Big Big Audio Question !!

2

24fps4ever

Well-known member
ok here is a question for the audio experts and vegas experts

situation: shooting a feature with hvx and editing in vegas using raylight

going towards: dvd and posible 35mm blowup

ok here is the confussion, I want to edit the video part of the film but I have friend that has a professional studio with about 200 grand worth of audio gear, you know a real music pro, I asked him if he could do the final mix for me on his studio and he said yes, he can do it in 5.1 with all the pans and whatnot that 5.1 has to have and in stereo mode he can do it also

here is the question: say I edit everyhting in vegas and have say 5 timelines of audio incuding: foley,voice, music,special efects, ok do I render those 5 timelines as wav one by one so that he does a master in his studio and then bring it back to vegas for the final dvd burn, my problem is that I though that you have to do the pans and all that good stuff in vegas right? or can he do a mix in 5.1 and just give me back the final audio mix already as 5.1 and all I have to do is put that final timeline in vegas a render the sucker, how does it really work, sorry for the long message but I really need to know asap, thanks guys
 
Ask your friend. There are many workflows to do this. Usually you'll finalize the picture edit before doing the final sound; then, you can use any audio system you want, and feed the audio back to your DVD authoring system or NLE. If your friend has done work for picture before, ask him how to go about it, what his preferred workflow is. If not, talk to him and work something out that works best for you.
 
its cuz thats the thing he has never done a final mix for a movie only music cd with artists, and yes I plan to edit the whole picture part of it and then hand it to him with all the audio I collected and let him clean it up and do a final mix but I want to know is if he does a 5.1 mix with pans and everything then he hands it back to me as a wav file and I just put it into vegas and once I render the whole thing it will have all the pans and the 5.1 magic on there or will it lose it since I did not do the mix in vegas?

thanks
 
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If he renders the mix on output all that "good stuff" will be there. Since both of you are flying blind here, do a test run before you get months of work behind you and find some basic step was missed. Keeping it all in sync has a million pitfalls.

Does Vegas output OMF?

Good luck
 
he uses protools and asked me to deliver the timelines in wav format
any ideas anyone? what is the best way to go about this
 
what he said... deliver the timeline in .wav format

depending wht youre ediiting on, if you use final cut u can most likley deliver a quicktime audio file, etc.

what i did whith my first documentary was.
finished the final edit with raw audio but proper placement, and i exported the audio file only and brough it to my mixer. We mixed it blindly as he didnt have a tv set up there. I knew what i wanted so the final mix was what i wanted.
Brought it home and threw it back into the timeline and it was perfect.
hope that helps
 
24fps4ever said:
he uses protools and asked me to deliver the timelines in wav format
any ideas anyone? what is the best way to go about this
Click to expand...

You need to give him as many tracks as you can feasibly generate in Vegas, at least 3 tracks of dialog (for example one track per character in a scene), three or more tracks of sound effects and at least two tracks of stereo music (in case you have more than one piece of music in a scene), etc. Protools can handle as many as 64 tracks, even more. This gives the mixer flexibility. I would split the movie into 20-minute "reels" and put head and tail pops on every track. See for example

http://dvfilm.com/faq.htm#prep


16-bit 48KHz WAV files would be the minimum quality format, many people use 24-bit files and higher sample rates but it's not always worth the trouble for a low-budget movie.

What you get back will be 6 mixed mono tracks for each speaker in the 5.1 system, and also hopefully an LtRt (4-channel surround mix) for Dolby SR (which is the most common format for film). From the 6 channel mix you can use Vegas+DVD Architect to encode the AC3 file for DVD.

Some of these latter steps may not be familiar to a recording engineer that works mainly in music, but if you need some of these steps done professionally there are companies like DVFilm (same company that makes Raylight) that do it every day and have some experience. They can work from the unmixed tracks or from the finished Protools session that your friend creates.
 
