Pro audio with a Mbox/ Protools.... Possible?

T

Terraform

Active member
Hello I am about to start shooting 2 projects
one a low budget narritive
and the other a low budget Doc

I have 2 shotgun mic's a ME66 and a ME64

I have been told that the audio in the DVX100a (which will be the camera I will be using)
is good but not fantastic.

and if I can get off camera audio that would be best.

as both projects are Low Budget I was wondering if it is possible to use a M Box and Pro Tools to do my audio recording.

has anyone had anyexperience with this and if so what do you think

also if not does anyone have any suggestions of cheap solutions.
I am on location in Bosnia so renting not so hot. possible through Belgrade maybe. but not certain.

thanks
 
It's a paradox, but Pro Tools LE (Mbox) sounds better than Pro Tools TDM. The reasons are that the LE version uses the computer CPU at 32 bit floating point. Instead TDM cards work at 24 bit fixed point with a sum to 48 bit fixed point which causes any level change and plugin to degradate the sound.


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if you dont have good external preamp use the m box if you have one, run directly to the camera. less problematic for everyone later .
by the way it would be better start with something better then me on on the boom .
 
what would a good external preamp be (affordable one that is)
and am I to assume that you are not a fan of the ME66, ME64's as mic's?
unfortunately that is what I have and probably will not be able to get other on short notice in Bosnia. any advice on how to make them sound as good as possible would again be appreciated.
 
you assume right
keep the space you shooting as dry as possible( accousticly wise) not to get to much side reflection . these mics have quit a nasty behaivior when the sound come off exis

use external ph only
about preamps /mixers that's qoit depends on your budget . if you recording to the camera keep the signal as high as possible without distort the input stage .
check around with musicians you may find good akg or neuman instead .
even Russian oktava would sound better .
 
good advice there, that ME mic will sound awful inside an echoey room. so just damp everyhting possible. and important to get a good level (to try and overcome the mics self-noise!) and as close as you can every shot.

also... have you ever used protools outside of the studio? you'll have to consider your locations and how you'll set up the space where the computer goes. Protools ain't the most practical way to record sound on location.
 
OK a few points. Don't get too excited about Le "sounding better" than TDM. Neither is assured of being "better" than the other. TDM has better converters and can work at higher sample rates, 32 bit floating could sound better in theory - if the math is all done well. But Le is at the mercey of your CPU so...

However that has almost nothing to do with the question.

I use PT all the time every day and have for quite awhile. I would not use it to record production audio. It's not what it was designed for and it's not very good at it. BOOM RECORDER is the app you want, and it's a whole lot cheaper. For a Le track count equivalent (2) Boom Recorder is $20, plus what ever interface you end up using, and that could be the MBox if that is what you have.
Suposedly the MBox's preamps are pretty decent, but no limiters or roll off etc. Also all of these will require you have the computer going. That will be an issue unless your all cart work. And you will need AC, the computer won't run very long with a converter and external drive off battery power.
Considering it all, in your case I would probably go for a MixPre and go streight into the camera. You wont hear me say that too often, but I don't get the feeling of a lot of experience here and your going to be away from support so I would go with a device that is a tank and will be reliable. If you want to go with a computer then definitly use Boom Recorder not Protools.
 
Definitely possible, I've done it a number of times, but far from optimal. So: it WILL give you a significant improvement, but will be more difficult to use (mbox tethered to computer, mic, and camera).

Here's a trick: if you can get power to the Mbox (say, via a USB phone charger) the analog section will work, and you can use it as a standalone preamp without a computer...
 
that is good advice on the mbox preamp. Ullanta thanks

and sorry to be so ignorant on the preamp side. but could someone give me some examples of a preamp that can be used for the camera if I decide to go without the mbox and use the camera's sound. I am leaning more in that direction but must admit I have no idea where to start with the preamp. does it have to be specific for camera audio or can you yield good (prefferably great) results using preamps made for other purposes. thanks
 
its alwais better with dedecated or field equip as it probably work on dc but you can work with ac powered preamps as well .
the best way is to go with mixer/preamp so your soundman at least will be able monitoring on camera recording .
check sound devices or wendt products , these are baicicaly the intro level for film recordings
the problem with regullar preamps they dont have contineues gain leveling and the amplification made by steps so it much harder keep the levels
 
Good preamps will always cost money; in general, film-production-oriented equipment will cost more than, say, rackmount preamps of the same quality. But a production-oriented preamp has features and benefits you won't find in other audio gear, and if you plan to do much production audio work at all, you'll feel the benefits very quickly.

So - if you're shooting one scene, and need to avoid spending, then jury-rig something with whatever halfway-decent preamps you have around (e.g., the Mbox); otherwise, save yourself a lot of time and hassle by getting a decent piece of production gear that's designed to be portable, battery-powered, and used while in motion. As Oleg said, Sound Devices or Wendt are a good place to start. Some of the cheaper brands, like Rolls or Azden, have many of the the utility benefits, but are significantly lower in sound quality - I'd say if you're gonna spend money at all, don't spend it on something you'll be unhappy with very soon, go for Sound Devices.

