Cinema loudness has been a real issue for both film mixers and audiences for years, and the EBU has updated the R128 recommendations with some wording about cinema mixes. It will be interesting to see what happens from here, but here is a basic summary from 344 Audio: https://www.344audio.com/post/article-the-end-of-cinematic-mixing
This is a short “Technical Notes” article that I wrote for the Australian Wildlife Sound Recording Group’s Journal, AudioWings, a couple of years ago. It is intended as an introduction to what phase or polarity is in the context of nature sound recording. Thanks to Sue Gould, the editor of the journal at the time … Read more Understanding Ø/Phase
Around 2 years ago I needed to record some atmos/SFX for a scene for a feature film which featured some driving in a van. To cover it adequately for a 5.1 surround mix I used 6 microphones and did some takes or passes where I was using audio cues in headphones to “perform” the driving … Read more Multitrack Recording Van/Vehicle Sound Effects
Airwiggles recently held an online conference (AirCon 2023) covering many aspects of audio production with “over 50 hours of live talks, panels, and interviews featuring inspiring audio professionals from around the world.” A lot of the events sounded interesting but the times of the events were usually not great for me to attend in real … Read more AirCon Audio Conference Recordings
Mike Thornton has written up a useful article for the Production Expert blog discussing the various metering options in Pro Tools, along with a little history on the different metering approaches. Worth reading for any audio folk: https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/understanding-advanced-metering-in-pro-tools
At the Schoeps MikroForum 2018, Hyunkook Lee (Senior Lecturer in Music Technology and the Leader of the Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL) at the University of Huddersfield, UK) gave a presentation discussing psychoacoustics in a 3D sound context which included some fascinating information about vertical localisation for 3D and immersive sound recording formats. A key note … Read more Psychoacoustics of 3D sound recording techniques
Craig Smith from the School of Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts undertook a huge digitisation project to archive rolls of film and tape containing sound effects from the 1930s to 1950s from Hollywood, and shared them on freesound.org under a Creative Commons 0 license. This is a generous and valuable undertaking to preserve … Read more Classic Hollywood Sound Effects on Freesound
Wired Magazine have done up a short video featuring Dave Rat discussing the evolution of music festival PA systems from point source rigs to line arrays, and the benefits that have come from this transition. Dave Rat explains the key points in a great and easy to understand manner. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/8c-gD4mwI8A
Schoeps have made a cool short video that demonstrates a few common polar responses for microphones. Check it out below.
UK Mastering guru Ian Shepherd from Production Advice presented a talk at a recent AES event focussed on “Mastering in the Streaming Era”. It starts with a general overview of what mastering is, but then goes into some more detail around considerations of mastering in the current era including loudness, normalisation and perceptual coding. You … Read more Ian Shepherd AES Mastering Talk