Ambisonics has been around for decades, but it seems like it is currently undergoing a resurgence in popularity, with a number of ambisonic sound effects libraries going on sale recently, and more interest in it for Virtual Reality productions. An endorsement of that is that Google have created Omnitone, which is “a Javascript implementation of … Read more Google Omnitone
Zach Poff is a Digital Media Artist, Educator, and Maker of Things. On his website he has some great resources including some DIY projects (I have used his info on the Alex Rice Piezo Preamplifier before). Zach has a couple of interesting pieces of software, including a Soundscape Composer which looks cool, but I haven’t used, and … Read more Pitch Playground
Ever wondered what a Hollywood film budget looks like? Website The Smoking Gun has some interesting resources including a copy of the budget for M Night Shyamalan’s film “The Village”. The budget comes to over $70 million US dollars. According to IMDB, the gross box office income for the film came to over $110 million. … Read more The Village Film Budget
Bob Katz is one of the masters of technical audio. His book Mastering Audio is an amazing reference book. In this article he discusses his approach to setting up a subwoofer with (almost) no test instruments: http://www.digido.com/articles-and-demos12/13-bob-katz/14-subwoofers.html
The Sample Rate Conversion Comparison Project hosted by Infinite Wave Mastering is an interesting tool for comparing the quality of sample rate conversion in different audio software. It is interesting to see how much it can vary, although overall, newer versions of most software looks pretty good. For a bad example check out Ableton 7. For a … Read more Sample Rate Conversion Comparisons
Having some multitrack music projects available for practice or classes can be pretty handy, and there is quite a varied collection available at: http://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm
The MEAA’s draft market rates for screen industry crew are published here: Get Real On Rates Production Sound Mixer, Sound Designer, Supervising Sound Editor and Re-recording Mixers have a suggested minimum of $2,200 per week, with Boom Ops at $1,800 and other non-supervising sound editorial staff at $1,850. These rates are wages for time only, … Read more Get Real on Rates
Another older blog post from film-mixing.com discusses a few of the issues relating to doing a separate mix for DVD movie releases. The method for dealing with frame rate conversions for the audio from 24 to 25 fps is an interesting approach that I wasn’t actually aware of. Check it out at: Audio for DVD … Read more Audio for DVD
“I just learned a lot of lessons on the job, that took me, probably took me about 10 years to learn what I could have learned in a couple of years of school.” – Mark Mothersbaugh in this nice little 1 minute stop motion animation. Mothersbaugh is one of the great composers of our time, … Read more Mark Mothersbaugh on Learning about Timecode
There seems to be a whole raft of short films about Foley lately. Here is another really well put together one called “The Secret World of Foley”: The Secret World of Foley from Short of the Week on Vimeo.