Pete Sperring’s Online Presence

Hey Production people.  I’ve posted my task 3 write up as a page.  If anyone’s interested in viewing it, it can be accessed from the page menu on the left of this post.

Having recorded the voiceover for task 2 in the studio a few days ago, I thought I should reflect on the experience, and the various problems I encountered during the recording.  First of all, positioning the microphones was important to me in order to maximise the quality of the recordings.  I faced the microphones away from each other so that the voice actors would not be able to talk directly into each others microphone.  The only problem with positioning the microphones was the stands, and the fact that they wouldn’t stay still for more than a few seconds; a problem I solved using the XLR cable ties to hold the stands in place.

Microphone position in the studio

After experimenting with the different types of microphones I opted for the cardioid mic.  The other types of microphone provided similar quality results but the nature of the cardioid mic complemented my mic positioning more than the others as it would pick up the sounds in front of the microphones.  This would minimise cross bleed during recording when the actors were speaking.

The recording of the script was fairly straight forward, I set the input level to about 3/4 of the way for both microphones.  This gave the actors enough leeway that they could deliver certain sections of the script with greater enthusiasm without peaking the levels.  After recording the actors, I found that the signal only peaked whenever there was a mistake, and the frustration of the actor came through in the mic.  Once these mistakes are edited out, the level will be consistant, and won’t peak.  Overall the recording was a success and the voices were recorded clearly and should stand out against the backing track once it has been added.

Spent a few hours playing with the Editing task last night.  Took a little while getting used to Logic 8.  I pretty much used ProTools exclusively over the summer as I don’t have a Mac, and just as I had gotten used to Logic 7, Apple went and upgraded it.  Worse things happen at sea, right?

Apologies to all the Logic users out there, but in my opinion ProTools is far superior when it comes to basic audio editing and automation.  Logic does have a few tricks up its sleeve though.

Global Tools: Beat mapping.  Using this to determin the tempo of the Chemical Brothers piece was completely intuitive.  I managed to capture the regions necessary for the edit with minimal effort.  I did this by visually matching up the peaks in the waveform to the beats generated by logic.  It was only after I had captured all the regions that I remembered during the workshop we had used a click to check the beats fell in the right places.  Didn’t matter though, all the captured regions were practically spot on.  I wish my version of ProTools had this feature.

Another thing that Logic made easier was the cross fades.  You just draw it in.  Then, if you’re not happy with it, you just draw it in again.  Logic automatically replaces the pre-existing fade.  Automation was frustrating however.  There doesn’t seem to be a way to adjust levels with minute detail i.e. by 0.1dB at a time.  I tried just about every options menu I could find, but nothing helped, so I had to go for an approximate value each time, meaning that the final result would not mirror the task’s instructions.

Sounding pretty good though so far.