Yesterday the audio engineer discovered that — while the closed system audio was attached to the video clips — the audio needed further refining. When a mixer/boom operator records sound — in this instance with a boom and lav for each participant — each mic is ‘mixed down’ to stereo and you pan left or right to get to the mic that sounds best. I never noticed the audio beforehand — it sounded fine to me. The engineer, however, noticed that each track was in stereo — sort of an arbitrary mix between the lav and the boom mikes. So. Each audio file had to be independently auditioned, set to dual mono, and a track chosen so it could be determined which mike was more effective for the scene. The boom or the lav. I didn’t budget an additional three hours of my time last evening dedicated to audio but that all changed. The engineer had to be dispatched as nothing could be done prior to separating and sorting the audio out. All done — job done. Monday more audio engineering. The bottom piece of software is a very powerful programme that does an amazing job of cleaning up post-production audio. It’s RX3 and is vital in sound restoration for film or general music recording.
I also discovered a much more efficient way to get audio out of FCPX and into LogicX vs sending out the traditional XML files. The engineer looked at the audio stems in the XML file. Light panic seemed to cross his face. How are we going to get hands around this? Then I showed him the audio exported as assigned ‘roles’. Mo’ better. It’s a very cool work around. We’ll be deeper into it tomorrow evening – more news.