Adrian Bradley Rayworth – Page 2 – Working to Animation

April 25, 2016Adrian Bradley Rayworth

Mixing/Editing/Timing/Picture Lock (L1,L3 & L6)

The mixing process is the final element in the post-production process, it’s essential to get the mix right as thats where you bring the the whole film to life sonically. In this post I’m going to look into the processes of mixing, what has to be done, how to do it, gear to use and the levels the final project needs to be mixed to (standard broadcasting levels).

John Eeye is a mixing and recording engineer running a studio known as Beach House Studio’s (referred to in this blog as Beach House). Beach House offers a range of services including Audio Post-Production, Recording, Mixing, Mastering, Voice over and Video Production.

Within this company on their website, John hosts a tutorial section where he offers advice, tips and tricks on working with a variety of different forms of audio and sound. One post that he uploaded was an overview of mixing audio to film. Within this post he covers many essentials that are relevant to my project, such as Broadcast standards, audio restoration, timing and working with picture lock.

Broadcast Standards and Compression Levels

When looking at broadcast standards it’s very important that your mixing to the correct level, there are different broadcast standards, for T.V, Cinema, Film, DVD they all need to mixed to a certain standard by law. These standards for british broadcasting and screening is set via the EBU R128 Loudness Recommendation and through the recommended sound level check finds the average loudness level for broadcasting. The british broadcasting standard is -23 loudness units.

When mixing to adhere to the loudness recommendations it’s important to have a good loudness meter as John mentions.

‘This is more important than you think it is, unless you already know all about broadcast standards, and then it is exactly as important as you suspect. As recording and mixing engineers for albums and singles most of our dealings with mixing and “loudness” is “how loud can you make this track without clipping or squashing it too much”.’ (Eye, J.)

He mentions about monitoring LU’s or Loudness Units as 1LU = 1dB, and speaks about loudness meters from Izotope, Dolby and Waves and their advantages to their use within mixing.

‘The beauty of using a loudness meter like Insight is that it has all the presets with the standards worked out for you. If you are mixing for the USA it has those, if you are mixing for the UK or Japan, it has those. If your market’s standards are not represented you can make your own preset. I’m in the USA so I chose the simple US meter preset. This gives you a max peak of -2db, a program average target of -24LU and a dynamic range target of 14LU.’ (Eye, J.)

Finally on levels, John give us a rough guideline on the levels to mix the audio to your film to.

Max Peak – -2dB

Loud Sound FX – -3dB

Score music that is not competing with dialogue – -5db

When performing your final mixdown its recommended that you use these guidelines, to make sure that your animation or project doesn’t sound too quiet, over compressed or too loud.

Audio Restoration

When editing and mixing sound generally you will find that in your audio you will find a lot of undesirable noise, this can be from bleeding atmospherics from the spaces from which you recorded your audio. John mentioned a plugin used to restore audio which I have used throughout this project, which is Izotope RX Advanced. Within this plug in you can extract unwanted noise from your audio as well as reducing the amount of ‘hum’ or feedback that you may have picked up through your microphone in the recording process. RX helps you clear up your audio in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours of EQing, Compression and even cutting.

Timing

John states in his article that for a lot of low budget indie films will range at about 30 minutes long and generally he will put aroung 150 hours into that project and he states that he was rushing it. It all depends on the deadline you have to get the project mixed by, one of the greatest issues with sound design as mentioned by Philip Moroz in his book mentioned throughout this blog, that setting and allocating times for certain jobs is one of the biggest jobs. You need to be realistic.

Going back to Ben Butt who was also referenced a fair amount in this blog for his work in sound design with Star Wars, the post-production mixing for star wars took a whole year to complete, and that’s a high budget film with countless engineers working around the clock to attain the best quality of audio. Which begs the question, how do you judge how long you’re going to need to mix?