24fps4ever said:
say I edit everyhting in vegas and have say 5 timelines of audio incuding: foley,voice, music,special efects, ok do I render those 5 timelines as wav one by one so that he does a master in his studio and then bring it back to vegas for the final dvd burn
Click to expand...

Renedering out the individual tracks as seperate WAV files may be your only option if you don't have access to a media interchange format such as OMF to handle the metadata. I've used that approach on a few projects in the past, and although it worked, there are a number of drawbacks.

Perhaps the biggest one was that you will be left with no handles on any regions, leaving you unable to tweak your edits to any extent. You will essentially need to have a completely pollished sound edit, since you will be largely unable to nudge anything or add any crossfades between regions within a single track. Check all your region start and end points for the "bump" sound of a hard splice, since you can easily get stuck with them when you start mixing, and tidy up all your foley punch-ins. Make sure that every track has a 2-beep and a tail pop on it, otherwise you may be facing some serious synch problems in the mix. Render each vegas track as a seperate audio file, start to finish, including the beeps and a few seconds of pre-/post-roll, and when you bounce your final mix to reimport into vegas, be sure to have those same beeps in the bounce.

If you're project is particularly long (ie. over 22 minutes), don't be surprised if you experience some synch drift over the course of the project when you migrate it to and from the mix. The tail pop is your best friend in identifying and dealing with this issue, and with some hard work you should be able to keep the overall synch drift down to 1/4 frame or less. I would also strongly suggest asking your mixer to provide a set of stem tracks (dialogue, music, effects, atmos) of the final mix, in addition to the final 5.1 mix.
 
stem tracks ?? is that not already incorporated in the final mix being stereo or 5.1?

I would also strongly suggest asking your mixer to provide a set of stem tracks (dialogue, music, effects, atmos) of the final mix, in addition to the final 5.1 mix.[/quote]
 
What version of Protools does he use? Does it have TC capabilities? Again, does Vegas export OMF?

Exporting stems to this guy is setting up a hell of a workload on someone who hasn't done this before. "Cleaning up and final mix" is not the same as "final mix" by itself. One takes a week or two, the other takes months, probably more for someone who hasn't done it before, and definately more if you have to give him stems instead of OMF with handles. Does this guy have any idea of what he is getting himself into?

As already stated, always have a head and tail pop to keep track of sync. Export the stems and a QT video reference. Don't f around with sample and bit rate; keep it 16/48. Give him all the tapes and well documented sound report.

And please, seriously, do a test run.
 
ok man well I really dont know what protools he uses, but its in mexico so its real cheap for top of the line stuff so price is not a problem
 
24fps4ever said:
stem tracks ?? is that not already incorporated in the final mix being stereo or 5.1?
Click to expand...
By stem mixes, I mean a a set of four 5.1 groups that, when mixed together at unity, come out to your final mix. This sounds like a lot of work (quadrupling the time needed to bounce the mix), but it need not be. The key is creative bussing, which will allow your mixer to output the stems and the final 5.1 mix simultaneously.

Here's the trick: rather than "bouncing" the mix, record it to an armed track. To do this, you'll need five 5.1 tracks (DIAL, MUSIC, EFX, ATMOS, and MIX) and five available 5.1 busses. All dialogue, ADR, and voiceover tracks are output to a 5.1 bus, which in turn is recorded onto the DIAL track. Likewise, all music is output onto another 5.1 bus, which is recorded onto the MUSIC track. Foley and hard effects should then be recorded to the EFX track by way of another 5.1 bus. Atmospheric and background effects can similarly be recorded to the ATMOS track via another 5.1 bus. Finally, all four stem tracks are then output to another 5.1 bus, which is recorded onto the MIX track. And there you have it: four stems and a full mix in the time it would take to bounce just one full mix.

A word of caution, though: be careful that reverb proccessing is recorded to the appropriate track (eg. all music reverb is bussed to the MUSIC stem). This can complicate things, and may increase the number of effects engines you have to bring to bear on the mix.

