What Does A Ninja Sound Like?

Welcome back to part two.  It's been getting a bit hectic trying to wrap up several projects and get a ton of new stuff rolling but I'm going to get a little more technical and in-depth on this article because I wanted to share some more in-depth information.  

I should note that my production workflow has been extremely loose from project to project in terms of sync and audio capture.  I don't normally bring in my audio and try to sync inside of my NLE.  Instead, what I do is just leave the in-camera audio on the NLE's primary audio track and label it Scratch.  During picture lock, which is the stage in which I can safely say I will no longer be making any time-based changes to my arrangement of clips or their lengths I begin exporting the project to work in my DAW.  Typically this is done via OMF export options.

 One thing I always do as I start editing and importing audio into Sonar is it's crucial to find the spots where transitions or cuts happen in the video.  As I work to the picture and import my sounds and start placing them on the timeline I find the cuts in the video and place markers on my timeline for easier recall.

This has helped saved time especially as a workaround for Sonar's lack of real-time video scrubbing (at least for me).  It seems that for some reason no matter which file format I work in or resolution (HD / SD) I still have buffering issues with Sonar: The further away from the beginning of the timeline I get the longer it takes to respond to user input.  In this regard I think my next video projects I'll try Avid Pro Tools seeing as how they've had a long-standing history with working to picture as it's been the industry standard for such a long time.  I just haven't had the chance to do this yet, as Sonar is my most comfortable DAW and one I instinctively gravitate to.

A huge workflow tip: as I edit and mix is using the clip features in Sonar such as creating clip groups to keep multiple audio tracks in sync with each other.

This practice helps keep me moving through spots quicker.  Even in the picture above there are 2 clips overlapping in each of the audio tracks.  I grouped each one separate so I can still edit the timings between the clips if I need to.  You can also group large quantities of clips spanning various tracks together (great after building a "sound" up from various elements and not quite ready to create a bounced stem).  Once these clips are grouped things like slicing and fades and trimming apply uniformly to the entire group.

Once I've got the audio where I want it and things match up to picture well, I make avid and religious use of the clip lock features in Sonar.  I clip locked both the data and the position to show this case:

Sonar allows independent locking of both Position and actual clip data.  I normally just clip lock position and then can come back to it later for doing things like clip automation (gain, fades, etc.) but in this case I don't need to do any of that so I went ahead and locked both position and data.  The biggest benefits for independently locking these two ways of manipulating clips is to accommodate the different workflows: 

Example:

building a sound design element it's usually more crucial to have the sound in sync before working on the actual sculpting of the sound, therefore locking position can assure you that while you affect the clips with plugins, fades, and even trimming (not affected by position lock), the clips are not accidentally moved. 

Example 2:

Clips that require movement but want their particular trims, fades, and other clip-based edits to remain intact while you move them along the timeline, the data lock ensures these do not get altered.

This provides a huge advantage of saving yourself from trouble later on in the event of mishaps like the program locking up or hanging for a moment while you're making selections / deleting / moving things around.  The most common mistake is ending up way ahead in your project before you notice something is missing or has changed due to one of those overlooked circumstances. 

It's Wednesday, May 9th (just over a week after the original shoot) and I've managed to rough in all the audio for the first spot - the 60 second Ninja version.  I first set out to capture the worldization of the music track to blend in with the actual song and give the music some room to sit in the visuals and then pop out when it's supposed to.

It's worth noting the time frame in which I'm working.  We did all of our pick-up shots this same day I'm already beginning audio work on picture-locked versions of the commercial.

Projects like this usually have a 2-3 day turnaround time if not less.  In fact, in a future blog article I will discuss time-frames on my other commercial project Zenergy Band.  Long story short, a full day of shooting with a rough cut turnaround to the client in just 6 hours after the production wrapped.  But for now, back to what Worldization is.

Worldization is a clever yet simple technique (in concept) of playing back a sound or sample into a given environment, and recording the new sound as it's interacting with that environment.

