According to Manchester, the layback process has become a huge issue. If your picture editor is picking music beds and cutting them to picture but by default becomes the final stop on the train, be careful.
Some products - Sonicfire Pro 5 comes to mind - are available as plug-ins, and the best of them make it remarkably easy to tailor prerecorded music tracks to the needs of your video. Some of these products are very good, and high-quality music libraries are available on CDs and as downloads that make it very easy to match sound to picture.
It's one thing for a picture editor to use the audio tools that are packaged with Avid, Final Cut Pro or several of the other prominent picture editing software packages. He says the line between the prosumer and pro markets has muddied things up, and budget-conscious producers often hire inexperienced audio engineers, causing quality control to suffer. He's also a music mixer for NBC's “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” Manchester has engineered scores for three Academy Award-winning films (“The Departed,” “Frida” and “The Red Violin”). Lawrence Manchester seconds what Klyce has to say about the relationship between budgetary pressure and the still developing state of digital recording technologies. Klyce says some aspects of the process have gotten easier as the technology has developed, but that turning out a quality product involves a certain skill level that can't be put into a box. Looking to work on the cheap can force producers into a corner as well. He says the danger is that the next generation won't be aware of the possibilities that high-end recording studios bring. Assured that the equipment they invested in would allow for seamless transitions from homes to major post facilities, audio post specialists began beefing up their project studios, just as their recording brethren had done a few years earlier.Īccording to Ren Klyce, who mixed the music to “The Social Network” (for which composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won Oscars), major recording studios, like Plant Studios where Stevie Wonder once recorded, are closing down.
When Avid purchased DigiDesign, the deal was essentially sealed, but it took another decade or so for things to shake out and for Pro Tools to climb the throne and declare itself the king of all recording formats for all applications, including audio post. Many, including a number of the most highly regarded facilities in the business, went under.Īudio post remained largely unaffected at first because multiple analog and digital formats (high priced for the most part) kept fighting with one another. One by one, studios that relied on soup to nuts tracking and mixing to meet payroll began to struggle. The Alesis ADAT brought high-quality digital recording equipment into the price range of every working musician on the planet, or so it seemed. For starters, let's consider the home studio revolution that fundamentally altered the way records - at least most of them, including major studio releases - are produced and recorded.