The best bet is by looking at what you do and don’t have… how much audio do you need to record and edit?, how much music does the director want scoring, if you’re scoring music as well. Also whats the quality of the audio like that you are going to be mixing. Taking into consideration all these parameters can help you justify how long your going to need to clean up your audio, balance it, compress it and mix it alongside the music. If your audio is mostly pristine and clear, and there are fewer channels, then you can limit your time mixing. But if not and a lot of the audio needs fixing and fine tuning, you’re going to want to leave yourself a bigger gap when constructing the overall soundtrack to the project.

Picture Lock

After speaking to a various amount of industry professionals throughout the course of this project, there were many opinions and subjectivities on certain elements, because some people like to do things differently… simple.

But one of the things that always remained the same. Picture Lock. Always when working in post-production sound make sure that the director of the film has given you the final, final, final edit of the film, where no timings change or anything. This is referred to as picture lock. This is the point where audio post-production begins as stated by Moroz, Burtt and just about any Audio professional you will meet. Reason being is because of timing within the film, if you start working on post audio before picture lock lets say, during the rough cut process, you will sync up all the audio, SFX and music, and send it back to the director or editor and they’ll say it’s great. But then they’ll send you an update of the film, then suddenly all your perfectly synced up music and audio is all over the shop and you have to re-sync everything back together, now this can go on for as many edits as it takes and is incredibly tiring, so it’s a lot easier and simpler to perform all post audio works once the film has gone through all it’s editing stages.

Working and waiting on a picture lock deadline can also be just as annoying, you need to keep an ongoing line of communication with your director and editor to make sure that everything is on track as planned. Philip Moroz stated in a conversation I had with him over email that you need to always have clarity with your video editor as this minimises complications in work. He said:

‘Definitely make sure that you clarify whether the video edit has been picture-locked. Projects can get very complicated and messy if you find out down the line that there’s an updated version of the video edit that you haven’t been working to!’

I have found that in this project getting a picture lock has been a lot harder than anticipated. Many deadlines that the groups I am working for were not met, so therefore has delayed the overall process of production. I also had a problem communicating the term of picture lock to both of them, especially the Satsuma team who no matter how many times I explained the terms of picture lock, didn’t quite seem to understand, which was overly frustrating! As Philip said, agreeing on a picture lock date is essential so that you’re not working to an edit that’s going to be essentially overwritten.

April 15, 2016Adrian Bradley Rayworth

Editing Foley – Izotope RX 5 Advanced

For the purpose of editing all my sound effects and foley, I used Izotope RX advanced editor.

Through this I was able to fine trim all my audio, cleaning it up so that it was perfectly audible.

There have been so many situation when editing recorded audio, where I have been trying to clean it up in the past using all manners of effects, such as EQ, compression, gating etc. It’s always really hard to cut and edit out atmospherics that have bled through in the recording process or even clips and pops of the microphone itself.

Through the use of instant processing, I was able to simply highlight an area on the spectral diagram (the orange waveform) and instantly process the effect I had selected, be this replacing the audio, attenuating it, fading, gaining and de-click ing.

The whole process which would normally take me days to edit all my foley and SFX took me as little as 6 hours to have all my sound files for this project edited and ready for use.

Another handy element within RX was the De-Verb function, with a lot of my recordings they caught a lot of reverb on them especially the recording of the letter box, so this function within RX was like a god send. It wasn’t able to remove the reverb as a whole but took out the big ‘boomy’ elements of the reverb.

Screenshot 2016-05-06 10.05.09 — Letter Box with De-Verb applied

The De-Noise function I found incredibly tricky to use, through most instances where I tried to use it, I also ended up removing many of the fundamental frequencies of the audio I had recorded initially… so I tended not to use it too much and instead applied EQ to attenuate specific frequencies within certain recordings.