The commercial spot has several different ranges between each of the 3 ninjas and the main actors sitting in the back room.  The music track ended up being a last minute selection to fit the deadline and still fit the mood of the commercial.  Since I can't be on location I set up 3 mics in my house and just used my JBL's to play back the solo'd music track, with the microphones' 'input echo' off (so they don't feedback into the recording).

The first mic I put up was in the middle of the hallway.  I opened the hallway closet up to help with some dampening so it didn't sound completely like a hall.

The 2nd mic is the Audio Technica in the far end of the room adjacent to where I'll be playing the music from.  The Rode NTG-3 is placed closest to the room but facing as off-axis as I can get it, and aimed directly at the wall just feet in front of it almost perpendicular to the direction of the sound source.  This should help enhance low-end reflecting off of boundary surfaces as large as the wall it's aiming at which is also in front of a small cove for the entry way that naturally enhances low frequency content.

So looking at the screenshot above again The green automation lines represent the volume changes throughout the tracks to simulate room changes when the camera cuts between locations.

here it is again if you don't wish to scroll....

The next step was to record Foley for the sword whirling and clothes cutting. I called Troy up to come over and help out as running Foley sessions is a 2 person job at best.  The first thing we discussed was tackling the sword whirling sound and we went through several items and settled on a broken power extension cable.

There's a particular setup I'm using with 3 mics.  I chose this method to give me the greatest range of options for panning and color as each mic is distinctly different.  An Audio Technica 3035 (cardioid condensor), Rode NTG-3, and an AKG C414 in Omni placed high up to get more ambiance.

Moving positions for the "ripping" foley.

The microphones' various recordings came out perfect and I ended up with an LCR approach to the mixing for stereo.  I imagine if I ever had to upfold this project or completely re-mix it for a 5.1 surround track I would have more than ample material to place in the 5.1 mix and still maintain a good balance and presence.

The editing workflow I use is pretty solid to me a this point as I've done several projects that have steadily grown in audio demands and complexity or have allowed me the freedom to experiment (which is a great opportunity to have)! 

While getting to see the project and all the edits I did. It's much more helpful just to describe my workflow and the order I like to do things in.

After capturing the audio the first thing I did was move the audio tracks far down the timeline away from any of the actual commercial material although ideally I would have just created a separate project for the recording session and what I'm about to describe next.

The first actual bit of work I set out on these audio clips is to clean them up, which involves denoising and any sort of effects for processing to get rid of unwanted background noise.  Once these are applied (which I normally do to each clip individually, and not the track), I then bounce the clips to commit the processes to audio.  Then, I begin slicing up all the useful bits and deleting useless audio gaps.

Sonar has a cool little process that can be applied to clips on the timeline that remove silence.  However this tool still requires some finessing and the volume levels of our Foley session vary so greatly it was easier and quicker just to manually slice the bits I needed.  After all the cutting, fades were applied, then came the arrangement of those clips which you can see their final place in the image above.

It's now Thursday, May 10th and I've just gotten to the point where I can transfer all the audio work I've done from the 60 second ninja spot.  I now have to build the audio for the 30 second spot.

I felt like exporting all my tracks out of Sonar individually to try my hand at working to picture in Pro Tools later.  Sonar has some really cool ways to easily bounce tracks and commit to audio all the Effects and even track and bus automation.  Note, this is not my workflow process I used since I actually stayed inside of Sonar for the entirety of the project.  I just want to highlight a really useful feature for quickly getting a project like this out of this daw and quickly into another daw like Pro Tools.

I highlighted all the tracks I want to export individually, and go to File > Export.

This is where I need to pay attention to my output options.  Sonar can output the tracks I want but I don't want it

With Tracks selected under Source Category, I un-check the box for "Track Automation" and since this is bouncing out the tracks individually before they hit the buses I don't have to worry about bus automation.

I normally un-check Fast Bounce just as personal preference but it really doesn't matter as any quality difference between Fast bounce and normal bounce is completely inaudible in most cases.

