FCP may be a great visual editor but its got some major short-comings when it comes to audio. The Mixer is clumbsy and often inaccurate, there's no real-time fx adjustment, there's no surround sound, doesnt properly handle mixed sample rates, no VST support, no bus-to-bus routing, no track-level effects and so on and so on. Where once these where the domain of dedicated DAW's they are now standard on virtually all other NLE's. Apple have some serious catching up to do in the audio department but the most glaring and most absurd of all is that FCP is the only editing system on the market that needs to Render MP3 files before you can hear them or play them back on the timeline !
FCP is, in many ways, a rather old-fashioned editing system. By virtue of it having copious options for visual arrangement and a scarcity of functional audio tools, it saids that the designers of FCP still see the role of the Editor as one focused on the visual rather than a combined and more flexible approach that involves both visual and aural elements. FCP's audio is designed to be able to prep audio for production outside of FCP (soundtrack, proTools etc) All other NLE's on the amrket have moved to a more integrated approach as a 'finishing system' whereby full audio options are availible right on the timeline. You can still move outside to a DAW if you want, but you can also complete full mix in the NLE. Vegas and Premiere for example are both DAW's as much as NLE's. FCP is still in the traditional, seperatist aporoach. Most of the rest of the NLE market is moving the other way.
The other element that may be the reason FCP cannot work with Mp3 files, is that Mp3, as a compressed audio format, isnt traditionally considered a proper format for production. Its almost like FCP is declaring to you that you shouldnt be using mp3?. (a very snobbish attitude i reckon)
Mp3 is indeed a compressed and lossy audio format but its a very good and clever one. It discards aural information that human ear cannot hear anyway so most of the data mp3 throws away has no effect on the quality at all. Of course the more the mp3 is compressed the more the quality loss does become noticeable.
This is where bitrate comes into play. Mp3 audio is measured in a bitrate expressed in Kilo Bits Per Second:
64kbps is considered FM Radio quality
128kbps is considered CD quality
192kbps+ is considered aurally Lossless
256kbps is considered to be Transparent. (ie has a bitrate so high that it is impossible to tell the difference)
So FCPs approach that all MP3 is BAD is simply old-fashioned and stupid. (hopefully something Apple will rectify sooner rather than later) MP3 is a very viable production audio format at high bitrates, indeed all the major field recording units such as those from Marantz can record in both Uncompressed WAV or high Bitrate Mp3. A 192kbps or 256kbps MP3 will still be considerably smaller in file size than the WAV with longer record times but the same quality.
When using online sound resources such a the FreeSoundProject you will also often come across MP3 files (and other formats) that youll need to use in FCP. To avoid the pain of rendering everytime you make an edit its best to convert (aka TRANSCODE) these MP3s to Uncompressed WAV or AIFF files.
The simpliest way to convert an MP3 to a WAV or AIFF file is to use Quicktime.
Open the Mp3 file in Quicktime and select FILE > EXPORT. Then where its says Export: and has a drop down list select SOUND TO WAV (or SOUND TO AIFF, they are both the same) Then click the OPTIONS button choose LINEAR PCM as the format and 48.000khz as the Rate. The Sample Size should be 16 BITS.
This will make a professional standard 48k, 16bit Uncompressed audio file from your Mp3, ready for render-free editing in FCP. A simple solution but really Apple, why should be have to double handle to use a common mp3? What in your core engine of FCP is so inefficient that it cant playback mp3; soemthign all other NLE's can do....?
One of the difficult areas for student filmmakers (as well as low budget indie productions) is sourcing music. Composers can be expensive and may fall outside of budget, time or logistic restrictions; and sourcing copyright on music can be a painful and slow process when dealing with major record labels. In the same vein, its very common to need small sections of music, aural bridges and motifs, to work into the edit but which would seem too small to demand the attention of a dedicated composer. In both these cases there are alternatives to breeching traditional copyright and goign through the tedium of seeking copyright releases.
OpSound is a fantastic resource of free Creative Commons music. In much the same vein as StockXchang, OpSound provides a vast library of audio resourses that do not require permissions or fees to use in your projects. All Music on OpSound is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 copyright.
