Post processing Poly-wav files recorded on Zoom F4

Well lets see... Used WaveFrame lately, or Sonic Solutions? I pretty much like Reaper but it's a consumer product and thus very easy to disappear. The twi I mentioned were not small players and evaporated over night. Nothing is for sure but big film is a very cautious group and something made by say Black Magic with some actual history in filmmaking is going to make them sleep better than a product made for musicians with no track record in film and no apparent interest in getting any.

It's not a knock, Protools was made for music and only morphed when they bought a film product and incorporated some of it's features. I can't remember the name now but that would be another one that was used and poof went away.

The "standard" for archiving projects now in Hollywood is to make MAG masters and then archive all the tracks and assets to drives carts disks (not sure what the current best practices are for media right now) and take those WITH what ever it takes to read them AND whatever computer is used with all necessary software and peripherals like monitors keyboards etc. And store it all in boxes. It's the only way you have a fighting chance of getting back to it in 15 years. And they will want to get back to many of them to remix in whatever is the hot new whatever in 15 years.
 
After making some experiments, my conclusion, for the time being, is this:

Resolve with Fairlight may answer all my needs for audio editing, manipulating and mixing. My only concern at present is that it has limited options for audio crossfades.

Should I want to move it into Reaper, in Resolve I can deliver (or render, or conform) each of the edited audio tracks on the timeline to a separate audio track, with my choice of Format, Codec and Bit Depth. (I believe they'd better follow the original, recorded audio tracks, which should be Wave, Linear PCM, 48 KHz, 24 bit). Then I can manipulate those audio files in Reaper and bring them back to Resolve.

BTW, in Vegas Pro, from the little I fiddled with it, there is no option to render individual audio tracks from the timeline - only the mixed result (which can be mono, stereo, or 5.1).
 
If you are going to round trip like that you should look into AATranslator or Vordio.

The problem with the way you are talking about doing it are multi fold. First you are baking in your changes in Resolve so what you can do in Reaper will be very limited. Second it's a lot of time/ work. Third you loose all of your clip names so it will be hard to tell what is where.

X-fades? 99.999% of cross fades in post are straight equal volume. Some go for equal power but despite the logic equal volume seems to sound better. Either way there is not a lot of use of fancy cross fades.

If you are laying out your tracks like a film mix then cross fades between say scenes are all done in volume automation. Maybe that is what you are thinking of? Film tracks are checkerboarded. Might seem awkward at first because of the increase in tracks but it is so much easier to work with and know what is going on where.
 
Joshua_G said:
BTW, in Vegas Pro, from the little I fiddled with it, there is no option to render individual audio tracks from the timeline - only the mixed result (which can be mono, stereo, or 5.1).
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Hi Joshua,

Well if you really want to render individual audio tracks, just turn off/mute the other ones, then render. But I'm getting rather lost now: what is it exactly audiowise that you can't do in Vegas Pro that you plan to do in Reaper? As has been said above, Vegas Pro is a competent DAW. Indeed, recently I used it purely as a DAW for producing an album.

Cheers,

Roland
 
Thanks, Scott and Roland.
I get what you are saying.

Initially, I didn't know what '+3 DB', '-3 dB' and '0 dB' crossfades are. I found out that '+3 dB' is 'equal gain', and '0 dB' is 'equal power'. I still don't know what and '-3 dB' is. I was concerned about crossfades when switching between dialog tracks of different talents or interviewees. This is covered.

Anyhow, at present it looks like DaVinci Resolve may suffice my audio editing and mixing needs.

As for Vegas Pro, I don't know how good and flexible it is as a picture editor, multi-cam and multi audio tracks syncing, and, especially, concerning color corrections and grading.
 
In general you want to have each characters dialog on it's own track. If it's boomed and two are talking that isn't always possible but in general that is what you want. Partly for convenience and partly because you will often want to make an adjustment to one actor because of mic placement etc. and you can make the generally changes on the track rather than having to apply it to each clip. Also for level adjustments, one actors level is often higher or lower than what you want. You can most/ all the way there on the whole scene with out having to go clip to clip.

The reason you would dip the center of a crossfade by -3dB is that if you are say looping something so you are fading between the same sound when they are both centered there will be a +3dB boost since they reenforce each other. This hardly ever happens with a crossfade but it is usually built in on panners because otherwise if you pan L to R there will be an audible boost as you pass through center.
 