If you follow these steps, you may well save yourself a great deal of time in the future. For example: mute the DIAL stem, and you have yourself a quick-and-dirty M&E mix, which is great if you don't have enough time/money to have a propper M&E mix prepared.
 
This is why you hire a pro.

First if he does music OMF probably won't help him since he probably doesn't have DigiTranslator.

Second if you don't know what stems are you should seriously question whether you ought to be doing the sound.

Why 5.1? You need a bunch of tracks to make 5.1 worth the hassle.

This guy does music he will not be doing LtRt's , you don't want Dolby SR unless your going to 35mm optical - don't think thats the case.

If Vegas can't do 5.1 AC3 encoding then you don't want to bring the sound back into Vegas. If you can't generate and sync an AC3 stream in the DVD mastering stick with stereo. A DVD only has so much bandwidth and uncompressed stereo will eat a bunch of that. I'm not even sure if you can play uncompressed 5.1 but if you can you would have almost nothing left for your picture.

At minimum you need to checkerboard the sound by scene or the guy won't have a chance to mix anything. You can output full tracks. If you have done a really good job of doing a stereo mix in the box and you just checkerboard the scenes he could do some balancing into a stereo mix. If you have figured out what your delivery for 5.1 he could even wash a little into the surrounds. Much more than that requires some serious work o your part and a lot of isoed tracks.

PT (shipping HD systems) can typically play 96 tracks at one time and can have 256 tracks (your not playing all tracks all the time).
 
Almost. Stems are not nec. 5.1. In fact Dialog and ADR stems are usually three track, though in most cases you could probably get away with only one track. Foley is also usually three track. Music and FX are 5.1.

Plus you can't do an M&E if you haven't done real Foley coverage. I could be wrong but somehow I don't think he has done Foley coverage, or a real dialog track minus all the PFX. In which case he really can't do an M&E. What your saying is all basically right but I don't think this project is in that ballpark. He's doing it all in Vegas. Maybe he had a huge budget and is working in Vegas as a challenge. But I suspect that he's working in Vegas because it's what he could afford and he didn't have a sound person work on it (or he wouldn't be here asking questions) so all the stuff that we would do on a "real" film are sort of not appropriate. He want's 5.1 because it's all the rage now, not because he sat down and took a good look at the pro's and cons and decided it was the best choice for his film.

I don't mean to offend, filmmakers with a lot more experience and deeper pockets make the same decision for pretty much the same reasons all the time.

My point is he's not doing Private Ryan (one of the very few films released in 5.1 that really used 5.1). He's doing a supper low/no budget film. He doesn't need a 5.1 mix - though he may still get one- and he won't really be able to do an M&E. So he really doesn't need stems because if the need ever comes up he will have to redo the sound anyway.

Make sure to get a copy of the PT session incase you need to revisit it later. Do as good a job as poss. My recommendation is to skip the 5.1 BS since your not really prepared for it anyway and VERY few places that play your film will play it in 5.1 anyway. If you want theatres to play it in 5.1 you have to go to a Dolby certified mix stage and Dolby sends a guy out. They produce a special track that gets printed with your 35mm print and the license only costs you around $12,000.

So I would stick to stereo. If you really have your heart set on 5.1 and you have figured out how to get it on the DVD, then mix it in stereo till it sounds as good as you can get it and in a second pass splash some BG's into the surrounds and give your self some bass bump where appropriate. Most people will hear your film in stereo or very badly setup surround, if you NEED the surrounds to make it work it will sound like crap most of the time.




SMuir said:
By stem mixes, I mean a a set of four 5.1 groups that, when mixed together at unity, come out to your final mix. This sounds like a lot of work (quadrupling the time needed to bounce the mix), but it need not be. The key is creative bussing, which will allow your mixer to output the stems and the final 5.1 mix simultaneously.