The next thing to follow immediately when I click save is a dialog box:

Sonar will not let you hit save unless you type something in the file name area.

I chose to simply put B and hit enter and this dialog box appears to confirm the following Actions Sonar is about to perform.

It clearly shows each individual file that's going to be created in the place I chose to save them, and that they all have a prefix "B" and Sonar automatically formats the file name with B-*track name*.wav

A really handy feature to have, as well as time-saving.

Sonar renders out the audio in one pass so it can take a while to process and write all the individual files at once.








I saved out OMF files for each of the individual spots and opted to simply rebuild audio for each of the 4 commercials individually.  I have greater control inside of Sonar and don't have to deal with the limited interchange options for audio from inside of Premiere Pro this way and thus I can move much faster.

The OMF for the 30 second ninja spot gets saved out the new project file.  Import the video track and set up the buses.  Here's the new template:

More cool tips!  Sonar has lots of hotkey commands that help save time.  When opening an OMF the audio tracks are placed on the timeline with the clips properly but the default selection is their outputs just go to your audio hardware's first output, and there are no buses. So the first thing I do is create a master bus.

Right clicking on the bus and you'll be able to see the option to "set as default bus".  A cool time-saver for future tracks that get created will now immediately route to the master bus as their output.

Next I simply create the remaining buses I know i'm going to use for the mix later on and these will all automatically route to "master":

1. Voice
2. SFX
3. Music

Now comes the interesting part.  As I import the audio tracks I tackle track management and start creating folders and sending the tracks to the proper buses.

Here's another cool little time saver.  I can just select the tracks I want to put into a folder, once I have them all selected I just simply right click and there's an option to "move to folder".

This can work in various ways but since Sonar only has 1 folder level to work with, if audio tracks already reside in folders the option will not be there, instead "move to folder" will be replaced with "remove from folder" and then you have the option to place the tracks into existing folders / new folder.

Since I imported the tracks all at once, they are all routed to the master bus. I simply just open up the folder track and select all the tracks within.

Shift+click at the bottom track in the SFX folder to select all of them, which brings up the last track selected in the channel preview on the left side.  The default bus is still Master so hold down CTRL and select "SFX" as the new bus.  this applies the new bus selection to all the selected tracks.

Next, I have all the audio tracks and clips selected in the timeline I want to trim all the silence away and leave me just the audio material clips to move around and re-fit for the 30 second version.

The dialog box appears for the Remove Silence tool.

I set the open and close level to -68 dB.  The settings above seem to produce good cuts without any sudden pops or clicks as the waveform leaves 0 degrees.  The look ahead also gives ample time for changes using the 2 millisecond buffer in the attack and release times.  It's worth noting that I'm choosing to use this tool here instead of earlier doing the original cuts to the foley session as on these rendered out tracks there is "true" silence.  There should be no clutter and I should be left with only the audio clips I want and already edited.

I saved the settings as a preset (because Sonar doesn't come with any default ones). Run the tool.  and below is the result from the trimming.

Now to focus on placement for the 30 second version and figuring out how to tackle the music track for the shorter play time.  It's back to the routine set up, placing markers along the timeline to mark the shot changes in the video.  Moving and trimming the clips to fit the shorter shots, and then re-mixing the music with automation.

Between the 60 second and 30 second versions of the Ninja project, I have all the audio material I need to use these two project files as templates for building the biker's 60 second and 30 second spots.  I simply saved out each project file (copying audio to a new folder) and named it accordingly. This choice in project management allows me to keep additions to sound clips added in for the biker content like the bikes pulling up in their respective project folders and not cluttering up the whole project.

As I wrapped up the first two (one sixty second Ninja and Biker version) I uploaded them privately on youtube for the client to review.  The okay was given and they asked for a 2nd variation at the end where the tag-line was different.  This was a simple edit, in Premier Pro I simply swapped out the last clip with the correct one for the new tag-line, keeping the same length.  In the audio projects I simply saved the project and labelled it "alternate" to identify each of the 4 commercial projects with the new tag-line, dropped in the voice track and synced it up and processed it.