Thanks, Scott.

Having each character on its own track is what I have in mind all along, for the reasons you mentioned. When there is more than one character boomed, the boom file can be duplicated to several tracks, as many characters are recorded.

Now I get the use of the -3 dB crossfade. The most useful looping I see right now is room tone.
 
Joshua_G said:
As for Vegas Pro, I don't know how good and flexible it is as a picture editor, multi-cam and multi audio tracks syncing, and, especially, concerning color corrections and grading.
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Picture editing is not my area of expertise, but I have edited a few projects, and follow the Magix Vegas pro video forum.
- Vegas does multi-cam editing either in a live switched type style with multiple picture windows on one screen an/or can have as many secondary monitors as your system can handle.
There are color correction, restoration and FX plug-ins included and support for third-party plug-ins. (Same with the audio section, which supports the VST and DX formats. DVD Architect can be integrated for authoring DVD and Bluray discs
- VP can automatically import SMPTE TC audio files and place them accordingly on the TL or can import them with PluralEyes. Audio files can be moved manually down to the sample level. In addition there is an option to import stereo files to a single track or split to two mono tracks, though an event can be changed manually in a few seconds. It has 5:1 mix capabilities as well and supports poly file import. In addition, different format, sample rate and bit depth audio files can co-exist on the same TL (or track for that matter).
 
Thanks, Rick.
Since almost always I shoot multi-cam and I don't use Time Code, Vegas Pro is useless to me for editing video. I'm not going to pay $299.00 for PluralEyes. Furthermore, on their compatibility page for host applications, they mention Vegas Pro 13 and 14, not 15, which I have. Right now, DaVinci Resolve covers all my needs.
 
Noiz2 said:
The catch being AATranslator is Windows only. Not a total killer for Mac users since it supposedly does OK under the various Apps that let you run Windows apps. And in a pinch you could create a windows partition and boot in Windows, but both are kind of a PITA and add a fair amount to the cost and learning curve.

On the other hand it still probably beats the cost of a PT subscription in not too long.
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It does more than OK it actually works - for someone like me where the only Macs I'm used to come with a coke and fries it is actually pretty impressive to see AATranslator running on a Mac.
WineBottler is the preferred emulator and is not only donationware but very unobtrusive.
AAT is supplied with detailed instructions on how to install AAT using WB.

Yeah I get how using an emulator is a PITA but when you would rather have pretty much the same session in another DAW to work on rather than stems then maybe its not that much of a PITA - it just depends on what you want to do.

As to cost, sure $199USD (or $59 for the standard version) could be a bit of a shock to the system (mind you it could pay for itself with one job) but if you purchased AAT 6 or more years ago you would still be receiving free updates today and that is cheaper than the $60 version of Reaper purchased at the same time and keeping updates maintained ;-)

I would have replied earlier but it has taken 3 weeks to activate my account
 
A few points. My PT rig is around $30K so $199 is not a big deal in the general scheme of things. While Mac's may be rare where you are they are about 99% of the sound post for film in the US, films with budgets anyway. I'm not a fan boy either way but practically speaking if you are planning on making a living in the US doing post sound on features you are almost certainly going to be working on ProTools on a Mac. So even if you are on lower budget indi's you kind of need to be able to talk to PT some how. Which is where AAT is pretty much the only game in town if you are using Reaper. The PITA is really dealing with a second OS. Maybe the emulators smooth that out a bit? But everything is in a different place and it just slows work down to a crawl. At least that was my experience when I had both OS's in house. I started in Windows but spending 99.9% of my time in Mac OS made navigating Windows a slow trudge.

One of these two products is a must in my mind if you are going to use Reaper since "stems" is both a huge PITA and a lot of overhead work you don't need to do, it is also something that will make the picture editor think you are an idiot for wanting. On a small short project with no changes it can work in a pinch but it's a really painful way to start post.

And, while I have not used it, I have seen nothing but good things about AAT.
 
I fully understand the Mac situation and I'm in no way advocating the use of emulators but rather indicating that it is an option where there may be no other viable option.
It would be great to develop a Mac version (and we may well do just that at some point) but for now we are stretched thin adding more and more detail and covering and expanding the number of DAWs/NLEs that we currently support and plan to add.

Thanks for the feedback
 
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