A lot of my use with RX was tightening up audio, such as my SFX and One shots, I cut out all the bleeding background sound between takes, hits or movements. This left my audio nice and clean, and it allows you to export your files as 24bit .wav files so they’re of high quality. This in total takes all the pain and stress out of editing audio and works as an all in one tool for mastering sound.

April 14, 2016Adrian Bradley Rayworth

Recording Sound Part 2 – SFX and One Shots (L3 & L6)

The last post I did on recording sound focused more on the recording of atmospherics and textures within the sounds required for both films.

This time I went out and recorded more of the specific sounds for both animations, such as Bicycles, Cutlery, and smashing.

I wanted to experiment a bit more with this style of recording than I did previously, so as well as booking an extra Rode NGT-2 (for stereo) I also booked out two radio mics for contact use, these recording methods were used to broaden my knowledge on sound design and recording targeting learning outcomes 3 & 6

My initial idea for this was inspired but Ben Burtt’s use of contact mics within Star Wars and how he got the laser gun sounds, in fact I passed some Pylons, whilst out recording but unfortunately didn’t get any recordings of my own…

I was wondering how to best the the recording of the bike, as I needed the sound of the chain and the bike being rode. So my idea was to attach a mic to the frame of the bike as the rim of the wheel …. and then soon realising that this would damage the microphones I opted out of possibly damaging any property. Instead we help up the bike and recorded the peddling and chain individually, they came out a bit like this.

I found recording the more specific sounds to be more of a challenge, as I was trying to get the best quality in audio possible, it was annoying when recording creaking footsteps in my friends house and a motorbike blazing past, it took a lot of time and patience, a lot more than recording Textures and atmospheres.

In this instance I can understand why some may choose to use sound libraries as an alternative, to be able to have clear precise recordings without the worry of interference from any third party sounds.

For my next project, I will definitely book out the use of the sound theatre, to use their foley room to record all of my specific sounds, sfx and one shots in the future, I’ll take this as a learning curve.

I tried tirelessly to get a decent recording of smashing glass and smashing porcelain for Guardian, but I could never quite get it right I tried several methods of placing mics and smashing smaller crockery near them, after setting the gain on the mics in an old abandoned camp not too far from morrisons.

But this proved both fairly dangerous and pointless as from the gain setting on the microphone so much ambience would bleed through that the desired recording was not audible. I think I might have to use a recording from a sound library for these.

Other audio like all the sounds that will construct the Cafe scene in Satsuma we’re fairly simple, I merely recorded a collection of kitchen appliances such as cutlery shaking, chairs scraping so on and so forth. All of these will be layered together to form the sonic ambience of a busy cafe.

One final recording that I was also particularly proud of are the wings for the crow in Guardian. I remember reading and researching about recording techniques in Sound on Sound magazine, and I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an article on foley, and it was mentioned that garden gloves make great bird flapping sounds. So naturally I gave it a try, and it worked perfectly.

April 13, 2016Adrian Bradley Rayworth

End of User License Agreement (L2 & L4)

I’ve covered the End of User License Agreement contract several times within this blog, whether it be to using sample packs from sound libraries or to purchasing the license to use a piece of software, I have constructed my own contract in the use of selling the rights to my music, for the purposes of being used within various forms of media. Within the contract it states that, through the transfer of money the buyer is not purchasing the music, but the license to use it.

This works to my 2nd and 4th learning outcomes, which state that I am to learn enough about copyright law to be able to properly describe how to distribute my music legally, professionally and to be paid for my services in the process. They also that I must be able to write up my own documents and contracts for sound design and music.

They are entitled to a non-exclusive worldwide license for the full period of copyright by myself for the use of synchronisation, the use online and non-theatrical where no charge is made to the public and Duplication. Failure to accept the terms and conditions result in a refund from myself to the buyer and no license is granted to use my music.

The terms and conditions can be found below the picture.

“End User License Agreement – STANDING LICENSE

IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY

BY USING THE MUSIC CREATED FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS

PROJECT, YOU [“THE BUYER”] ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE

TERMS SET OUT HERE AS APPLICABLE TO YOUR CATEGORY OF

LICENSE – STANDING OR EXTENDED.