Mixing was a bit more of a duty to attempt uniformity across all the projects but still simple none-the-less.  Since I didn't have any of my plugins or processing done until after all the project files had been duplicated from each other, I simply went in to each track and bus and saved out FX Chains and Presets from the plugins, and simply followed the load-out on each of the projects.

Now, with audio mixed and mastered, I headed back into my premier pro project file and loaded up the appropriate audio files to replace the audio of each sequence.  Finally, text was added and final grading was done, and the results are now posted on youtube... The time difference between when I finished a bulk of this work and actually closed out the project was due to a client hiatus. Sometimes things happen and when projects reach their milestone like this and the client is unable to give any feedback or communicate they are ready for another step forward in the project is when ultimately I am stuck sitting on my hands waiting to be told what to do.

Some insight: []  We shot this on a shoe-string budget, with a small schedule expecting a short turn-around.  I had all 4 commercials ready for the client to approve and deliver within the first 2 weeks but because of unforseen circumstances on the clients side, communication breakdowns occured and my producer and I were left waiting for approvals on things for almost 3 months.  However, most of the work was paid for (aside from some of the editing).

IF jobs like these pop up, always make sure to cover yourself legally, or at the very least as a work ethic demand payment up front in full.  If for some reason political aspects begin to play into the business end of things like getting paid for your work, you need persistence and follow-through to make sure you get paid.  I've learned this the hard way through the years of growing my business from the ground up.

I'm not saying this out of personal aggravation (though there was a little of that). I understand this happens and the catch here is learning not to take things like this personally, it's just business, and in the end whether you get paid or not you have only your sanity.  Roll with the punches, don't get angry when they hit you.  Keep on trucking, and do what needs to be done.

Behind the Apocalypse

So by now, my trailer for the dubstep remix mashup of Rob Zombie tunage is passing 900 views!  I'm really surprised at how quickly this has spread!  However I know it's got a lot of confusion and curiosity surrounding it.  I'd like to clarify just what I'm doing both on the remix, as well as a breakdown of the work I did putting together the trailer spot.

Firstly, I intend to make an hour long mash-up that can be made available by the end of this year; as for how it will be available I'm not entirely sure just yet .

(If you want to support this project, please sign up on Rob's forums and support me on this topic here, you'll see what I'm trying to do).  

What is this mash-up?  I'm building my own remixes as I go, arranging the mash-up in one single project.   The Theme is that it's all Rob Zombie's music, hence the title "Zombie Apocalypse".  Pretty cool huh?

Let's rewind back to about the end of April.  I started a remix project to kind of play around with some dubstep techniques as Troy was doing a homework assignment making a remix of whatever he wanted, to submit for classes he was taking at Pyramind.  We had talked about it a week or so prior and then I had mentioned the idea of doing a "Zombie" remix to some other friends.  Then the dubstep practice project became a full-fledged idea and I thought, eh... why not?

I started working on it little bits and pieces at a time, and didn't really make much progress the first month or so.  It wouldn't be until June where I reached a 3-4 minute mark on the mashup arrangement that I really fleshed out all the details.  I've been busy working small jobs trying to keep income flowing: recording local clients, doing commercial video production as (paid) favors of Harry Mok.

July is already here and I needed to get some motivation behind this project, and decided the first week of July that I want to build a trailer to get some exposure going, and minimally "show-off" some of the completed sections I had built of the mashup.  Keep in mind it's still being built and there's hardly any mixing done on it!

I had an inkling in my head of how I wanted the trailer to come across, and set about building the layout up in After Effects.  The first part was easy, simple intro playing off the theme idea for "Zombie" and end of the world theme: a cinematic optical flare with dust flying around in the air, as the camera pans downward to reveal a world in flames, with someone rising slowly in them.  At this moment I purely just jotted down the idea to come back to later on and try to tackle how I would build it.

