Mixing too quiet means mixing too loud

If you're not trying to be really obnoxious to your office-mates you might think that it would be better to mix with your monitors turned down to a reasonable level. It's not. Indeed it means you have to mix over again.

In film there is a standard for how "loud" you should mix. Specifically, your monitors should be at 85dB SPL (measured in noise bands) from each speaker at the mix position with the meters at -20dB Fs. Does that make sense?
This is actually pretty loud. Louder than what you should be doing with music actually (my rule with mixing music is that you should be able to talk over it comfortably. That's how you know you're at about the right level.) Now the other thing with film mixing is that you typically have to hard-limit each channel at -12dB Fs. This may be more of a broadcast issue actually. But considering that -12dB Fs is 93dB SPL from each speaker it's a good idea to not go above that level anyway.
As an aside (isn't this entire post an aside?) I've often wondered why they fellows at Dolby or whomever decided to lose 12db of headroom from mixes. My only guess is that if all six channels of a 5.1 mix are limited to -12dB it becomes very hard to actually go above 0dB Fs when you mix all those channels together, even if you do it clumsily. That's my guess.
Anyway, remember about how 85dB SPL should equal -20dB Fs? Well even when I'm mixing "correctly" I don't even go that loud. I set my system to 72dB SPL at -20dB Fs. This makes mixes "louder" than if I'd done them at 85dB because I'm pushing the faders up more to make up for the fact that my monitors are turned down.
But this whole complaint is that I'd mixed the first pass of the Dead Residents movie even quieter than 72dB (somewhere around 60? Maybe?) and all of those mixes just slammed into those -12dB limiters way too often and too hard, losing any sort of dynamics in the mix and actually making it a bit distorted.
So, mixing quieter means mixing louder. Right?
Somebody re-write this so it makes sense.

Angry Planet on DVD

Angry Planet, the Mac Rogers-penned sci-fi picture we shot a while back, is out on DVD in North America.

Fun fact, by searching for "Angry Planet movie" I found that the design was come up through 99Designs.
There were some nice designs submitted. Some were based on an older piece of art for the movie (the art used for the streaming version of the movie.)

Those different versions of Daryl Boling are pretty amusing.
Order yours on Amazon or what-have-you. Buy some for the kids! (You know how the kids are always wearing through DVD's -- buy plenty of extras for 'em.)

Setup, Tears, Dastoli, Time

Okay, Michael Arndt on the setting-up of a story.

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I really dig the Dastoli Brothers. They do some very nice visual effects work. And not just CG either, they have some very sweet miniature work too. The "tutorials" they do are super-advanced. I can only barely keep up with what they're talking about.

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Sydney Australia is like 14 hours ahead of NYC time. Scheduling a mutually agreeable time to live-record a commentary track (especially when most of your people on NY time are doing day jobs with evening theater) is quite an achievement.

Whew, Finished

So last night around ten o'clock I "finished" Dead Raid (the new title for Dead Residents.)
Immediately, of course, I found an error -- some missing bullet hits and ricochets in the first act. But there's a whole movie, color-corrected, with 5.1 mixes in both full English and with the Music and Effects split out.

At this point in the movie-making process I'm usually pretty annoyed with the movie I've been working on. And no, I don't typically blog about that. But this picture I'm still feeling pretty good about. A lot of the effects the writer, Steven Niles, was going for worked. Those can be hard for a director (me) to pull off but I think that somehow we did.
We're late on the delivery for this movie. Originally we'd promised February 1 (and you'll notice it's early April now). But we created a new prologue (and postlogue) which are kinda fun. The movie will be delivered by Cannes.
There's still a tremendous amount of work to do. First there's the quality-control checks. New mixes, new renders of effects, all that sort of thing has to be dealt with -- all in an effort to make the movie better. A complete transcription of the audio, along with timecode, has to be created. And just for fun, a copy of every single contract has to be double-checked and scanned and made into .pdf files. Then there will be a load of other paperwork -- mostly me signing pieces of paper which say how long the movie is, what the aspect ratio was, and a notarized form promising that the movie was made in the United States. 
I'd love to say I'm going to take the weekend off. But we have two more movies lined up for this year and somebody's got to get on the pre-production train for 'em.

Roger and the Therapeutic Therapist

A short from our own Montserrat Mendez.

Le Maitre Neutron Hazer Maintain

If the Neutron is running and not displaying any error codes via the LED at the rear of the unit it most likely just needs to be adjusted.

First make sure the air pump is running and that the small plastic bottle on the same side as the heat tube is not full of fluid, if it is remove, clean, dry, and reinstall.

If you are comfortable doing so, remove the side cover (10 screws) to gain access to the PCB, just above the fan at the center bottom of the PCB there is a blue potentiometer w/ a white center, use a small flat  screwdriver and in small increments turn the pot to adjust haze output, too far on way or the other will slow/increase the fluid pump and cause no output or cause too much fluid and spit fluid with the haze.

 

 

Those are the notes from Le Maitre themselves on how to get our hazer to behave properly.

Foley For You

Recording the RC car.

So today I bought an radio controlled car. And not for the 9-year-old-boy reason you think I did. No. 

We've needed something to make robot sounds for quite some time now. And the dude at Pilotage Hobby came up with with this RC car as a relatively inexpensive way to get servo sounds. 

The picture above shows the car on its back, on top of a music stand, being recorded by a Rode NT1. 

The servos seem to change in quality over time. We'll see how it all works out. 