P.S. I don't know if there's any chance that a MOTU Traveler would be easy for you to get hold of, but it sort of fills a gap between the MBox solution and a piece of production gear - it can be battery powered, operated standalone in a bag hangin around your neck sorta like a production mixer, and sounds a bit better than the Mbox. It has four mic preamps, a number of mix busses, and lots of outputs so you can handle some pretty complicated setups with it... don't spend money on it, but if there is one around, a much better solution than Mbox... If you combine that with an M-Audio MicroTrack using digital S/PDIF, you avoid the MicroTracks sound problems and have a pretty good complete recording system...
 
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motu ultralight comes to the mind as well while the monitoring from the camera made true aditional line inputs
2 preamps only but smaller then the traveller
 
Oleg, have you tried it? I haven't... but the Traveler has power regulation circuitry that's better suited to battery voltage fluctuations, where the Ultralight is designed for constant voltage - a lot of devices can work fairly well with batteries anyway, but some get flaky as the battery charge changes...
 
ullanta said:
Here's a trick: if you can get power to the Mbox (say, via a USB phone charger) the analog section will work, and you can use it as a standalone preamp without a computer...
Click to expand...


Interesting. Didn't know the MBox could be used standalone (sort of).

If you can sit down and have poer for the lap top it's actually a joy to use Boom Recorder on set.

The reasons I would not use Pro Tools and would use Boom Recorder are:

BR has pre roll, PT will take some time to actually get rolling.
BR makes great Sound Reports and you can add all kinds of metadata that will show up in the report and be embeded in the file. Including notes about the recording planes problems etc. In PT you can name the track and the new file will take on that name. BUT you cant do that while recording and you get no notes section and no reports.
PT is great in the studio but it's not the most stable of apps at it's best. BR is a rock.
PT works with a limited set of hardware and you can't record over 8 tracks at a time with out going to a HD system and that is not too mobile.
I think actually that you can 16 with some wanking and a digi 003, but still.
BR can go up to 64 tracks with pretty inexpensive hardware (or expensive if you want). Very flevible and very smooth.

BR can make LONG continous recordings, splitting files at set sizes and has an adjustable overlap so you end up with handles on bothe ends of each of the files to guarantee no drop outs. PT, well it can't do any of that.

I edit in PT but I record with BR if I'm out of the studio.
 
Hey there Noiz,

I'm not at all disagreeing with what you're saying, but for the record you can record 20 tracks with a digi002 (rack or console) or an 003, or with various M-Powered solutions... and I'm not sure about the length issue, I often record 3 hours at a time continuously, and have gone continuously up to 7 hours. And my four ProTools LE systems are the most rock-solid of any I have - they are dedicated laptops that never get updated unncecssarily and don't have a lot of other software installed - but ProTools has NEVER crashed on me in the last 6 years of almost daily location usage. (On my desktop that's loaded with all types of software, is often updated, and used for almost everything in post, often while multi-tasking other jobs, ProTools has crashed a small handful of times... but that's why my machines for critical work are "clean").

Anyway, I'm primarily in mysic production... I'm not disagreeing with the idea that ProTools is not a good solution for most production audio. Indeed, anything (like BoomRecorder which I've never used) designed for this use is likely to provide a smoother workflow, and anything not requiring you to be tethered to a computer is likely better than that. But in usage, when properly configured, ProTools is rock-solid and it's not ProTools flakiness" you have to worry about, just its unsuitability!
 
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Ullanta,

20 tracks? You get 8 analog and 8 over the light pipe, where are the other four? Not disagreeing, just curious.

I use Le and HD. These are post systems so they aren't "clean", but then neither is my laptop and it runs BR. I go back to version 3.2 so I have had a lot of years with PT. I have gone a year or so with out crashing on some versions, and a few hours with others. In most cases these aren't "crashes" they are hiccups, but they would stop a recording or require you to restart PT. A few years back it would sudden quit once or twice a day. When it was fairly new on OSX it would cause kernel panics pretty regularly. And I'm one of the more solid and trouble free systems I know of. My lap top for instance needs to have there "repair prebinding" script run anytime there is an up date and sometimes just because... On there support forum they have three diferent downloads that are "fix utilities" One is the script I just mentioned, aperently they don't play well with all Intel machines (some are fine???). The second one deletes all the pre files and cleares out all the catalog files. People were doing this so regularly that someone made an app that automated the proscess. It's enough of a problem that Digi put it on there site to download. The third is some heavy duty troubleshooting utility that they have you download if you have some killer problem.

So you are extreamly lucky. As I said I really like PT and most of the time it's fine. Every once in awhile some upgrade trashes things and you go through some weeks and or months of instability. 7.2 had a bug that could corupt your session and it's backups. I personaly would have an ulcer if I had to use PT in a production situation. But if I had your experience I probably wouldn't, so ?

I'm surprised at your track time. WAV files are not speced for more than 2 gigs. You can record more but you shouldn't. There is a modified WAV format that can go larger and the Apple core Audio format CAF files can be huge but PT doesn't support either as far as I know.

