Buy Some Headphones

By: Jane St Vincent Welch and Anna Craney (ASE)

About 60 people attended the Big Sound and Vision Day, an afternoon seminar jointly organised by the Australian Screen Sound Guild and the Australian Screen Editors on Saturday June 1 at the NIDA Theatre.

Everyone seemed to arrive on the dot of five past two and then got down to cheerful talk about who was doing what, when and why. Then, realising we were all there to learn something, the audience raced in to hear Andrea Lang and her welcome for the first speaker, Stephen Smith, president of the ASSG and owner of Tracks Television.

Stephen began by explaining how important it was for us to be there. "I think it's a good idea the two Guilds work together on areas where we have a common interest to open up communication." He then introduced Julius Chan and Philip Purcell who would talk about how this could be done.

Julius Chan
Julius Chan was introduced as a self confessed techno Nazi. Julius started by introducing us to some colourful soundies' acronyms: PEBKAC - problem exists between keyboard and chair; FUBAR - fucked up beyond all repair; and CUF - carbon unit failure. Use at your own risk.

He accompanied his very entertaining and informative talk with a power point presentation of a lot of pictures of motorbikes and some rude bits. Julius has worked on features as diverse as Babe and The Hard Word, as well as TV drama. He deals mainly with OMFs from Avid rather than EDLs. He gets very few OMFs from Lightworks and he says they're often problematic.

Running through the pros and cons of OMFs and EDLs, Julius noted that the main drawback of using OMFs for film post production was that the loading of the audio was done in the picture department where the environment is often "not very sound friendly". Monitoring and pathways may not be correctly set-up or not of good quality and sound problems may not be identified until later, sometimes not until the final mix.

On the positive side, OMFs eliminated the double handling of media and sped things up. For a feature EDL conform Julius allowed a week for loading and two to three days for synching and checking, whereas an OMF transfer could be done in half a day.

Sometimes a disaster happens, like when the OMF of an entire scene just disappeared and they had no EDL reference! That particular job had to be manually synched up and took days to find what takes had been used.

Communication with the sound team was the key to smooth OMF preparation, according to Julius. He likes to go to the picture facility when the OMF is being done "to check the right buttons are being pushed".

One bit of software he would like to see in picture facilities is Digidesign's Digitranslator, which allows picture editors to open OMFs in a ProTools session to check it's all correct. In the meantime, Julius recommended having the spotting session at the sound facility that could serve a dual purpose to check the OMF transfer and sound quality.

Julius said he would like to see "big, long, nasty handles", up to 10 seconds from picture editors. Assistant picture editors could also help sound editors by making separate bins for wild lines, spot fx and atmos, which could then make up part of the OMF transfer.

Philip Purcell
Philip Purcell works mainly on television series such as Getaway and RPA. He has hours or days to work on projects so OMF has been very helpful.

Previously, EDL conform was a luxury - the editor would often have to output two or four tracks from the Avid to tape to be mixed with no handles unless track space allowed overlaps.

Philip works on stand-alone Fairlight systems and is using AV transfer, a new third-party software support for Fairlight that cleans up OMFs, fulfilling the same function as DigiTranslator for ProTools. While still not yet bug-free, Philip sees it as a great leap forward.

The main drawback of OMF, according to Philip, is that it's not standardised, everyone implements it differently. He looks forward to the introduction of AES31, an international standard currently being formulated.

With quick turnaround television that is mixed in half a day, Philip said the editor was effectively the tracklayer, so it's important that there is some common sense in the tracks. For example stereo pairs must be on 1&2, 3&4, 5&6 etc, not 6&7. As for handles, he's grateful for any at all, just to allow for a cut to be a fade or for a more accurate hard cut. If there are no handles, he says, it's no better than working off the old tape cut-only output.

Editors coming on to a series needed to talk to their sound team before they digitised and also check the sample rate the other episodes had been using. If they cut an episode using a different sample rate, it means the sound team can't use any of their library sounds. "Generally it doesn't make the editor's life more difficult, it just means we're all playing on the same field."

