Tom Efinger's The Dig It Post

The frame rate error messages are slowing you down. Now what?

Q: Sometimes when I try to import video into a Pro Tools session it gives me a frame rate error message. What's the best way to handle this?—George K., Dallas, TX

A: As you may know, Pro Tools does not support multiple video frame rates in one session. When you try to import a video running at 29.97 into a session with a video running at 23.98 (or any other mismatched combination) you'll get an error message stating Pro Tools “can't import the selected video file because it does not have the same frame rate as the current video in the session.”

There are essentially two ways to handle this depending on your needs: First, if you want to use both videos in the same session, it's easiest to just convert the new video to match the current video's frame rate. There are a handful of great programs that can do this, but the one that stands out to me is MPEGStreamclip. It's a FREE program that can convert almost any format to any other format. It's fast, efficient and it even lets you manually alter frame rates when converting video which makes it ideal for this situation!

Second, if you want to replace the current video with a new one, it's actually very simple but can trip you up unless you know the details. The key is to not only delete the video, but to also remove it from your Regions list as well (if you don't do this the 'mismatched frame rate' error will continue to appear even though the video file seems to have been deleted!). To do this in one quick motion simply highlight the video region in the timeline, press COMMAND + APPLE + B (Windows users: CTRL + SHIFT + B), and click REMOVE. That function simultaneously deletes the region from the timeline as well as removes it from your Regions list, thus allowing you to import any video regardless of frame rate!—Jeff

Found
Our
Groove

By Tom Efinger

In 1997 Dig It was selected to do the sound editing for Lisa Cholodenko’s first feature film, High Art, starring Ally Sheedy, Rahda Mitchell, and Patricia Clarkson. We were very excited about the project from the start. My good friend and business colleague Jeff Kusama-Hinte was producing the film with some other notable producers and had been talking about the film with a glimmer in his eye, like he knew he had something special brewing. I also heard that the band, Shudder To Think, was going to be scoring the film. I heard they were some interesting Rock and Roll characters with real talent. It all seemed to be adding up to something special.

We were informed that not only would Dig It be sound editing and sound designing the film, but the production company also wanted us to work with the band in finessing the score, editing and premixing it all to picture. I had just recently moved Dig It Audio to it’s then newly constructed location on Varick Street, and we were ready to rock.

We started the sound editing work on the film, and at the same time I started to have studio sessions with Shudder To Think to work on the score. There were three members of the band working on the score; Craig Wedren, Nathan Larson, and Stuart Hill. Both Wedren and Larson have gone on to score numerous hit TV and film projects in the years since High Art.

As soon as we started working on the music it was clear that wine glass tones were pretty much the primary instrument. These tones were crisp, clear, and elongated. The movie begins with them and then intermingles bending guitar notes and some other minimal elements. I think the Dig It crew was inspired by what we were hearing in the music sessions and started to formulate how the sound design would work with this ethereal and minimal score. The sound team at Dig It consisted of Damian Volpe, Jonah Lawrence, and myself. Since the score was ethereal, we wanted the sound design to follow suit. The movie opens with Syd viewing slides with a loupe and sliding them into a plastic sleeve. We wanted the sound design to be just as crisp and clean as the score. The production recordings of this scene were too noisy to be turned up to the level we wanted, so we decided to completely drop the production audio and just use foley and sound effects to fill the scene. It really just consisted of ambience and foley of all of Syd’s movements. We did the same with the next couple of scenes as she leaves the building and proceeds down into the subway. We cut all the production sound and just used FX and foley. Then we could really control the elements and stick with clean specific sounds. This was achieving the desired effect, so we took this strategy to other areas of the film.

One of the scenes I remember working on most was the lovemaking scene between Syd and Lucy when they go up to the country house. This is probably the peak scene of the film, and we wanted it to sound great and have that same clean and ethereal feeling. The problem was that even though the production audio was well recorded, the sounds of the sheets moving was very sand papery sounding and abrasive, and the kissing was covered with loud snaps and unattractive mouth noises. Fortunately, the dialog sounded good and they mostly stopped moving when they delivered the lines, so we could strip out the production audio in all the moments when they were on the bed, except for when they talked, and replace it with careful sheet rustle foley and kissing foley. If I remember correctly I think it was Jonah who agreed to be the guy to do the kissing foley. We put him in the recording booth, and he rolled up his sleeve and made the kissing sounds by making out with his inner forearm. This gave us the chance to do several takes to picture and really create some soft and sexy kissing devoid of mouth snaps and pops.