Once some quick motion graphics were roughed out I had to plan out the rest of the trailer segments. I needed a "script".  What do I want the commercial to say?  What am I getting across?  Quick tip: Always keep a notepad and pen on your desk for quick jotting down of ideas.  I actually prefer this for day-to-day use as I often will write and re-write TO-DO lists of things on my plate I want or need to get done.  This keeps down on clutter on my screen as I used to prefer the Sticky Notes utility that comes with Windows 7.

As I built the trailer I went through about 3 versions of the script as I expanded on the content to fill 60 seconds of play.

There are a lot of video elements that are layered together and the hardest and probably the most complex part was the fire man segment with me standing up in the flames.  The first thing I built was the flame sequence.  Many video layers placed in 3d space within After Effects, along with separate smoke elements.

Once I got the rough camera motion down and timed everything out. I figured the opening sequence should take a total of 20 seconds even, and the fire segment making for a total of 7 of those seconds.

Timing has to match perfectly, and when it came time to shoot the plate I rallied in my favors I had been doing for the Mok family and they happily provided the lighting equipment and backdrop stands.  Mok and I went shopping for a backdrop cloth that I could use to block out the exterior location from my shot (I shot outside in front of my house at night).

I called in another favor to a good friend of mine Tomas who let me borrow his DSLR as backup (which I ended up using as Troy's was having issues).  Michael Mok & I started setting up at about 9:30 pm.  You can see the setup below in the raw capture on the left and Photoshopped on the right.

Just a quick run-down of the "stage" layout: 

For the stage itself we used a cutting desk in the garage that has collapse-able sides and layed it on it's side, but that alone still wasn't tall enough to hide the softbox from the camera, so I grabbed two 2x4x8's that we had laying around because Troy and I have been busy building him a custom desk.  These raised it enough and kept it steady when I stood on it so it would not move.  

The black cloth I got just over 9 yards of in length and came at a decent width of 60".  This worked out perfectly as the backdrop stands we ended up having raised about 8+ feet in the air to cover not only my height for the angle of the camera but also accommodate the fact that the stage was increasing that height.

We did 3 sets, the first set of takes we brought inside immediately to ingest into After Effects to see how the footage looked.  I immediately noticed just how bad of camera shake there was even on a tripod.  As you can see from the screen grabs above we shot the footage vertically to maximize the use of space in the footage, which meant we couldn't use Mok's solid production tripod and instead had to shoot with a cheaper tripod.  It was windy out that night, and that coupled with a DSLR that weighs more than the tripod holding a camera vertically meant it would shake easily.  

Normally this kind of wind shake wouldn't be noticeable for a standard kit lens, but we were shooting with an older Canon EF 75-300mm that I borrowed from my older film canon SLR.

The last take on the last set was the final pick I ended up using to build the composition with in After Effects.  The first step was selecting out the clip segment I would use in the timeline and trimming out the rest, then warp stabilizing the footage.

The Rotobrush was then used to comp out the background.  This took quite a bit of work as I manually went in on a lot of the frames to get close to the look I wanted making sure the brushing worked to my advantage and wasn't too crisp or too blurry letting in any background.

In Premier Pro you can see how the final timing of the sequence looks.  Notice only 1 audio track which says final mix. 

What I normally do with Premier is export out to OMF whatever audio is in my sequence if i'm working with video files that have audio (DSLR's, or synced Zoom H4n handheld recorder samples).  In this case, I simply render a WMV at 720p low quality but decent enough to work in Sonar with.

By the time I got down to doing the final iteration with the last after effects segment I had built, and dropped into the timeline, the project was unwieldy and premier and After Effects would be really slow to respond a lot of the time so I only had my previous audio mixing render to work from which remained blank.

This left some guess work to the timing.  And unfortunately, it takes almost as long to build preview renders with in premier pro to at least see if audio and video sync and i was just trying to wrap it up and get it online.