Please note you are not purchasing the music itself

[ownership/copyright is not transferred to you]; you are purchasing

a license to it.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR ALL LICENSES

1. The Music [which shall mean all the data selected to be

downloaded] licensed to The Buyer by The Composer. The Buyer is

granted a non-exclusive worldwide license for the full period of

SYNCHRONISING

With The Buyers own website (except templates that are sold or

given away) or online service, corporate/educational/ training

videos/ CD-ROM/ DVD, computer multimedia presentations or

animations [“Project”].

ONLINE

To exploit the Project electronically on all online services/networks

and to provide podcasts.

NON-THEATRICAL

Usage where no charge is made to the public [as part of Project

where applicable] to comprise:

– Trade Exhibitions, Presentations and Business Seminars – Corporate

and other in-house

Multimedia Presentations – Music On Hold / In-Store Music

(independent store only) – Photo

Presentations/slideshows Student Films and Community made Films

(College, Personal, Demo) and other non-commercial publicly

accessed venues, gatherings and

events.

DUPLICATION

To produce up to 500 [total of all media] copies of the Project CDROM,

CD-A or DVD (training/

Educational/promotional/family/wedding)

2. No rights are licensed until all steps have been completed through

the website and payment has been made by the Buyer and received

by The Composer.

3. These rights are specific and personal to The Buyer subject to

Terms 4 to 7. The Buyer shall not have the right to exploit the Music

data in any other media of any nature at any time or to permit others

to do so nor to make any additional unauthorised copies and/or to

permit, authorise, sub-licence, assign, transfer and/or otherwise

exploit the Music in any form, whether for other commercial

purposes or otherwise.

4. If the Buyer is acting as agent for another party [“the Principal”]

the Buyer warrants that it is legally authorised to enter into this

licence on behalf of the Principal.

5. Where acting as an agent the Buyer will disclose full details of the

Principal to The Composer when entering online information and

applying for a licence.

6. The Buyer agrees that the Principalʼs liability under the licence

does not affect the Buyerʼs liabilities and the Buyer continues to be

bound by all Terms of the licence.

7. The Buyer indemnifies The Beat Suite against all and any losses

caused by the Principalʼs breach of the Terms of this licence.

8. There is no further right to copy [beyond what is specifically

licensed] the Music for supply by The Buyer to any other persons

whether by copying or electronically supplying or otherwise all or

any part of the Music.

9. The Buyer shall not acquire any rights and/or interest in the Music

at any time which may be exploited by The Buyer, and all rights not

specified granted are reserved by The Composer.

10. The Buyer acknowledges the limits of this licence and undertakes

to inform any third party who seeks further or unauthorised use of

the Music that they must seek a licence from The Composer on their

own behalf.

11. If the Buyer has any concern that a third party with whom they

have been in direct or indirect contact may be about to or intend to

use the Music in an unauthorised way the Buyer will immediately

inform The Composer.

12. The Buyer agrees that any web site usage will be through a

streaming format that will prevent the Music from being

downloaded and used unlawfully by users of the Buyer’s site.

Podcast provision will be in a format and on terms to ensure this.

13. The Buyer shall use the Music entirely at The Buyer’s sole risk and

expense and agrees that

The Buyer shall be liable for all its own costs and expenses or

otherwise that may arise from any such use.

14. The Buyer is responsible for complying with any regulatory

requirements [such as PRS licensing] and payment of any further

sums due on any particular authorized use of the Music

15. In the event that there is a technical defect in the material

downloaded The Composer agrees to replace it provided that the

Music has been treated with all due care and not mistreated in some

manner or damaged by some other means after purchase. The Buyer

shall check the viability of the downloaded data before making

copies or further using.

