Stephen Barden is a supervising sound editor at Sound Dogs Editing and Design Group. The Toronto audio post shop’s credits include Men With Brooms, Treed Murray, Blizzard and Requiem for a Dream.

The term convergence has come to mean many things lately, but I am predicting a convergence in the world of sound for picture – part of the ultimate streamlining of the transfer of production sound. This goes beyond the transfer of dailies sound, reaching into the picture-cutting room, the sound-editing department and eventually into the final dub.

Men With Brooms, from Toronto’s Serendipity Point Films and Whizbang, provides a good example of current practices in the sound department. While our staff at Sound Dogs didn’t really do anything new here, we did take a couple of ideas a step further.

As a comedy, Men With Brooms was destined for test screenings and thus required temp dubs – in this case, three of them. I decided very early on to maintain the highest quality possible in all stages of post-production, starting with the first day of dailies. My goal was to never have to ‘up-res’ or re-conform the audio. While it is not uncommon to use audio tracks from the Avid for temp mixes, it wasn’t acceptable to me to use tracks that had been digitized into the Avid from Beta SP. Picture editor Susan Maggi and I decided the audio path would never leave the digital domain.

Sylvain Arsenault recorded production sound on timecode DAT, and that sound was digitally copied onto a TASCAM DA-88 digital multitrack recorder in dailies transfers at Deluxe Laboratories. The DA-88 was delivered to the picture editing room each day with the Beta SP master dailies picture reel. I had previously had the picture-cutting room equipped with a DA-88 machine patched into the Avid’s AES/EBU (digital) inputs.

The DA-88 was also set to chase the timecode off the Beta SP, thus, when dailies were digitized, picture came off Beta SP while dailies sound was transferred in the digital domain. This would be the last time during post that sound would be sourced off linear tape. When it came time to temp, we received tracks from the Avid, via an OMF transfer, that contained a great deal of sound work Susan had already done. This was strictly a transfer of data, with all audio being first-generation quality.

An interesting new twist is the ability to convert Pro Tools sessions back into OMF format for easy re-importing into the Avid. To give ourselves the option of quickly getting our temp mix stems to the cutting room, our temp was recorded onto TASCAM MMR8 recorders in Pro Tools format at 16-bit with a sampling rate of 47952Hz. (Avid editing systems are currently only capable of accepting 16-bit audio.) All the sound work for the tempdubs done in the Avid and by Sound Dogs quickly became an excellent foundation for our tracks in the final dub.

The future

You will start to hear the term Metaflow used quite a bit in conjunction with Avid Film Composer, Pro Tools workstations and the communication between those two platforms. Coined by software developer Mark Gilbert at the U.K.’s Gallery Software, the term describes the streamlining of the audio process from production through post. The testing ground for Gallery’s new batch of tools is post on Die Another Day, the forthcoming James Bond film.

More hard disk recorders from manufacturers such as Zaxcom, Nagra and HHB are being used on set to record four to eight tracks of location audio in Broadcast Wave Format files at 24 bits and sampling rates of 48k and up. The tools being developed under Metaflow will allow for direct importing of these audio files into the Avid. Bit truncation will continue to occur until Avid goes 24-bit, but for turnover to sound, facilities are already in place to instantaneously refer (or conform) the audio back to the original 24-bit files from location. This means no more synching of dailies at telecine – this will be done automatically upon import of the audio into the Avid. Best of all, this import will be strictly a transfer of data (think ‘drive copy’), as opposed to a ‘lossy’ transfer of audio.

New tools such as those found within the concept of Metaflow will create some complications and confusion in the short term. But I, for one, will be happy when the days of zero-offset DATs, auto-conforming and window-burn video dubs are long gone. Indeed, it seems like those days might finally be just around the corner.

-www.sounddogstoronto.com