Mix fo feature film - Audition vs Protools

Hey Postmaster, I love love love your posts on DVXuser - your insight into cameras is great and your projects always look wonderful.

If you want audio tracks auto-synced to scratch tracks in Avid, just use PluralEyes.

Avid is basically designed for a professional timecode workflow. There it outperforms Premiere easily: for example, you could have sent timecode track as analog audio to one of the channels on your Blackmagic cameras and Avid could have easily read the timecode from there and Auto-Synced.

When it comes to a bunch of indie dudes sending scratch track but no timecode, well, it wasn't designed for that. Sure, it SHOULD be... but you're not the target market. Just as Premiere sucks when you have 20 folks editing the same project on a network. There you want Avid Unity.

Anyway, use PluralEyes. PluralEyes works better for me than Premiere and FCP X's sync BTW - I have had it work in conditions where those failed.

RE: Audition vs Pro Tools... I have used Audition for decades, all the way back to when it was Cool Edit.

It lacks a vast megaton of workflow features compared to a proper Pro Tools HD setup. Avid plus Pro Tools plus the vast infrastructure of workflow tools developed over the years for doing post sound there really works.

If you have a dislike for Avid + Pro Tools I would definitely consider Nuendo before doing Audition.

It seems you have a lack of knowledgeable people around you on the post side. That sucks! I would say you should just find some people with a serious credit list and get their advice. I imagine that they would say something similar to what I am saying (or they have a workflow with Nuendo or Audition and know the quirks and workarounds).

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
You can cut a feature on Avid, FCP, Premiere, and probably a dozen others that don't pop to mind. They are ALL Professional products. For sound post you need to be able to send an OMF or AAF, and they all do.

The old school workflow is that you edit picture with the scratch track and keep track OF EVERYTHING. Then sound post takes your EDL's and such and generates pull lists that Transfer uses to pull original tracks from the show tapes and a bunch of dialog assistants phase in the sound.

You can do it sort of in a NLE but they are designed to work on the frame and that is a LOT of wiggle room for sound. Plural eyes gets around that and can get a tifgt sync.

Avid was designed to work the way big budget features work. IF you do the workflow it's fine, if you go off the reservation it's a mess.

It is always true that you need in film to work backward. What do you need to have at the end? Then do the workflow that will get you there.
New age filmmakers are always trying to go from the start to the end with out figuring out what the end is and that is always a mess.

"Plan the work, work the plan."
 
AFAIK, FCP-X dropped OMF and never did support AAF. So third a party app like Automatic Duck 'was' used for conversions.
again.. as far as I know...
 
Well I don't know of anybody doing professional work with sound post that switched from FCP7 to X which is why I typed FCP not FCPX.

You are right FCPX doesn't support OMF. FCP7 did OMF and if you sent your tracks to STP then it could do AFF.

FCP6 & 7 were big players in the low budget film world. Most of those users either stayed with 7 or moved to Avid or Premiere, the later being a better choice in a lot of ways if you came from FCP.
 
If you record SMPTE timecode into one of the audio tracks of the Blackmagic cameras, you'll find the Premiere Pro CC 2014 does a pretty good job of syncing to audio if you create a multi-cam clip and choose the sync mode "Audio". PluralEyes can do it too, but doesn't seem to do as good a job with the SMPTE audio and can be off one or
two frames.... sometimes more than that.

Once on a Premiere timeline, you can then generate the OMF and then import to PT. I'm using 11.2.1 HD. When exporting for Protools, be aware that
Protools still prefers split-mono audio and to have the OMF audio in a separate audio folder (not embedded). Pans and volume level automation are maintained, although
the two audio engines (PT vs. PP) are different enough that you'll likely have to tweak things.

When you open the OMF session, you may have to re-link the audio .. this is a confusing step for some. Basically, you choose the
audio folder where Premiere wrote out the .wav (or .aif) files and then choose the clips and then do "Find Candidates" .. and then
link. I don't understand why PT isn't smarter about this .. it would be nice if it said "is your OMF audio in a separate folder?"
on first open .. but .. once you're linked up .. off you go.

As of PT 11, the ability to render offline is a huge time saver (unless you're using hardware inserts, "on line" rendering
is no longer required).

As a backup, if you can get a visual timecode (Denecke slate or iPad Movieslate jam-synced) then you'll have a backup in case the audio
sync doesn't happen correctly .. and sometimes it doesn't).

I'm a timecode bigot ... I won't work without it unless there's a really good excuse.

If you don't have a SMPTE timecode generator, the cheapest route is MovieSlate for the
iPad ... the timecode add-on is an "in app" purchase.

We use either a Denecke TC or the SoundDevices 702T ... but you'll need line->mic attenuators.

As to which audio editor ... Audition has come a long ways .. but I still find Protools to be faster and more
intuitive for me (since I know all the shortcut keys). Plus, I have a lot of plug-ins and encoders that
are PT specific.

