Over the last three or so years I've noticed a rapidly growing trend to use .mp3 encoded music and sound effect cues in trailers, promos, commercials television and film. Now I love the convenience of .mp3 files for my iPod, iPhone and Blackberry, but I hate the sound of them, especially if I'm trying to mix it into a spot with narration and sound effects. Everything gets this haze of mud and grit over it. It's sort of the audio equivalent of doing a high-definition picture finish using VHS source material.
I do understand the workflow considerations for why .mp3 files make it into a project in the first place. Everything today has to be faster and cheaper. It's the nature of business in the first decade of the new century. The one thing that gets moved to the back of the bus is quality. Quality; it's one thing that we, as a country used to hold in very high regard and took much pride in. Today it seems to be an annoying afterthought.
One example was a project I worked on where they licensed a Who song for 6 advertising spots. Now a Who song does not come cheap, and an ad campaign that has a budget to use a Who song is one that lasts a number of weeks, if not months. This song was the music bed for the whole spot...a key element in the "sell" of the spot. The familiarity of that song that will draw people in. The song was available as a CD at any Best Buy, WalMart, Amazon, or local indie record store, yet after months of editing and production, not one person thought to send a $12 an hour production assistant on a 30 minute trip to buy a $15.00 disc. They sent me the spots to finish using a .mp3 file; of a Who song!!!. You cannot convince me that they had no time to go out and buy the CD and overcut the music or request a high fidelity copy from the publisher. They could spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to license the song, but not the $100 or so it would have cost to get a hi-fidelity version of it and cut it in? That is absurd. At the very LEAST, the publisher, who is making a small fortune for licensing the song and have the best interests of the artists in mind should have required it. Have they NO SHAME?!!!
Music libraries, publishers, producers, sound and music supervisors, editors and mixers are all guilty, though some have a lot more say in what we will settle for than others. We all have the deadlines and budgets to deal with, but at some point we really have to stand back and make some value judgments. Do we really want to settle for mediocrity just to save $15 on a multi-million dollar movie or advertising spot?
What can we do about it? We can set some standards. We can all make calls to the production music companies and insist on a minimum of 44.1 16 bit files. We are paying them good money to license their songs and they give us crap quality files so that they can save a bit of drive space on their servers.
We can remind producers that using .mp3 files make their spots sound muddy, grungy and take longer to mix because of that fact. .mp3 files just don't blend in as well and downmix horribly.
We can remind editors that .mp3 files are great for auditioning music and sound FX, but should NEVER EVER be imported into a sequence. Grow a set my friends and just say no.
Let's take some pride in our work and strive to make our projects sound better, not worse. We have 24bit 192k available to us and we settle for a product meant to be played through a pair of sweaty earbuds? That's how far we've fallen in the quest for quality? Time for a change.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Penteo and Surround Sound
Much of my work over the last few years has been in broadcast and consumer (DVD/Blu-ray) promos and trailers. After years of procrastination, my clients finally pulled the trigger on mixing spots in surround sound. The problem I'm finding is that unlike the film world, where music score is often recorded and mixed in LCR or 5.1, the great majority of my source material is stereo only.
This was never a problem with stereo only mixing, but when it comes to 5.1, many times the only thing that ends up in the center channel is the voice over and dialog bites and the odd sound effect. The music was losing it's punch. Since much of the production or popular music that's used in today's promos has heavy phantom center information, you end up having to ride the music bed into oblivion to make room for the dialog or VO. I wanted to be able to dip the center panned information to clear that hole without having to also remove all of my left/right information.
I've tried the T.C. Unwrap and the Waves UM225 and UM226, and though all of these did take my stereo sources to surround, I was never too pleased with the results. All of these solutions did take stereo to surround, but none to gracefully. There was always a center that swam a bit and a phasey artifacting. Once you "unwrapped" your source, it would not downmix to stereo or mono without sounding like it was mixed in a swimming pool.
Then I got a call from Chris Stone, my old boss from the Record Plant days about Penteo. With John Wheeler at the helm, Tom Scott and Tom Kobayashi all invloved in the company, it had some great minds behind it, so I had to check it out.
At this point I have to say that since trying Penteo, I've become one of their evangelists here in Los Angeles, though I am not a paid employee of the company, nor have they flown me to Hawaii for a golf outing or given me center court seats to the Lakers.
After they sent me a set of .wav files that included the original stereo files and a Penteo processed LCR extraction. It was pretty impressive. Not only did it create a solid center channel from the existing phantom center, but a nice Left Right minus the center panned information.
Better yet, when I mono'd out the LCR extraction, it sounded exactly like the mono'd original stereo version. No swimming center or distracting phasing artifacts.
Quentin Tarantino even sent his vinyl collection to Penteo to process it for use in the Inglorious Basterds soundtrack.
For me, other than the obvious advantage to having LCR music cues available in a mix, the folks at Penteo can turn around music cues very quickly. In my trailer and promo world, where it seems we have to turn around spots in hours, quick turnaround is essential. Television and film mixers have also joined the ranks of the "get it done NOW" world, so having a team that can jump on a job is a great advantage.
Penteo is worth checking out. Give me a call at Post Haste Media and set up an appointment to come hear it or we can come to your facility and let you hear it on some of your own projects.
This was never a problem with stereo only mixing, but when it comes to 5.1, many times the only thing that ends up in the center channel is the voice over and dialog bites and the odd sound effect. The music was losing it's punch. Since much of the production or popular music that's used in today's promos has heavy phantom center information, you end up having to ride the music bed into oblivion to make room for the dialog or VO. I wanted to be able to dip the center panned information to clear that hole without having to also remove all of my left/right information.
I've tried the T.C. Unwrap and the Waves UM225 and UM226, and though all of these did take my stereo sources to surround, I was never too pleased with the results. All of these solutions did take stereo to surround, but none to gracefully. There was always a center that swam a bit and a phasey artifacting. Once you "unwrapped" your source, it would not downmix to stereo or mono without sounding like it was mixed in a swimming pool.
Then I got a call from Chris Stone, my old boss from the Record Plant days about Penteo. With John Wheeler at the helm, Tom Scott and Tom Kobayashi all invloved in the company, it had some great minds behind it, so I had to check it out.
At this point I have to say that since trying Penteo, I've become one of their evangelists here in Los Angeles, though I am not a paid employee of the company, nor have they flown me to Hawaii for a golf outing or given me center court seats to the Lakers.
After they sent me a set of .wav files that included the original stereo files and a Penteo processed LCR extraction. It was pretty impressive. Not only did it create a solid center channel from the existing phantom center, but a nice Left Right minus the center panned information.
Better yet, when I mono'd out the LCR extraction, it sounded exactly like the mono'd original stereo version. No swimming center or distracting phasing artifacts.
Quentin Tarantino even sent his vinyl collection to Penteo to process it for use in the Inglorious Basterds soundtrack.
For me, other than the obvious advantage to having LCR music cues available in a mix, the folks at Penteo can turn around music cues very quickly. In my trailer and promo world, where it seems we have to turn around spots in hours, quick turnaround is essential. Television and film mixers have also joined the ranks of the "get it done NOW" world, so having a team that can jump on a job is a great advantage.
Penteo is worth checking out. Give me a call at Post Haste Media and set up an appointment to come hear it or we can come to your facility and let you hear it on some of your own projects.
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