Mix fo feature film - Audition vs Protools

Postmaster

Postmaster

Dark Side of the Camera
Okay, I just wrapped a feature film (as DP), and now we have some discussion on audio post,
regarding the proper software.

Some folks keep telling me, that Protools is the only "pro" way to do a good mix for cinema,
while the other half is telling me, that it is just a mater of taste and personal preference, and
that Audition could do the same job, if the guy in front of the computer knows, what he is doing.

I'm a DP and not an audio guy, so I know just enough about audio as a DP needs to know.
I would appreciate if some of the "guys in the know" here would chime in, and bring me up to speed.

1- Is Protools really the only way?
2- What is the big difference between Protools and Audition?
3- What is used for typical movie mixes, and why?

Regarding number 3. I know that most films (the video part) is still edited on Avid,
but I also know, that it has not much to do with Premiere being unpro or semipro, but
more with investment, availability of editors and legacy, than with the capabilities of Premiere.

thanks, Frank
 
Postmaster said:
Some folks keep telling me, that Protools is the only "pro" way to do a good mix for cinema,
while the other half is telling me, that it is just a mater of taste and personal preference, and
that Audition could do the same job, if the guy in front of the computer knows, what he is doing.
.
.
.
I know that most films (the video part) is still edited on Avid,
but I also know, that it has not much to do with Premiere being unpro or semipro, but
more with investment, availability of editors and legacy, than with the capabilities of Premiere.
Click to expand...

I think you just answered your own question.

What do you care what tools a person uses? You'd hate it if someone dictated what camera and lights you were allowed to use, yes? You think your sound editor will be any different?
 
It's not about dictating anything, it's about which route to go, and what's doable.

As I said, one half of the guys I ask, tells me audition is just fine, and the other half keeps telling me, it's absolute mandatory, that we MUST use Protools.
I'm just trying to find out, if Protools is really THAT much better than anything else, or if it is just like Avid - that it is used, because they have spend so much money on it, and a lot of audio guys are so used to it, but that there is no technically reason to prefer it over something else.
 
Audition is a very capable product, Nuendo also, and Protools is an industry standard, largely because it was the first and has been around the longest. If you're looking for a job in a studio in North America, learn Protools. If you're looking in Europe, Nuendo might be good. But in your case, as others have said, the decision belongs to your sound editor and his preferences and should be of no one else's concern. It won't make one bit of difference except to his workflow - the quality of the output will be the same.
 
Audition has come a long way in the last few years, but ProTools has been doing it longer. There's no mandate in what you have to use here, and it should be up to your audio post facility based on what they have and what they know, but the reality is that ProTools is the way to go if you are at all concerned with being able to collaborate or have the session sent off to anyone else for any reason. It's so widely-used that you can find a ProTools editor pretty much anywhere to take over or to perform additional work.
 
If you're editing the video in Premiere you are crazy not to use Audition, because of the way it integrates with the system. Other than that it's a coin toss as to what you have and/or prefer. They both work.
 
The reason we have this discussion is, we planned to edit in Premiere, but we found out that Premiere doesn't play nice with Protools when you export a OMF.
 
Aside from the NLE/DAW import/export compatibility issue. It's the skill of the operator that makes the difference. If the project is important, I recommend hiring a pro.. it doesn't really matter what software or platform is used.
 
jlpskydive said:
If you're editing the video in Premiere you are crazy not to use Audition, because of the way it integrates with the system. Other than that it's a coin toss as to what you have and/or prefer. They both work.
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Editing from Media Composer and exporting to ProTools is very similar to Adobe's Dynamic Link between Premiere and After Effects (as well as Audition maybe).
But all-in-all, you could make a basic mix (syncing dialog) in the NLE, and from there, export 4 or 5 mono tracks (basic dialog, sound effects) and importing them into the DAW (ProTools, Audition, Sound Forge or even Reaper). Add a compressed video to work with, and you're good to go.
 