Damien Volpe chose some great ambient and FX sounds for scenes throughout the film. He made a conscious choice to make the backgrounds have softer more elongated ambient sounds. Sweeping “car bys” and bass heavy rumbling “truck bys” played a big role. Also, I remember that he envisioned Lucy and Syd’s loft building to be near an elevated highway like the BQE. He chose one particular ambience of cars going over a metal divider in the road, so the sound was a rhythmic thunk thunk of each car passing by. It became the signature sound of Lucy’s loft when things were quiet.

In an effort to stay with a high art sound concept, we really sought to keep all of the atmospheric effects clean, smooth and on the ethereal side. We avoided loud car honks and people shouting outside and anything that broke with this softer more airy esthetic. 
We mixed the film at Sound One, with Rob Fernandez. Rob was a new young mixer there at the time (he has amassed quite the resume since then). It was a good fit for our team at Dig It. I mixed a few films with Rob before taking over all of the mixing at Dig It in the years since.

High Art was a great experience. Even now when I look back I am happy with the way the sound turned out. I’m not sure we realized it at the time, but I think creating the soundtrack for the film took a measure of restraint. Often when we sound design a New York City film, we fill the backgrounds with busier and more punctuated city sounds, but the aesthetic was set by Lisa and the guys from Shudder To Think, and we just found our groove in the mix.—T.E.

I just got back from a work trip to Baton Rouge Louisiana. I was hired to go there to mix Universal Soldier 4, directed by John Hyams and starring Jean Claude Vandam, Dolf Lundgren, Scott Atkins, and Andrei Arlovsky. I mixed the last movie, Universal Soldier 3 - Regeneration, which turned out well and was happy to get the call to jump on this one. These are big, hard hitting FX movies, so naturally the sound is huge. They are a lot of fun to work on but also a lot of hard work for all of the post sound crew involved.

The other notable thing about this experience is the current situation in Louisiana. As many of you may know, Louisiana has one of the most aggressive rebate programs for film making in the country, and it includes money spent on both production and post-production. Although I have not researched the specifics, the gist of it is that filmmakers can receive around 30% back on all the money they spend for production and post-production in the state. The film business is booming there, and some have even coined Baton Rouge “Hollywood South”. A lot of the work in Baton Rouge is connected to the Celtic Media Center. This is a large Hollywood style lot with 8 large sound stages and a host of other complimentary buildings. It was built several years ago by some Irish investors at a cost of approximately 40 million dollars. While I was there they were shooting a new Tom Cruise movie, titled Oblivion, in one stage, and a movie called The Host, written by Stephenie Meyer of the Twilight series, in another. I talked to several people who were there to work on these and other movies, and a lot of them were transplants from Los Angeles. They were saying that the work has been incredibly steady in Baton Rouge for the last several years.

We mixed in a facility called Post Digital. The mix stage was built as part of the original construction of the entire lot, and is a fairly large stage, approximately 30’x50’ with a 20 foot plus ceiling, a large screen and projector, and an Icon mixing console. We were on a tight schedule for the final mix, and were pretty much working in that stage around the clock for the final week of the project. We would mix long days from around 9am to 9pm, and then the sound editors would add in and premix additional FX and music elements from 9pm to whenever. We had originally planned on doing premixes, resulting in 5.1 stem tracks, that would then be cued up for the final mix, but with all elements coming together very late in the game, we were running all the sound elements from individual tracks, some premixed with automation and some not. It was a crazy amount of material and ran upwards of 200 tracks. Since a good deal of the effects were premixed to each other, like 8 elements that made up a specific gunshot and impact, I utilized VCAs to control groups of elements with one fader. I could then go into the individual tracks to tweak the layers if needed. We created VCAs for Hard FX, gunshots, hits/falls, sound design FX, Fol FX, LFE FX, and Ambience. I would go for the VCAs first and then work down into the layers of tracks from there.