CC Share Alike simply requires that the creator of the music is credited (thats the Attribution part) and, more importantly, that any derivative works that use the music (ie a film using the music as part of the score) use the same Creative Commons copyright (thats the Share Alike part)
In other words, you cannot use music copyrighted as 'CC Share Alike' and then use traditional restrictive Copyright on the resulting combined work. If you use the CC Share Alike material you must 'pass on' the same freedom.That freedom is the right for anyone to to Share to copy, distribute and transmit the work and to Remix to adapt the work.
Some may baulk at this idea, it goes against the grain of the inbuilt 'copyright' culture we have grown up in. But Creative Commons is becoming an increasingly popular and viable way to make more open creative projects that retain some legal rights and protections but do not automatically restrict further use and distribution. For more info on Creative Commons check out their website www.creativecommons.org
Audition: The audio app that should have shipped with CS3
Once upon a time there was an audio tool called Cool Edit Pro; a humble, unassuming digital audio software
system that none the less garnered quite a reputation for efficiency,
flexibility and an easy learning curve. CEP also made a very smart
market share building maneuver in allowing access, of sorts, to their software for free.
The
Trial version of CEP didn't time out and instead allowed for only a set
number of selected features to be turned on - the choice as to what
left up to the user. What this did was make CEP very popular with
zero-budget students who then went on to become professionals and very
often stuck with CEP. By this process CEP built up a formidable user
base in the face of an overpopulated DAW market. CEP particularly
found, by its easy entry point and learning curve, a solid user base in
radio and journalism.
This is the legacy Adobe inherited when it bought CEP developer Syntrillium and re badged it Audition. Adobe has traditionally had no set piece in audio production and Audition filled a vital vacancy on its path to presenting a complete end to end production solution.
There is a widely held belief that different mediums (TV, film, mobile, on-line, book, magazine, blog etc) have inherent, in-built, parameters dictating acceptable length; the duration and density that a viewer/reader of that medium will accept from that medium. We very often hear this in regard to on-line streaming video; that the YouTube aesthetic demands everything be under 5 minutes or viewers will switch off and move on to something else. I've heard pundits of mobile media technologies talk about the 30second threshold, that people wont watch anything on their mobile phone for more than 30seconds. And all this spills over into (or perhaps indeed spills over from) Print where there is the widely held belief from editors and writers that writing on-line cannot engage the same depth, length or breadth that could be 'sustained' in print publications newspapers and magazines.
To this I say Bullshit...!
I say a work will be watched or read for as long as it is engaging, useful or interesting.
I say it's in a large part a self-fulfilling prophecy where by the assumption is that on-line media needs to be shallow and short and therefore it is Made shallow and short.
I say just because a homemade YouTube video of a pet dog taking a shit in a pair of shoes cant be sustained for more than 30seconds does not mean that the medium itself has such restrictive paradigms.
I say these concerns are artificial constraints derived from short-sightedness on the highly transitory 'now' rather than forward-thinking visions of what's to come. Constrains borne of temporary technical limitations (bandwidth, connection speed, screen size) which are everyday being washed away to obsolescence. 5 years from now will any on-line video be delivered at pixelated 320x240..? Of course not.
I say that writing on-line demands that content dictate form far in excess of any other medium ever known and so long-form writing is more at home on-line than anywhere. An open-ended, infinite publishing platform cannot help but drive towards new definitions of long-form detailed writing. Not least of all because on-line allows for viewer interest specialization en-masse that the economies of scale in print publishing can never accommodate.
I say that anyone singing the mantra of what on-line media Can and Cannot accommodate when it comes to length, duration or complexity is living in a very narrow and backward thinking world.
As a small element of proof in such a verbose diatribe I present an article by Dan Brockett entitled
The article examines sound, locations recording, microphone technology and reviews a vast array of different microphones makes, models and types. The article is long, deep and wide and is a fantastic resource as well as fine example of on-line journalistic reviewing tha moves beyond the Fluff mentality and expectation.
Just as audio is the great neglected art of video production with too many movie makers focusing on the image and treating sound as subservient, so too do we similarly neglect our hardware. Well happily spoon out large sheckles for widescreen monitors but too often leave sound to a tiny set of PC speakers or cheap and nasty headphones.
While powered bookshelf audio speakers are the ideal for mixing your soundtrack, the truth is that many home studios are simply not conducive to such setups. Likewise the editor working from laptop can't very we'll carry speakers with them.
