Q.
What is SoundScape
A. Digital Audio Work Station - or to be
a bit more descriptive
Sounscape is a audio disk recorder with editing and mixing capabilities
History of video audio
It wasn't that long ago that I was battling with 1/4 inch audio
recorders and trying to sync them to video machines, Ahhh yes I was in
the back room today and stumbled accros my old friend the 1/4 inch
machine and it reminded me of the way it was done. Audio always came
second in video production because the perception was the pictures told
a thousand words what a cliche, well times have changed but lets spend
a
liitle time reflecting on history then I'll dazzle you with how it is
done today. Way back then once you had finished your video edit which
was tape to tape editing you would lift the audio (this term lift is an
interesting term today we'd call it dub) onto a 1/4 inch audio recorder
with centre track timecode. The 1/4 inch tape was taken to audio with
a
video tape of some description as a visual reference. Using the timecode
as a reference another multi track audio record would lock to the video
reference tape, so you had three machine locking to the reference
timecode, which if you were lucky all would work just fine! The audio
engineer would then record voice and music onto the multitrack recorder
usually a 8 track recorder but if you had a bigger budget this could
have been a 16 or 32 track recorder. Once all was layed up the task of
mixing began using points of the production the mix back to 1/4 inch
tape was a skillful job indeed, when completed the 1/4 inch tape was
taken back to the Video Edit suite where the 1/4 inch tape was layed
back to the video tape using the timecode as reference, as you can
imagine with all this copying onto audio tapes there was a continual
tape hiss problem. As time went on 1/4 inch audio tape recorders were
replaced by DAT tape machines (Digital Audio Tape) and eventually the
multi track audio recorders were replace by the Digital Audio Workstation.
Limitations
The limits of this described editing process were
many. Usually the
video editor was more worried about the pictures and therefor sound
quality was poor. Also the audio edits were in the video domain at 25
frames a second. Some work arounds were developed between the audio
engineer and the video editor like, audio overlaps since most audio was
mono at each cut point the video editor would record an extra second on
track 1 of the out going audio and an addition second of the incoming
audio on track 2, this method added huge time to edit sessions
Improvements
As time went on and EDL's developed (Edit decision
Lists) some engineers
prefered to reload the sound from the wild tapes this allowed them to
record extra handles of sound so they could make crossfades etc
Soundscape Today
In todays post production environment most video
editing is done on NLE
(Non linear editor), where the footage is digitised into a computer and
manipulated as the client wishes, then when complete the audio and or
video in converted into a computer file which is transfered via disk /
lan / wan to the sound suite this file is totally digital and has as
much extra audio and the sound engineer needs. This is then loaded into
the digital audio workstation and is edited and mixed. The tools that
the sound engineer has are almost limitless they are editing in a sub
frame mode, so the limitation of 25 fps is no longer a problem! Yes alot
can be said in a 25th of a second at least a little breath etc. The
sound mixing desk is controlled by the Audio workstation so little
tweaks can be done at any time. Soundscape can control directly a video
deck or play a mpeg file. So to get your final soundtrack to tape you
can export a soundfile back to your NLE or directly layback to tape
Soundscape Tip
If you have a matrox parhelia card you can play
back mpeg file on a
external monitor. you need to configure the video play to direct show
in
Soundscape and when selecting files change the filter *.avi to *.* then
change directories to get the filter update. Good luck.