Talking and making sure you both understand the terms and the technology helps stop problems recurring.

Panel discussion
Sound editor and owner of Digital City Studios, Michael Gissing said he and editor Emma Hay (AFI winner for editing Secret Safari), said they had started the "No OMF" Club. They found the time taken to-ing and fro-ing to get the OMF right mean there was no time advantage over an EDL conform, but there was a discernable advantage in the sound editor going back to camera tapes - the technical quality was better.Input levels could be standardised, especially when a mix of source formats could be used.

Michael reckoned EDLs for docos could be loaded in about five hours, whereas he doesn't have the time to go over and massage the picture editor to get the OMF right.

Philip Purcell pointed out that these days, editors often extract music and even sound fx directly from CD, making it impossible to re-conform, since there are no camera tapes or DATs for those elements. He went on to explain that this introduced yet another problem, since CD's of course are always at 44.1KHz, and while it was possible to convert 44.1k audio from CD to 48k, the conversion was often badly handled and could lead to some sound degradation. Panellists recommended dubbing CD materials to DAT or Betacam and emphasised the importance of always digitising from timecoded source material, just in case an EDL conform was required.

Julius said the inclusion of dissolves and rubber-banding was no problem for ProTools, but according to Philip, they created a lot of problems for Fairlight and he recommended making a copy stripping off all effects. Philip also always advises putting two-pips on the head and tail of each track to check sync as the Fairlight tended to delete effects like fades and pull up the track by that amount. The pips helped detect any drifts of synch. The Fairlight also takes hours to open its OMF files, unless you use AVTransfer to open them.

Michael Gissing had some final advice to editors to help overcome the vagaries of audio set-ups in editing suites. "Buy a pair of headphones - then you know what things sound like and you can always plug them in the front of the deck bypassing everything else."

After a break the audience watched clips from two films - Secret Safari and Stolen Generations - edited by Emma and mixed by Michael. Michael began by declaring that in documentaries it was the content and not the performance that was at the core of the discussion-making as material may not have been shot in ideal or controllable environments.

Emma said she might choose a noisy interview in the street over a quieter one in an office because it told the story the best way. This created a challenge for the sound team who had to work hard to make the sound as clear as possible, especially when the interview was used as voice-over.

When creating sound for archival footage, Emma and Michael agreed there were no rules - it came down to a matter of taste and time as to how you used the sound. You must be careful that sound effects didn't draw away from the story, but enhance it whilst remaining convincing.

Michael made the point that a run through with the editor and director was really important to understand the style and tone of the film. This is beyond the information that tracks on their own can reveal. For example, establishing where a character lives could be done through sound clues. Michael said a one hour documentary would take about six days over a two week turnaround with either OMF or EDLs.

Next to grace the stage were sound editor Andrew Plain (Charlotte Gray, Lantana, Facing the Music) accompanied by editor Dany Cooper (Angel Baby, The Well, Queen of the Damned).

Andrew talked about the studio system in the US. It was alright to lay tracks and do rough mixes in Canada, but the final mix had to be done in Hollywood - they did not trust personnel or facilities outside Los Angeles.

Andrew also talked about the strict pecking order present in a mix, as in who tells the mixer what to do, from the producer down to the sound editor. However in the mixing studio for director Michael Rymer's In Too Deep, the Americans were horrified that Andrew and Dany both had a say in the final mix.

Dany said it was necessary to take the whole picture of film as a combination of light, movement, dialogue, sound effects, music and projection when cutting. "I don't just edit the pictures, I try to imagine the sounds as I am editing or temp them in, because they are the things that support the suspense, drama, emotion etc, all culminating in that suspense of disbelief that makes cinema," she said. "The pictures are like line drawings and the sound adds colour and texture and I guess where necessary, the glue."

Dany also said sound added dramatic shape to a show. "If I am thinking sound-wise when I cut, then my rhythms will allow space to be filled and for silence. A good sound editor enhances the work that has already been done and can take mine and a director's work to another plane."