16. If the Music is incompatible with The Buyer’s hardware and there

is no alternative product available then there is no liability on the

part of The Composer to provide any other disc and/or data or any

refund or reimbursement of any nature at any time. The Buyer

agrees that The Composer liability with respect to any such claim

made in relation to or arising out of this shall not exceed the licence

fee paid by The Buyer.

17. In the event of any other claim, demand, actions or otherwise by

The Buyer and/or any business for any reason arising from the use of

the disc and/or data then The Composer shall only be liable in total

to repay the full purchase price of the Music to The Buyer and that

The Composer shall not bear any responsibility and/or liability for the

use of the Music by The Buyer, any business, third party or otherwise

which is supplied directly or indirectly by The Buyer at any time.

18. The Buyer agrees that it is The Buyer’s responsibility to arrange

and bear the cost of insurance cover for the benefit of The Buyer,

any business and/or third party for the use of the Music by The Buyer

19. If The Beat Suite believes there are circumstances connected

with the Buyerʼs use of the Music or the licence granted that give rise

for action to be taken against a third party the Buyer agrees to give

such reasonable assistance as may be requested by The Composer.

20. If the Buyer receives any claim dispute Letter before Action or

other legal documentation concerning the Music from a third party

the Buyer will notify The Composer as soon as possible

21. The Composer does not accept any responsibility for the use of

the Music by The Buyer and subject to any legislation limiting the

right to exclude liability shall not be liable for any direct and/or

indirect damages, loss, injury or otherwise that may arise in respect

of The Buyer and/or any business in which The Buyer may be

involved and/or to which The Buyer may supply advice or material

for any reason.

22. Without prejudice to the generality of the previous Term The

Composer does not accept any responsibility and/or liability for any

errors, omissions, viruses, defects and/or any other matters of any

nature in the Music which may be a legal, technical or material fault

or problem or otherwise.

23. The information on this website is provided without warranties

of any kind either express or implied as to merchantability, fitness for

any particular purpose or non-infringement or by virtue of the course

of dealing or custom of any particular trade or industry.

24. The Composer confirms that all rights necessary for the specified

use by The Buyer of the Music have been obtained from the

Composer.

25. The Buyer shall not represent the Music as their own or claim a

credit.

26. In the event that The Composer become aware and/or have

reasonable grounds to believe that The Buyer and/or third party is

using the Music in a manner which was not set out in this document

The Composer shall be entitled without notice to The Buyer to

terminate the licence provided under this document without

prejudice to any other rights and remedies of The Composer. The

Buyer shall be obliged upon written notice to surrender all copies of

the Music and/or data to The Composer.

27. The Buyer will indemnify The Composer against all and any claims

demands actions damages liabilities and all reasonable expenses

including legal expenses incurred as a result of any breach of this

Agreement by The Buyer. The Buyer acknowledges that any breach

of this Agreement may cause serious damage to the proprietary

interest in the Music and that damages may not be adequate

compensation for such a breach and therefore agrees that in such

circumstances The Composer shall be entitled to an injunction.

28. The Buyer agrees that it shall not use and/or authorise the use of

the Music whether disc and/or data in any manner or nature which is

inconsistent with the intended purpose of the licence granted. Nor

shall The Buyer deface, erase, remove and/or alter any part of the

part of the Music and/or data.

29. The Buyer will not disclose passwords or access codes used in

accessing any area of the web site and will maintain the same as

confidential and will use best endeavours to maintain strict

safeguards on all Music licensed under this Agreement.

30. This Licence is granted by The Composer to The Buyer but the the

Music shall so far as rights retained apply be entitled to all benefits

and rights as set out in this Licence subject to legislation concerning

third-party contractual rights.

31. Together with entries made and submitted on the website by or

on behalf of the Buyer these Terms are the entire agreement

between the parties and supersede all previous agreements

promises and representations. Any amendment or alteration shall be

in writing and signed by authorised representatives of each party.