If I had all the time in the world to put into making it there are definitely things I would go back and refine but overall this was a solid 2, maybe 3 days of work comfortably I managed in my free time across 3 weeks.  And now, back to remixing!

Still to come: A commercial campaign I worked on in May will be published shortly as well as a behind the scenes reel so keep an eye out for more updates as there will be a couple of posts about it here as well.  Then, another commercial spot I worked on is out for VFX right now, but once that one is published I'll have a segment on that too.

Several other projects in the works, building a demo reel for a model and actress friend of mine. On a side noteI recently did music and audio post for this little preview:

Yuki Noguchi who I worked with back in January also shot the ACE Rail commercial, did an excellent job on this!  The clients wanted something a little more energetic and building motion to what was happening on picture than the temp music they had.

Lastly, I will be resuming and finishing up the RPM challenge episodes (3 left) for our studio's channel, as well as building a behind the scenes documentary for the Ace Rail commercial mentioned above.  Lots of stuff coming!

Zombie Apocalypse 2012

Check it out!  The trailer just went live on youtube for the remix project I'm working on! And no, at the moment Rob doesn't know about it, at least not that I know of.  Here's to hoping he'd like to check it out :)


Still to come: there are a few other commercial projects I worked on in may i'm awaiting on publishing approval for before I post.  Keep an eye out for more behind the scenes and in-depth looks coming soon!

Zombie Apocalypse is Coming!

It's been getting super hectic around here.  With all the commercial projects, event video, and several private projects that include building a sound effects catalog, a possible videogame project coming up, and working on a script for a short film project that Troy came up with - time just feels like it's flying by at about 200 mph.

So just what is this Zombie Apocalypse thing?  Is the real deal coming?  Are we all in uber-grave danger of either dying in some horribly fantastical way or being turned into lumbering, flesh-eating, brainless automatons?  Not likley.

However, if you would like a nice diversion that takes a tangent of this conversation, take a look at Romantically Apocalyptic.

So anyway,  back to the reason this post post-hastedly posted post-Morten.. Wait.. who died?  Ah Zombie!

Speaking of zombies, there's a famous one: Rob Zombie.  Hopefully those of you still alive are back on track with me.  I've been busy working on a little something special in the way of a remix / mashup / mixtape thing-a-majiggy.   I'm doing it because it's cool, fun, and a great way to stay in shape.

For those of you who like plain and simple: I'm making a dubstep  mashup of a bunch of White Zombie and Rob Zombie songs.  Did I leave anything out?

If you'll indulge me, I'll share a preview with you in all soon (hopefully), but the bigger point behind this post will become clear in a moment.  First, a quick disclaimer:  I in no way take credit for Rob Zombies work, nor do I intend to sell or make profit in any way shape or form from this remix release.  This is purely for Rob Zombie fans, and Dubstep fans (or any combination thereof) to enjoy!
 


So far I've managed to cut up, mangle, destroy, and dub the heck out of about 4 songs crossing 2 of his most popular albums.

1. White Zombie - Electric Head PT 1 (The Agony)
2. Rob Zombie - Living Dead Girl
3. Rob Zombie - The Ballad of Resurrection Joe and Rosa Whore
4. White Zombie - More Human Than Human

With a growing list of over 18 songs so far, I plan on eventually hitting somewhere around an hour in length for a dubstep mashup of epic zombie proportions!

This all started when Troy and I were discussing what to remix for a fun side-project and Troy put together a quick one of his own as practice.  Pretty awesome for his first attempt if I do say so.

Below I've added a sneak peak of the project in my favorite DAW: Sonar!  I also recently purchased the upgrade to Reason 6... and I freaking love it!

I've missed reason because for a long time there was no 64-bit rewire or 64 bit support period for reason being slaved out to another host.  Well in Sonar's latest update they finally added 64-bit rewire support!

Thank you Propellerheads and Cakewalk!

You should be seeing another update soon as I get further along in the arrangement.  Hope this teaser tickles your fancy... or whatever you have that's interested in music!