When it comes to watching movies, a home theatre setup might be optimal for many, but a thumping subwoofer in the lounge room may not be appreciated by partners and sleeping children. So with these scenarios, it is that most of us find ourselves turning to the humble headphones for our audio production work and quality audio listening experience. The new XFones from Hauppauge seem aimed at satisfying a very broad spectrum of user needs.
International Mega-Band Radiohead turned a few heads recently with the release of their latest album, In Rainbows, as a free/pay-what-u-like download. Spurning the traditional 'record company selling physical product' model, Radiohead lent heavy weight support to the much more digitally tuned direct marketing and delivery approach on line.
Radiohead were certainly not the first however to embrace this model that aims the delivery of music as a promotional vehicle rather than purely an end product. Numerous have been the indie and unsigned musos who've embraced the Internet as a major means of self promotion and music delivery. Whilst Radiohead's move lends enormous weight to what might otherwise be dismissed as a viable solution only for the underground independent, musicians such as 'Brad Sucks' have long been a step ahead.
Canadian musoBradSucks has his entire debut album fallible on line as free mp3 downloads along with on line sales of his CD. Moreover Brad also goes a step further by providing all the individual parts from the multi-track for his songs. In the age of the re-mix culture, the Prod-User and pro-active co-creation Brad has embraced his ever growing audience as participants in the creative process.
For media-makers resources such as these provide fantastic opportunity for editors and sound designers to build their skills. Brad's songs (taken from his album 'I don't know anything') are very well recorded and the individual parts make for fantastic building block assets for learning the craft of song arrangement, sound mixing and remixing.
Not to mention the fact that this album by BradSucks is a really good listen and more than worth the download.
Sometimes a software tool comes along from an unlikely source, from previously unknown developers, that not only greatly impresses with a bulging feature set but also with a seismic shift in concept and implementation.
I have written many times about Celtx in exactly this regard and now I have a second tool to add to this list of apps that seem to know something that the major players do not and seem incapable of learning from. REAPER is a software Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that provides a comprehensive feature set for recording, sequencing, arranging, editing, mixing and mastering music and multi-track audio projects.
There's plenty of these around, even very capable open-source free ones in the form of Audacity. But there's something very special about Reaper. Having obviously drawn much of its interface and working functionality from the pages of Sony's Acid Pro, Reaper combines very musically orientated loop sequencing, with pitch and tempo correction, over a core engine of fast and accurate audio editing. A central routing matrix ensures a very sophisticated patching system that would be at home in any hardware rack and a fabulously open platform of file formats for import and export. Broadcast Wave, FLAC, Aiff, Ogg and Mp3 amongst others.
Reaper can use all manner of third-party FX plug ins DX and VST as well its own in-built host of very functional reverbs, filters and EQ's. MIDI is supported with a piano role midi editor and a video scoring window for moving image projects accommodating AVI, Mpeg, WMV and MOV formats. All this built over 64bit audio engine optimized for multi-core and multi-cpu systems. This very well rounded feature set all laid out in a very clean and functional interface that is remarkably nice on the eye.
But of course at this point we still really aren't talking about anything all that special or unique. The price for some may put it into a 'special' category - just $225.oo for the whole setup. Or better yet for students and education facilities just $50 per copy.
There is no doubt that Reaper can hold its own with any of the software audio systems around Acid Pro, Audition, Soundtrack. Indeed it presents far greater flexibility and efficiency than some of these (it certainly leaves the pitiful half-baked Apple Soundtrack for dead, particularly on format suppourt) But no, not even these factors are the real jaw-dropper....
What really sets the cat among the pigeons and demands answers from the big software developers is how Reaper can pack a DAW software app with all the functionality of its over-priced competitors into a software executable installer of just 3.1mb. Yes, your eyes dont deceive you, the entire Reaper software package, filters, effects and all along with a demo song with sound files, is downloaded from the web as a single 3.1mb file.
So please Mr Sony, Mr Apple, Mr Adobe; why is it that your bloated, inefficient audio applications, which really offer very little over Reaper, weigh in at between 100mb and 300mb...?