Here's the trick: rather than "bouncing" the mix, record it to an armed track. To do this, you'll need five 5.1 tracks (DIAL, MUSIC, EFX, ATMOS, and MIX) and five available 5.1 busses. All dialogue, ADR, and voiceover tracks are output to a 5.1 bus, which in turn is recorded onto the DIAL track. Likewise, all music is output onto another 5.1 bus, which is recorded onto the MUSIC track. Foley and hard effects should then be recorded to the EFX track by way of another 5.1 bus. Atmospheric and background effects can similarly be recorded to the ATMOS track via another 5.1 bus. Finally, all four stem tracks are then output to another 5.1 bus, which is recorded onto the MIX track. And there you have it: four stems and a full mix in the time it would take to bounce just one full mix.

A word of caution, though: be careful that reverb proccessing is recorded to the appropriate track (eg. all music reverb is bussed to the MUSIC stem). This can complicate things, and may increase the number of effects engines you have to bring to bear on the mix.

If you follow these steps, you may well save yourself a great deal of time in the future. For example: mute the DIAL stem, and you have yourself a quick-and-dirty M&E mix, which is great if you don't have enough time/money to have a propper M&E mix prepared.
Click to expand...
 
Well to live up to one of my favorite tag lines "Often in error, never in doubt", I just finished talking to the filmmaker and this is a bigger film than Vegas would imply.
 
Don't panic. It's all straightforward. YOU create, as individual stems, the following:

1. One dialog into a mono track
2. One stereo ambience (wind, birds, traffic, room tone {sound of set when recording dialog}) track.
3. One stereo music track.
4. Any footsteps, clothing rustles, shuffles (anything a human makes) into one mono track.
5. One sound effects/sound designed stereo track for jet swishes, bubbles, witches melting into lava etc... (get a pro to do this).

Now there are your stems. SAVE all the stuff in case you have to go back and separate out the lava bubbles from the witch scream (if mixed together).

Put an audio 1 frame "two pop" (enclosed as an EXACTLY 1 frame in length wav with tone) before and after each frame with an EXACTLY one second gap between them, before and after (like this: Silence/POP/Silence/POP/Silence) Why two? If there's a frame rate issue or other timing or sampling discrepancy you'll see drift between the two pops right away.

Resist the temptation to make a template out of the enclosed two samples. Once again, place them one at a time, one after the other like this: "1 Second Silence.wav" then butted right up next to that: "1 Frame SMPTE POP.wav" then butted right up next to that: "1 Second Silence.wav" butted up right next to that: "1 Frame SMPTE POP.wav" and finally: "1 Second Silence.wav"

EACH of your stems should start with that. It's ok to use one pop (surrounded by a silence sample before and after of course) at the end of the stems. Line up the end pop so all track/stem's pops are in sync, no matter how long the gap after the last bit of audio. For example, say there's only some footsteps at the beginning, let that track roll so it's as long as the longest track even though there's nothing but silence after the steps, then place the end pop lined up with the others so they are all dead bang synced (meaning EXACTLY spot on). Yes, ALL of stems will be the exact same length.

Your music should have LOTS of separate tracks. Don't be a cheap azz and use some stereo canned crap music. Anyone who custom composes music (like me :happy: ) should also give you broken out seperated stems (laid out with two pops as above), maybe like this:

A. Drums, Perc - Stereo
B. Bass - Stereo (mono is ok too)
C. Melody or Lead Instruments - (strings, synth, horns, melody) - Stereo
D. Staccato - (strings, synth, xylo, misc perc, horns) - Stereo
E. Legato - Stereo longer more sustained notes
F. Winds - (all of them) - Stereo
G. Rythm Guitar - Stereo
H. Lead Guitar - Stereo
I. Vocal - Lead - Stereo (mono ok too)
J. Vocal - Background, Choir, Stereo
K. ANY reverb ONLY tracks of above - Stereo. This is key for a better 5.1 mix.

Now when mixing in the 5.1 environment, have your engineer mix the bass sounds (any low frequency content), from any combo of the music tracks and from #2 & # 5 above, to the sub/bass channel, next dialog and Foley to the center channel, and everything else spread out on the front and rear L&R'S channels, according to taste.