Postmaster said:
Premiere doesn't play nice with Protools when you export a OMF.
Click to expand...

I think you should be using AAF to export projects to ProTools, since Premiere's OMF is very weak. I've been trying for the last month to use Premiere's OMF to send projects to Sonar X3 (which doesn't support AAF) and have been fairly disapointed with the results. Premiere's OMF output appears to be OMFv1 which isn't all that great. I'm about to break down and write code to convert Premiere's AAF to a Sonar friendly OMFv2, but it's a project so far down on my list it may never happen.
 
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There are a few "right" answerers. First off is your workflow. The "integration" aspect of things like FCP<> STP and Premiere <> Audition don't really mean anything in a traditional post (film) workflow but do come into play in a ENG or one man band workflow. So whether that make a difference has everything to do with how you are going to post.

In the US ProTools is king right now. In Europe Nuendo and a number of Windows based products like Sonar are used a lot more often. Not sure of the split but PT is not 99% as it is in the US.

PT wasn't the first, or even the best liked, but it hit a price/ performance sweet spot and pretty much cleared out the competition. It still lacks some of the very useful for post features of the program that digidesign bought and merged with the then music only "Sound Tools" to create Pro Tools.

Anyway. PP works fine with ProTools. Not sure who had problems but I have done a lot of Premiere Pro projects.

If you are doing a traditional post workflow (picture edit -> Sound post -> Mix) then whatever your sound folks want to use as long as they can import your OMF/ AAF files is fine. You don't care they are not going to be sending a session back to you, they are going to be sending a mix file.

If this is a one man band situation and your picture editor ios your sound editor and everything is on one machine then things like FCP7 and PP integration with their own sound programs are a plus.

The reason you wouldn't go with something like that is sound people don't use them. If you want me to work on your project I'm going to be on PT. If you have one and want me to do it in Wave Frame or Sonic or "your favorite DAW here" then you are going to pay for my learning curve. I don't own STP or Audition because they are part of a visual suite and I spend my money on sound stuff not visual stuff. The last isn't totally true but mostly.

If Mac VS PC is not a problem then you can use Reaper on the PC. On it's own it doesn't do OMF but thee is a PC program that can convert OMF to A Reaper session.

Pretty much all of them will work and in the right hands can create a mix. They all have the tools (or have plugins available) to do everything you need and there isn't really any "quality" issues. Some like STP get unmanageable when your track count get up in the normal narrative film range, but since you probably won't be using it outside a one man band situation that doesn't come into play much.

As I said PT is about 99% of the US sound post biz. The reasons are cost/ performance and market saturation. If I start a project at home I can take the session and it's files to just about any studio and open it up. If I worked in Audition I could not because pretty much no sound post places work in Audition. So I could probably export it to something like OMF and import that but I would loose all the plugins and a lot of settings etc.

If I'm mixing it all at my place and sending you the mix to stick back in the time line then it doesn't matter. On a big film you will have 8 - 40 or so editors and a number of different facilities working on the sound at some point. They all have to be compatible. A no-budget feature has one or two sound editors/ mixers so not such a big deal.
 
OMF as mentioned has a number of flavors. AAF is basically a newer version of OMF. They all have some limitations. PT can take either. AAF is less problematic in general but either may need some dancing to transfer correctly. In a traditional work flow its a one way trip so you should only have to deal with it once.

There is one other work flow issue you should look at.

Big budget films have the sound crew on early and they "chase" the picture changes by "conforming" their sessions to the new picture edit. This is a BIG PITA, but there are pricey tools that make it less so.

Low budget film traditionally were required (by budget) to finish and lock picture BEFORE sending everything to sound post.

The new low budget filmmakers are not forced to go to a facility that has a big stick in the way of overtime and have started to back slide into the big budget practice of making changes after handing off the project.

IF you are going to do that you NEED to talk to the sound post people and wrk out HOW that is going to happen. You HAVE GOT to track changes some how or you will quickly get into sound post hell where the sound team has to virtually reedit from scratch. There are ways to make this a fairly painless proses BUT that requires a very specific workflow and really good documentation.
 