What is it you seemingly do Not know that Reaper does...?
if you are doing any audio work for video, for music, for podcasts you'd be mad not to take Reaper for a spin. Even Mac users are not out in the cold again with an OSX version of Reaper about to go into Beta. As soon as that happens Mac users will have no reason to put up with the tedious incompetence of Soundtrack Pro any more.
The much anticipated new album from Radiohead - entitled In Rainbows - is aiming to fall off the bleeding edge of new thinking about how to sell music. The proposal is simple; the album is availible from today only as a download. The cost? Whatever you want to pay....Some will cheer at the power of inscruitable record companies being circumvented. Others will decry it as vanity on the part of a band so big they dont need the money. But the truth is more likely to be found in the simple experiment of what the market is willing to pay? What the broad populous place value on? And most significantly ow the market and fans take to the notion of the onus being put on them to pay on their own terms and their own values. In this sense is it really just digital busking on an epic sacle?
Inevitably there are a host of articles exploreing the idea and collectivly well worth the read, more for what their diversity says than any one voice.
The ability to control the volume of a sound over time is one of the fundemental process of audio production. What was once known as solid-state mixing and done with automated fader mixing desks is now very much part of the mouse-driven digital age. But whilst the ubiquitous audio envelope or 'rubber band' is built for infinate control, often there is a faster simpler way to create simple Attack Sustain Release (ASR) curves for audio parts.
Despite the bias of critical thinking, analysis and certainly
production focus on the visual elements of cinema over the aural there
is none who would deny the sheer power of a soundtrack, in all its
forms, to make or break a movie. Ted Pigeon over at 'The Cinematic Art' offers up a two part mini (part 1and part 2) essay on cinema sound with a focus on music that provides much food for thought.
However
Teds argument also centres on a narraowness of sound perception
attached to emmotional responses and signal flagging to the audience
non-diegetically the drama of a scene.
[Read More]
In any good audio system there are a variety of ways to automate and control volume changes over time. Usually these are based around audio enevlopes or rubberbands. Sony Acid also allows for easy and effective fade- ins and fade-outs with a simple one click process of dragging the edges of audio events to create ASR (attack, sustain, release) curves. However what many new users to acid dont releaise is that there are a serie sof preset options to choose from to control how these fades function. This tip of the week covers how to use the very fast and simple ASR fade curves in Acid and are equally applicable to Vegas.
As has often been said, Sound is the great neglected and mis-understood
art of cinema. Intricate, profound, complex and sophisticated; a good
sound design can transform a film from ordinary to extrodinary and
beyond.
My own small contribution to prompting new film makers and film
students to consider sound design with the same lusty enthusiasm they
show for the moving image can be found here as a 3-part podcast. It was
recorded as a guest lecture given at the University of NSW exploring
the evolution of sound reproduction and the construction of aural
cinematic space.
Tip of the Week - Assets and Project files in Acid
All the creativity in the world wont help you if you cant manage your project in a functional way to keep track of your assets and projects files. This quick tip covers how assets can be reassociated in Acid and how the auto search and re-associate function works.
One of the most important areas opening up the potential, distribution and broad functionality of digital media across all cretaive areas is Metadata - the extra information that can be embedded and atatched to files of all types to carry all sorts of information. Photos, videos, audio files all carrying their important information with them wherever they go - creator, publisher, date, time, copyright info, type of technology used and pretty mcuh anything else. The functionality that this can deliver for the end user is obvious but even more important is the use to the producer as more and more creative tools take advantage of the cataloging, managing and sorting possibilities availible with digital metadata. As just about anyone working in a post-production facility can attest - the biggest investment required by the digital age is content management tools, not just content creation tools.
Heres a short and simple tip about adding ID3 tag information to Mp3 audio files. Perfect if you're producing podcasts.
It strikes me as a strange paradox that the more accustomed we become
to technology in lives and in our creative processes - technology that
we have grow very accostomed to seeing evolve and make possisble that
which was only previously impossible; as Scott McNealy said
'?Technology has the shelf life of a banana.? - its strange that it's
often so difficult to envison the tehcnological future. Picturing the
next 5 years is easy. 10 not so hard. But 300 years from now...?
I often find myself refelctng on this passage below from the New
Atlantis buy Sir Francis Bacon in which, in the most extordinary detail
and confidence, he describes the type of digitla audio technology that
we work with everyday....
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