Mixing action films is a tricky balancing act of more but not too much. You want to make a full sounding, super impactful soundtrack, but if you try and push too many elements too loud at the same time you get mush. Walter Murch has written some very insightful material on this subject. I once had the opportunity to watch him give his Apocalypse Now FX demo, where he breaks down the layers for you. What he basically says is that you can only foreground three main audio elements at any given time. He gave the example of the soldiers landing in helicopters on the beach and jumping into action. He foregrounded the music, the helicopter FX, and the Foley FX of the soldiers running by as they left the aircraft. The other elements had to take a background position so that you still have clarity and detail in what you are hearing. The most interesting thing to me was that when he soloed up the sound FX for the 4 helicopters landing on the beach, I heard only the sound for one helicopter. It made a huge impression on me. If there were the sound for 4 helicopters it would be a big throbbing mess of sound. One helicopter engine/blade chop sound was enough to serve for all 4 and left space in the mix for other elements to be heard. It was a lesson I will never forget. I am always trying to find something to turn down as well as something to turn up when mixing big action sequences. Often it’s a dance where different elements take center stage, moment to moment, as a scene progresses.

All in all it was a great experience to go mix on US4 in Baton Rouge. I think it turned out to be a very interesting soundtrack with an atypical music score and plenty of big FX.—Tom Efinger

For
the
Birds?

By Abigail Savage for the Dig It Post

Directors tend to hate birds. It's a curious thing. Not that the particular form of our species called “director” has a personal vendetta against all winged creatures. It's just those damned birds! In the middle of some big dramatic moment, in New York, in the winter, inevitably during the best take: birds. You can tell the crew to be quiet before a take, but you can't tell the birds. They're everywhere, always. To be specific, I'm not talking about the soaring majestic hawk or the evil laughing crow that a sound editor puts in for dramatic effect. I'm talking about those cute little twiddly things that tend to come in packs of twenty and are constantly conversing with each other.

I've often been asked by directors, “Could you just kind of edit out those birds in the background?” Short answer? No. Not really. I won't bore you with the details but trust me, if you've chosen a take to put in your movie that has birds in the background, they're not really going anywhere. We can take the edge off them with EQ but they're never completely gone.

And then there's the country: we sound designers put a nice country ambience in the background during a nice country scene, and time and time again the response from the director is: “I like that background sound but can you get rid of the birds?” If you try to lower a country amb with loud birds on it so the birds don't stand out, you've likely lowered all the good stuff in that ambient sound as well, and you end up with a dead scene. It is very, very hard to find a country ambience that doesn't have at least one lone bird trying to steal the show. They just don't understand!

Over the years I've learned to live with the phenomenon that directors hate birds. But I've decided to take this opportunity to actually understand why. And what I've come up with is that there's both a technical and creative reason for this bird-hate. On the technical side of things, the problem with a bird is that it tends to be pitched right in that upper register that makes your ear twitch up and pay attention. They always tend to be perceived as louder than everything else. This makes a bird-call hard to control in a mix; if birds are there, they're going to be distracting.

As for the creative side of things, I think the big problem with birds is that they always indicate HAPPY and COUNTRY and SPRINGTIME, no matter where you are, or what season it is. Directors just don't buy birds in the background in the winter time (even though there are birds in the winter) or in the city (even though there are tons of birds in the city), and if they're trying to craft a serious or sad scene, directors won't want birds in the way trying to sell their happy-birdy-springtime lifestyle to the audience. But what if it's a happy scene? In the springtime? In the country? A director might not want to have birds in the background during a scene like that precisely because they're an indicator or symbol of all those things—they're clichéd.

So technically, and creatively, birds never win. I kind of feel sorry for them.

The best solution, as a sound editor, is to avoid ambiences with specific birds in them—find a few go-to country ambs that you can rely on, that are more washes of sound and are less active than might be your first inclination. Or create an ambience like that by removing the inevitable lone bird calls and suturing the background track back together, to create a continuous, bird-free ambience. And if you feel strongly that birds can lend themselves well to a scene, use a single track of a specific and clean set of bird calls, so the director can request a bird to be cut out of the background and it won't effect the overall texture of your work.