32. Every Term in this Licence is intended to be severable and if any

should be held to be invalid unenforceable or illegal by a court the

validity and enforceability of the remaining Terms shall not be

affected.

33. The Composer may assign its benefits under this Agreement in

whole or in part at its sole discretion. The Buyer may only assign its

rights with the specific prior written approval of The Composer.

34. This Licence shall be governed by the Laws of England, whether

the Music is supplied and/or used in the United Kingdom and/or in

any part of the universe.”

April 12, 2016Adrian Bradley Rayworth

Recording Sound – Part 1 Atmos and Textures (L3)

So recently I went out recording for all the audio I needed for both of my projects, Satsuma and Guardian. Armed with my cue sheets, a Zoom H4n and a Rode NTG-2 Microphone I set out into Lincoln, to find and record all the audio that I’d need for the purpose of my films.

Through the whole ordeal i collected a wide variety of sounds and atmosphere’s some more specific, like birds, benches and textures.

and also some, that I just managed to come across, like a burnt out fire in a section of woodland not too far out from Lincoln’s edge.

These textures sounds and fx really added to my own sound library and it was great to put some of the techniques that I’ve read about from other sound designers such as Ben Burtt and Philip Moroz.

In this blog post I’m going to label some of the significant sounds that I recorded in this project and detail how I recorded them.

One of the most crucial sounds that I had to collect for the use in this project, was the crow in Guardian.. I wasn’t quite sure on how I was going to get an accurate recording of crow close up to use in the animation, I was trying to conjure up all sorts of plans to lure one in, or trying to find a next nearby and patiently wait, with my microphone armed and suspended on a boom pole. However I came across the railway crossing whilst wandering on lincoln’s outskirts and I thought that it would be an excellent opportunity to capture a recording of a passing train. I checked the timetable and noticed that there was one coming in a matter of minutes, so I decided to wait to record it passing by. To not waste time, I also took the opportunity to record some distant traffic atmospherics, and out of a complete stroke of luck … a Crow who was perched in the tree’s started calling out, I checked back on the recording later, and with a bit of editing through Izotope RX it was exactly what I needed. This reminded me of what Ben Burtt said in an interview, the power of opportunity, as a sound designer it’s my role to always be ready, always be on the listen to capture sound. Even if I’m planning on recording something totally different … you can never know what you can get. I got the train too by the way. Both recordings can be found below.

Crow

Train

A lot of the other real significant textures that I recorded for this project was through parks, I was walking through the Arboretum by Lincoln College, and recording all kinds of textures there from fountains, the crunching of leaves, children playing in the distant, dogs barking etc. It was here where I think the bulk of the recordings came from. Although I didn’t just ‘start’ recording … I walked around the park several times, and just listened to what was around me, and let my ears do the directing. I took many test recordings to test the level of wind noise in the area and when recording such sounds as footsteps on crunching leaves, how much of the passing cars way off in the distance would bleed through. I picked each spot very carefully, also with it being in a park it was quite hard to get a solid recording without having a child walk past and shout “WHAT ARE YOUU DOING??” this ruined many recordings for me and really took it’s toll on my patience throughout the daytime.

Some of my favourite recordings where by far of the fountain, I suspended the mic on a boom pole and took three separate recordings of the fountain, the top of the fountain where the water spurts outs, the mid section where it hits the first plate collecting water, and the bottom where the water joins together in a pool. The recording came out very clear and crisp is probably one of my more favoured liquid textures that I’ve recorded for this project. Below are the three fountain recordings.

Whilst exiting the park, I also noticed that the gate, had a really lovely squeak to it when moved slowly, I didn’t really need a metallic squeak for this project, but if I’ve learnt anything so far from researching the work of others, what you capture now, can save you later. So naturally I recorded several instances of the gate slowly squeaking… this will make use for a nice effect in Satsuma, where I want to simulate the squeak of a rusty letter box opening.