakes! There were some motorbikes using the track when we were there too and I recorded some beautiful sounds from them – one in particular is stuck in my mind & I’ll post it too: imagine two very powerful 4 stroke motorbikes hitting the straight at the same time, both accelerating like crazy side by side until their exhaust sounds start to beat & flam – it made em think of old war movies where you are on a B52 bomber and you get that weird flamming beating sound as those huge powerful motors slowly shift in & out of phase with each other. I haven’t heard such beautiful air distortion in a long time!
> Lastly, thanks so much for the support for HISSandaROAR – the response has been phenomenal (2,553 unique visitors!!) & hugely encouraging – tonight I’m celebrating the first week in its life…. And this weekend I’m doing more recording for Library 2… thanks again!