Isolate those birds; quarantine them. And when faced with dialog that has birds built in to the recording, first and foremost be honest with the director that they'll never entirely disappear. Cut out what you can, and try to EQ out what's left. Maybe, just maybe, the director will grow to love and appreciate those birds. But I doubt it. Poor birds.—A.S.

Mike Birbiglia's new film Sleepwalk With Me recently had a great run at Sundance, winning the Best of NEXT Audience Award, and I wanted to take this opportunity to use Sleepwalk to discuss a fundamental element of sound design: trial and error.

A major thread in Birbiglia's film is a set of sequences depicting Matt's (Mike's filmic alter ego) dreams as he is having sleepwalking episodes. Before I even saw a full cut of the film, and long before it was done being edited, I was handed the dream sequences to work on. One scene, nicknamed “Pizza Pillow,” was of particular concern: early test audiences were having trouble knowing whether it was a dream or not. I was given a clear direction from Mike: make sure the audience knows that what they're watching really is a dream when the action starts getting weird. At this stage of the game, there was only temp score in the film, and the temp score that was in this scene was not working. Mike was flirting with the idea of having no score at all and trying a version of “Pizza Pillow” with only sound effects design.

Next came the fun part of experimenting. There is an important moment later in the film that has to do with broken glass, and I thought it might be fun to make a dreamy glass element that could come in halfway through the Pizza Pillow scene. So I put that in. I put in a low droney rumble, a classic go-to for dreamlike sequences (think Donny Darko or anything by David Lynch). Then I tried experimenting with the characters' voices—they were both stand-up comics, so I thought it might be interesting to have their voices slowly morph until they sounded like they were talking through blown-out mics on a stage. That made me think about mic feedback and how it's used to indicate humiliation or awkward moments—an appropriate evocation in this scene, so I threw that in as well. I created a funky warbley sound from a big plastic sheet, and threw that in. I recorded some ambient drones and pads off my keyboard and threw those in. And then I handed the scene back to Mike.

My new super sound FX version was cut into a test screening of the film. And—it didn't work. The scene used to get a laugh; my version clearly did not. The glass FX came off as scary, and this dream was supposed to be exciting and funny. The vocal FX were too aggressive and obscured the dialog, a cardinal sin in film sound. Dialog is the single most important thing, and I was making it too hard to hear! All in all, most of the FX were not working.

But that was an incredibly valuable piece of information. Now we knew that taking the scene too far in a 'dreamworld' direction was pulling the audience out of the film, not into it. We knew those sounds weren't helping to tell the story. And we could only have found this out by first trying it on for size. We were finding out that what was really needed was just enough sound delineation in these sequences to signal that we knew we weren't quite in reality, but not so much that the audience would be alienated from the substance of the dreams. They are real enough to Matt as he is dreaming them. They should be real enough to us as an audience experiencing them.

As a sound editor, I like to try pretty much everything; put it all in, mix it all up, and see what floats to the top. You never know what will work, or what a director will be responsive to. You never know, for instance, if the wind sound in their head will match the wind sound in your head. So what do I do? I cut in a lot of different wind sounds. Anything that sounds good. Anything that might possibly strike a chord, and we edit down from there. That's what happened with “Pizza Pillow.” We lost most of the vocal FX and dialed back what we left in. We lost the plastic warbles. We lost the mic feedback. We highlighted the foley on the pizza and the rush of the tomato-sauce coming from the garden hose, and we kept some of the lower drones – they were working quite nicely with the newly finished final music, a great piece by Andrew Hollander, the composer on the film.

Indeed, Andrew Hollander's score turned out to be the final key ingredient in the dream sequences. It was light and quirky and dreamy in a way that the FX were not, and it immediately let the audience know that what they were watching was a dream, without pulling them too far out of the narrative or breaking with the tone of the film. This ended up being a perfect example of how score can sometimes do the heavy lifting in a scene instead of the sound effects. Of course, sometimes it's the other way around. There's a constant dance between the two. Frequently they play nicely together, and just as often one needs to take center stage.

But that's a whole different article in the making.—Abigail Savage for The Dig It Post