Anyway I'm not arguing, I'm actually glad someone is getting that kind of stability out of PT. My experience has not been so good.
Cheers
 
As to 20 - oops! I meant 18 (you get 2 more from S/PDIF).

Anyway, to me your experience is strange - everyone I know finds ProTools to be problem-free! They complain about pricing and hardware restriction, of course, but not about instability.

As I said, I never update unless absolutely necessary - so some of my machines are running 6.4, some 6.9.2; haven't touched 7 yet. But all my machines (except the melting-pot desktop) have been trouble-free for years. No "maintenance" necessary.
Not a crash, not a hiccup, not a "better increase buffer size" warning on my recording systems. I also almost always use Glyph drives for recording, which seems to prevent a lot of problems... but I've used other drives for low-track-count sessions... and, if it's useful information, I haven't used M-Powered... just Mbox and both Digi002's...

"Extremely lucky"? Why would so many people would use PT if it was so buggy as in your experience most of the time? I wouldn't! Why do your pals who have worse experiences than yours? I think I just have very strict and clean habits - I pretty much never have software problems on critical machines because I install as little software as possible and don't give into temptation to change a working system, and use good drives. As I say, my desktop is not critical, I install all sorts of test software, freeware plugins, microsoft apps, and other junk; and I have multiple audio applications that seem to interfere at least in some ways (PT, Logic, AudioDesk - often complain about each other on launch), etc. But then again, even there PT doesn't give me much trouble.

As a (former) software guy by trade, all I can say is - most software is big and ugly these days, especially OSes, and there aren't many good tools for ensuring/repairing system integrity. Troubleshooting can be really nasty, which is why the manufacturers always just push a reinstall - easy for them, sucky for the end-user. Certainly there's a lot of flakiness, and I don't doubt your experience. I just want to stress that, of course, to me your case seems to be the extreme one. In the end, we all use what works for us... which is the important lesson here for anyone still reading this thread - find what works for you, and don't screw with it when it does!

As for recording time.... what? WAV? CAF? Huh? ProTools native format for me (on the Mac?) has always been SDII... and I bounce to AIFF. These don't seem to run into such limits quite so soon...
 
I forgot about the SPdif, or actually I was thinking that you had to choose between, SPdif and Light pipe. But your right.

Well the folks who I know who have had more problems than I are mostly working on big budget features. Skywalker Ranch had (may still have) a policy that every editor had to maintain two out of computer copies of the session file, AM and PM because PT crashed so much. It was a fireable offense to not have those backups. PT 4.x crashed the system on average 2-3 times a day in all the post facilities I worked at the time. The versions that ran on Mix hardware were pretty stable, but early OS X versions were dodgy. My system is quite stable but I just had a sudden quit trying to ad a second video file? On reopening the session itworked fine and imported with out a problem. You good habbits are probably serving you well. Post isn't quite as clean an environment and we are working with video wich puts more strain on the stability. But I would call PT semi stable. Some systems are rocks some are nightmares (and I'm only talking Mac here so the hardware is pretty standard). Ironically Glyph has had a very bad reputation around here for some bad quality control. The might be fine now but we had to send back three drive racks in a row that were botched. Not subtle things either. One the fan had not been attatched or the screws had all fallen out, don't know which, one had a bad fan, and the last had the SCSI switches mis wired.

You should probably think about changing from SDII files. Digi has been on the verge of dropping them for a few years. They recomend not using them and they have a couple of big drawbacks. SDII cant be higher than 48k, it is compleatly PC incompatable and will get trashed on a non Mac server, or any non HFS file system.
WAV is the format that Digi recomends and the format PT will default to.
CAF is Apples audio format. It is the format that all the audio included with STP is in. It has some great advantages but I don't know if any non Mac computer can read it - semi big issue. PT native format since HD came out has been WAV files not SDII.

I and most of the folks I know using PT are using it for one reason. We are working audio post editors and that is what 90% of profesional audio post is done on. There are a lot of reasons that is the state of the biz (and some good arguments for why it should change) but it is what it is. Basically if you work on sound for film in america you work on PT or you don't work. That's not strictly true, especially on really low budget films but 90% of work on features is PT. I like PT. But that maybe because I know it so well. But I think it is also because it is one of the best thought out sound editing app out there. But stability, in my experience, has not been it's shining star.
 
Interesting. Iwas sort of "born and raised" on ProTools, and have never had to "choose" to use it just to be compatible. As you say, I find it well thought-out, especially for recording, compared to other apps... and, of course, as a long-time solely PT user I find other apps to be counter-intuitive. As for the file formats - hey, I'm not changing my practices at this point! Tempt me not!

I often work with video in PT - but another factor I should mention is that I have pretty much no plug-ins on my recording systems. Three systems have only the DigiRack ones, and one system has Waves RComp and REQ... in the classical world, we tend to work a lot more with mic placement than effects...

Strange to hear that about Glyph as well!

Anyway, I couldn't work with something that crashes in the work I do... I get the recording the first time or I don't get it at all. How do people stand to work with flaky systems? I'm also a fanatic about backup... but I still wouldn't want to have to make use of it! Blech!
 
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