As wabbit said, surround can be extremely intricate and complex so the above is just a quick "thumbnail" sketch to get you started.


Two last quick tips: DON'T try and align one side of a stereo track accross another track. By this I mean, don't put one side of the stereo ambience (just to pick one) on one stereo stem (like maybe the right side) and then put the left on another different stereo stem. They will be "phasey" and you can't align phase locked stereo using the two pop method accross two different stereo stems. Using different INSTRUMENTS works well and can be fun to, say, push the beat of the drums with that of the melody or bass or whatever, but stereo needs to stay in the same stereo stem (or track).

Zoom in all the way in Vegas and align right down to the highest resolution. Better still drop the silence/pop/silence/pop/silence ----> music/sound, on the grid.

Yes you will need to mix your stems down onto some other medium (ergo the term "mixing") AND all the stems will, OF COURSE, need to contain all the pops at start and end as described above. Turn all those seperate stems over to him. YES, you might have as many as 10 ~ 20 SEPERATE stems or more (all starting with your precisely aligned two pops). He will then have those two pop stems to line everything up again on his end.

SO, WTF is the whole purpose of the pop anyway, you may ask. Well, once you're done mixing you'll propbably find you have some dead air leader before the start of your mixes. This will vary depending on when you hit Play/Record on the mix down deck/computer. Even if your mixing down within one program digitally, there could be gaps at the start and the two pop ensures they're all in sync and especially once the tracks are sent out elsewhere.

Oh yeah, almost forgot to add the second and just as crucial part - the graphics that should contain the VISUAL equivalent of all the above. You'll need to make a "target" graphic (a single frame that has a bulls-eye on it) which is one frame and also a black graphic (exactly one second long). The latter could be, 24 frames or 29 frames or 30 frames of black (depending on whether you're running at 24, 29 or 30 FPS).

Start thinking about time code capture equipment for all future works. :happy:

Can always PM me or call.

Best,

Silicon Audio Labs
Great sound is half the picture!
- -- ~~<((( d(-_-)b )))>~~ -- -
 

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It sounds like you've bitten off a little more than you can chew. Nothing against your friend, but music guys aren't the best mixers for film. It's a completely different world with a completely set of different issues.
 
the budget is 100k, and now I have learned that I really dont need 5.1 I can just do it stereo, now what are the apropiate steps for that? thanks guys I cannot thank you guys enough



Noiz2 said:
This is why you hire a pro.

First if he does music OMF probably won't help him since he probably doesn't have DigiTranslator.

Second if you don't know what stems are you should seriously question whether you ought to be doing the sound.

Why 5.1? You need a bunch of tracks to make 5.1 worth the hassle.

This guy does music he will not be doing LtRt's , you don't want Dolby SR unless your going to 35mm optical - don't think thats the case.

If Vegas can't do 5.1 AC3 encoding then you don't want to bring the sound back into Vegas. If you can't generate and sync an AC3 stream in the DVD mastering stick with stereo. A DVD only has so much bandwidth and uncompressed stereo will eat a bunch of that. I'm not even sure if you can play uncompressed 5.1 but if you can you would have almost nothing left for your picture.

At minimum you need to checkerboard the sound by scene or the guy won't have a chance to mix anything. You can output full tracks. If you have done a really good job of doing a stereo mix in the box and you just checkerboard the scenes he could do some balancing into a stereo mix. If you have figured out what your delivery for 5.1 he could even wash a little into the surrounds. Much more than that requires some serious work o your part and a lot of isoed tracks.

PT (shipping HD systems) can typically play 96 tracks at one time and can have 256 tracks (your not playing all tracks all the time).
Click to expand...
 
24fps4ever said:
the budget is 100k, and now I have learned that I really dont need 5.1 I can just do it stereo, now what are the apropiate steps for that? thanks guys I cannot thank you guys enough
Click to expand...

Is that the audio post budget or the total film budget?
 
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