Tomorrow will be robot Foley day in the Pandora Machine, that's for sure.

Redbox Android

You know what my take-away was from this negative review of Android Insurrection?

The movie is in RedBox y'all!

Big ol' tip of the hat to Tom "sunglass-wearing cocky bastard" Rowen.

Foley Kontakt

Alejandro Cabrera released a free Native Instruments Kontakt instrument of Foley footsteps. You launch the Kontakt player and then you select "indoors" or "outdoors" and then the type of shoes. Could you use a wider selection of each? Of course. But it's free. Is it worth paying for? Yes. Do you have to? No.

Signo makes a number of different Foley instruments for Kontakt too.
Note that you need the full version of Kontakt for these instruments to work for you (at least for more than about 15 minutes).
I haven't actually tried these in a post-production environment but it seems like you could really do a lot by "playing" your Foley on a keyboard. Frequently one is "playing" footsteps by "walking" with shoes in one's hands so it's not that far out a concept. It's certainly worth a try.
(Kontakt is a software "instrument" you play with a MIDI keyboard or similar.)

Day 14

So apparently at some point I said "Doesn't there need to be a prologue to this movie?" And apparently the answer was "yes".

Virginia Logan takes one for the team.

So now we have a new opening. Steven J. Niles re-wrote a terrible outline I'd created. Then we brought in Anouk and Kire.

Kire Tosevski rockin' the post-apocalypse with my sherpa sunglasses.

Then I got the bright idea that Anouk should play the thing mostly in French and dance around. I did a little dance for her to show her what I meant. She looked at me like I was insane.

The Queen of Mars did that awesome Yellow Sign tattoo on Anouk Dutruit.

Robot 43 (Maduka Steady) comes to the rescue.

We shot entirely in the basement of my building. I'm so lucky to have such an understanding super.

I'm just amazed at how inherently limited the color palette is. It has something to do with the way I suck the color out on camera but still, the art direction is perfect for us.

I just wanted a shot with this kind of depth in this sequence.

And you wonder why you get the notes you do

I gave notes on a script. I hate giving notes on a script. But it tends to be that writers (say) they hate it worse when I just go and re-write and that they'd prefer notes. As the Queen of Mars says, writers don't like notes. They like cookies.

So this was the response I got to my notes:

"[This] is such a ridiculous, audience-alienating idea, I can only ask, why?" 

I made the mistake of trying to explain why. But that didn't work. Instead I got:

"If it seems like I'm pushing back, it's when the notes seem arbitrary or just plain crazy."

So. "Arbitrary" and "just plain crazy". There ya go then.

Tutorials

If AfterEffects is your bag, this Video Copilot tutorial on volumetric light effects is amazing. I mean it's freakin' amazing.
Volumetric light.
In AfterEffects.

This tutorial on color-correction by Stu Maschwitz is very cool. I know I've linked to it before but I just re-watched it and so there.

Wherin I Demand Global Shutter, and Then Don't

You know, the need for sensors any larger than the ones we have seems to have disappated. Back in the olden days (10 years ago) distributors and buyers would complain about folks not shooting on 35mm because (among other things) the depth of field is so much greater on a small-sensor video camera than on the "big sensor" of 35mm motion picture film.
We used the equivalent of a 35mm sensor on Angry Planet and Alien Insurrection using a Letus camera adapter. Oh, and Clonehunter.
But starting with Day II we've been using a micro 4/3rds format camera. At first it was the GH1 and now the GH3. We save a lot of weight on the camera rig by not having that Letus adapter (although that adapter does look nice, I kinda like everything Letus does.)
The micro 4/3rds is bigger than Super-16 but not as big as 35. But you know what? It's big enough. You open that puppy all the way to f2.8 with a long lens and you have some nice softness in your background. And also it isn't a bear to focus. It's kind of the best of both worlds.

Gratuitous armor.

Thing is, with the micro 4/3rds cameras we now have to contend with rolling shutter.
You see a bunch of tests on the Internet showing the skewing that rolling shutter does. And, for instance, on my brother's camera footage from his quad copter you can see the propellers "bend" from the rolling shutter.
But for most practical situations you just never see the rolling shutter. Even in hand-held fight scenes with whip pans the issue of the rolling shutter seldom makes itself apparent to the naked eye. Yeah, if you freeze a frame you can see that vertical lines are bendy. But other than that, who really cares?
Well, I'll tell ya, you care when you go to do a composite with a handheld camera. On the GH1 we learned (after struggling in post with the GH1) to be very careful when compositing in a background on a handheld shot. So we started being very religious about locking down the camera when we were going to be compositing (say) giant robots in the background.
When I realized this I started jonesing for a (somewhat) large-sensor camera with a global shutter.
The other significant issue with the GH1 was the way the blacks got very noisy in low-contrast environments. This causes these obnoxious horizontal bands across the screen that are impossible to get rid of.
So we moved up to the GH3 with a single f2.8 zoom (uh, 14mm to 35?) The GH3 has improved on that noise in the blacks (which was dinging us in QC) but also behaves better as far as rolling shutter artifacts are concerned. I have no idea what magic the engineers at Panasonic are doing but it's rather magical.
In any case, it seems we have a much easier time doing composites with handheld shots. And that's really almost all I care about.
Here's a video of footage from the GH4. The GH4 is a 4K camera. I don't really care about 4K. Nobody else does either.
But there's a lot of nice motion without (what I can see at least) a lot of rolling shutter artifacts.

Dragon Reign Poster

More questions than answers! ;-)