The post above is key. A lot of filmmakers aren't aware of how difficult it is for sound editors to make changes and assume it's as easy as making changes in your NLE. Not so. I learned this the hard the way.
 
Thanks for your input guys - I probably should have been more specific.

We shot on 4 Blackmagic cameras (so no timecode sync) but we fed the audio from our sound guy into the cameras, which should be good enough for a scratch track.

Our first idea was to edit in Premiere - since it automatically syncs the (up to 8 tracks) from our sound guy with the scratch track and export the whole shebang via OMF to Protools
for the post department. Now OMF didn't work since it renames the files and doesn't carry all the metadata, we found a way to export via Premiere>XML>Audition.
Than the production decided to edit on Avid and we are back on square one. I was told that Avid doesn't play nice (sreiously?) with his own DNXHD files (the proxies we did), and now we have to render MFX instead (duh!).
Also when I export an AFF out of Premiere (already synced with the audio files), Avid doesn't find the files. There was a plugin from Automatic Duck that got it right,
but the Duck guys pulled it, and it was implemented in Premiere, for some reason it still doesn't work.

Now we have a problem, since Avid can't automatically sync the scratch track to the audio files, like Premiere can - so it has to be done by hand.

What we are doing now, is rendering out again to MFX, importing to Avid, syncing by hand (takes probably 3 days), and go to Protools from there.
I hope Avid is able to spit out something (like an EDL) that I can import to Resolve to do my color on the original raw files.

I guess that's the price you have to pay, if you want to use an "industry standard software", that hasn't been really updated since 10 years.

I don't know about you, but every time I run into Avid, it's a mess. Everything is super complicated, super slow, has to be rendered into an other format,
isn't compatible or what do you have.

I have a hard time to understand why so many folks still use it.

Sorry for the rant, but the reason I even have to deal with this as a DP is, I told the production, that I have a solid workflow for raw files without synced timecode - which I actually have (I do it all the time without problems),
but since they insisted on Avid, (they told me Premiere is a semipro app and you can't make a movie on it - really) everything fell apart.
 
Postmaster said:
I was told that Avid doesn't play nice (sreiously?) with his own DNXHD files (the proxies we did), and now we have to render MFX instead (duh!).
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Well, I usually export my color correct videos from After Effects in a .mov container, with DNxHD codec. Then, in Media Composer, you can either link to AMA (direct access) or import the files (and it will automatically convert it from .mov to .mxf files, even if the codec is the same). Once converted, it should be smooth as butter to play and edit.
On my system, it's smooth even with the videos linked via AMA.
Postmaster said:
Also when I export an AFF out of Premiere (already synced with the audio files), Avid doesn't find the files.
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Last time I exported from Media Composer to ProTools in AAF format, it was perfectly synced. If your timecode starts at 0 and the format remains the same (fps), should work fine.
Postmaster said:
I don't know about you, but every time I run into Avid, it's a mess. Everything is super complicated, super slow, has to be rendered into an other format, isn't compatible or what do you have.
Click to expand...
Again, you can either link to AMA to access the original files or import them, which will convert the videos in .mxf format to be "compatible" with Media Composer.
From there, exporting AAF files should be perfectly sync when imported in ProTools.
 
In my experience AAF export/import doesn't always work. In those cases I use a third party OMF conversion utility.
BTW, I haven't seen an OMFv1 in a while either.
 
I've been using Auditon since it came on the market (before Adobe) but made a switch to ProTools years ago and I never looked back. But now and then I'm using Audition to convert format or just do a simple single audio file edit just because it's faster to do that in Audition.
 
Yes, Adobe Audition was formally known as Syntrillium's Cool Edit/Cool Edit Pro. I lot of folks use and like it.
Personally, I couldn't cozy up to it, but the same goes for SloTools. FWIW, I use Sony's Sound Forge, Vegas and Steinberg's Nuendo.
 
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