But, if you're starting out fresh, Audition will work just fine for you and is a little simpler to move back and
forth between Premiere.

jeff
 
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The reason PluralEyes doesn't work well with TC is that it's pattern matching, not reading the TC. Since TC is just a string of tones representing 0's and 1's the pattern is easy to get wrong.

I grew up with TC and have not used it for sync in editing since we stopped using tape. Files don't have continuous TC only time stamps, unless you kludge it in on an audio track. I can see the use though on the picture side, kind of.

The thing is if you can feed the camera TC then you can feed it a decent guide track. Everything should be slated always, not doing it is just silly (with the rare exception of some news and documentary work).
And with a slate and a guide track you can phase in and have tighter sync than you are going to get with TC. If you have also set everything to TOD then the time stamp on the files will all match pretty close so finding the right take is just matching creation dates, which you can do with out a TC reader. That and feeding it to the audio track of the camera means it has no frame relationship so a large part of the function of TC is eliminated. You just have a guide track you can't phase.

Not arguing for you to change since it's working for you but it's a work around for a problem that doesn't need to exist. And I wouldn't recomend it to someone who isn't already a "timecode bigot".

I am a TC fan and still have tape machines and synchronisers. I even have a VITC reader and window burn inserter if you need one. But I don't use it for file based work flows except as a time line reference.
 
I normally send an audio track to the camera regardless and manually slate the take as well. Especially with the RED cameras which inherently have TC issues.
 
Postmaster said:
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.
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I just sent off an OMF from Premiere to a ProTools editor for a soundmix. Worked like a charm. As Premiere isn't able to reimport OMF's, i simply got the mixed/edited WAV-files and threw them into the timeline. Shouldn't be a problem though if you have a 5.1 Track for example...
 
I have had good results with OMF's from PP, but I did just have an issue. The editor was going to send as an AAF which is what I have gotten before but tried a different version of the OMF that worked.
So it's probably not bullet proof but then nothing is.

You don't want to send an OMF or the like back to a NLE because you will lose all the plugins and most of the automation. You want to send back mixed tracks. That might be stereo or mono or 5.1 or?
 
Some things to note:

This should have been sorted out before a frame of footage was shot. I understand that the powers that be make changes sometimes...but this kind of stuff can grind post production to a frustrating halt. I would ALWAYS try and make sure that production knew what workflow they wanted before they started principle photography. Getting people that know what they are doing involved from the post end of things during pre-production eliminates all of these issues.

Timecode is your friend. Use it, but it's easy to get wrong, so use it wisely.

To answer your main question, it doesn't matter what the sound editor uses as long as they do good work on what they use. I can use Audacity (which is free) and do a better job of sound design than a high school kid who just got a $50K Pro Tools rig and is learning to use it. As long as they can get an OMF/AAF they are golden. I personally use Pro Tools for everything because that's what I'm familiar with and that's what I'm the fastest with. I know people that strongly prefer Nuendo. I used an older version of it (at least 10 years ago) and I didn't like it, but that's just my personal preference and in the end that doesn't matter since the end product is what counts. You'll find that Pro Tools will give you more versatility in terms of being able to take sessions from one facility to another since most professional places in the US use pro tools.

I've never met a professional sound editor/sound designer that uses Audition, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but those that I have seen use it tend to have gotten it as part of an Adobe suite of software. I personally found it limiting...but again...that's just me. You won't find it on any major mix stage or sound editorial house, that's for sure.
 
jmarkham said:
...Once on a Premiere timeline, you can then generate the OMF and then import to PT. I'm using 11.2.1 HD. When exporting for Protools, be aware that Protools still prefers split-mono audio and to have the OMF audio in a separate audio folder (not embedded). ...
Small points but as far as I know OMF only supports mono tracks so all stereo tracks will be split to consecutive mono tracks when the OMF is created.

Unless things have changed pretty recently PT only works with mono files. It imports stereo etc. but splits them on import and then links the two files so they behave like an interleaved stereo file.

Historically PT wanted embedded OMF's so if it likes non-embeded that's a new thing. It has always wanted non-embeded AFF files though.


Point for OP, get your post sound person in place and ask them what they want. You can probably ask them how to get it also, since most of us have had to learn how to get what we need out of NLE programs we don't use.
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Noiz2 said:
Unless things have changed pretty recently PT only works with mono files. It imports stereo etc. but splits them on import and then links the two files so they behave like an interleaved stereo file.
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PT now keeps imported stereo files as interleaved if you tell it to in the session setup window. You can also record interleaved files too. I rarely do this though out of habit and fear that it'll break Soundminer or other third party apps that like non-interleaved PT settings.
 
Good to know, though mostly for answering questions. Till I'm ready to drop $$$$$ I'm not upgrading.
 
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