Oh. hey.

As I've said, the busiest times are the most interesting, but then there's no time to document it. I've waffled between slaughtered-with-projects and sleeping-over-ten-hours-daily for a while, with a fairly regular work schedule. Then the Survivor season ended and we finished that other show and things have been a little spotty and less consistent lately. Episodes deliver late, I cancel dinner plans, etc. etc.

But for as busy as I felt there, for a while, I can't think of much that happened. Predictable and boring heartache aside, the main thing that sticks out for me the last few months is that I realized that in American English, at the end of Zs and hard Ss, there's a short section of a soft S. I don't know why I never noticed before, but it kind of blew me away.

As you know, in addition to the more creative work of designing and editing sound effects, I (much more often) edit dialog. Sometimes this means cleaning up production sound in noisy environments, sometimes this means pacing out the sentences in interviews that have had content removed for more concise storytelling (removing ums or stutters, replacing pronouns with proper nouns, shifting sentences from the past tense into the present, etc), and sometimes this means editing voiceover to fit and play over action.

I was working on a 'wacky' series with two commentators who talked over each other fairly often and for the most part, fading one out as the other started speaking worked just fine, but in cases where they did a few takes of a section and changed up timing, sometimes a whole word or just a syllable at the end of one commentator's sentence would be masked by the other in one take, but not in another. i.e. you can hear Tom talking over the end of Jerry's line in Jerry's mic, but since the producers wanted to use a different take of the next line, we don't want to hear Tom start to talk, but we want Jerry to finish his line. Make sense? So in order to execute that, I have to find an acceptable substitute for the last few letters that Jerry was saying so his sentence ends cleanly. In the particular instance that I am talking about, the line ended with a hard S and I was having a difficult time finding a clean one in that episode. But as I mentioned, it turns out that in a hard S or a Z, after the vocalized part, there's a short voiceless part. Pure S. I figured I would try stealing a soft S (Ok let's get picky: a voiceless alveolar sibilant) and pasting it at the end. It sounded seamless and I added another tool to my toolbox!

And I do this stuff all the time. After a while you get notice that you can put in a long fade across a W and you won't hear it, you should always drop a short fade into the center-loudest point in a short I, etc, etc. You know that you can crossfade different Ss together and not hear it, paste a SH right before "He" and make it say "She" easily with some finessing, copy and paste "and" or "but" from somewhere else in the show etc, etc. But it was really nice to add another nugget of knowledge to that database and I was quite pleased.

Media Headaches

It doesn't seem like 6 or 7 minutes is that long to wait for a video to recompress into a different codec, but it really starts to add up if you have to try 8 or 9 different configurations before it

1.) works
2.) looks decent
3.) has Audio
4.) sounds decent
5.) stays in sync
and
6.) ports well to YouTube and has all of the above characteristics there.

Due to an inability on my part or on Apple Compressor's, I just burned about an hour of my life trying to figure out how to include uncompressed audio with an MPEG-2 video in a format that Quicktime could read and thus that I could upload to YouTube. Fail. And the the MPEG-4 version looked great on my machine and completely AWFUL once uploaded.

Instead, I'm going to go home and use Vegas to make a 640x480 MPEG-2 that will (hopefully) not lose sync when Youtube converts it to Flash video. I guess maybe I'm dwelling on this issue too much; there aren't any really hard sync points in this video, but I would like the music beats to coincide with the visual hits.

This is the latest headache after dealing with this promo video for most of the last 2 or 3 days. Bouncing textless/texted versions back from Sean (the latest addition to our media team), outputting the audio to get it into a platform I can actually use (Pro Tools) and mixing it here at the workplace on a Saturday night, adding last minute text for a little reinforcement of the website address.

I'm tired. I sure hope this thing makes a difference in ticket sales.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHjb8fgPdyI

(Please click on the "watch in high quality" link. Do it for me.)

General Update; Low on introspection.

As I was getting ready to leave my apartment for yet another derby event, I realized that there was no way in hell I'd fit everything I needed in my shoulder bag. I needed a laptop for some last-minute editing of backup audio material, the audio interface for that, some microphone cables from my personal stash, an extra microphone, blah blah blah, the brownies I baked for the skaters, and my whiskey flask. So I put the fixed-gear away and lowered my blue touring bike down from the hoist on the ceiling. I loaded all my bags onto the rack and put all of my necessary effects in there and rolled out. Since I hadn't ridden that bike in several months, it was immediately striking how differently it handled than my other bike, especially with a fair amount of gear attached. It's such a heavier ride and the center of mass is so much further back that the turns and even straightaways when standing up feel more... substantial. It's a slower ride, for sure, than my yellow bike, but also somewhat smoother. At any rate, I started thinking about bike tours and I think I'm going to try to go back to France this summer for a couple of weeks, or maybe to Spain. I think my Spanish is at a point where I could use a little immersion to help it along. Sometimes when I'm on the metro and I have forgotten my book, I play a little Scrabble mini-game on my phone (it's not really Scrabble, unfortunately; it's more like Boggle) and I regularly see words in French and Spanish that I of course can't use. It's a small reminder that I need to put my language skills to use more often than I do.

As the readership knows, I do a lot of media work for LADD I am most proud of the latest highlight video. I get more and more comments from skaters and fans that these really help get everyone pumped and ready for the game. Last night a skater even told me that sometimes when watching the videos she starts to tear up! This one is a collaboration between Vince (the media clip montage) and myself (the music portion):


There were some skaters from the local flat-track league, Angel City Derby Girls who saw our media presentation and were impressed, so they asked about the possibility of us cutting together a promo reel to get some press attention. I'm going to talk to them this week about it.

After much unnecessary nervousness and anticipation, I did a test edit for American Gladiators and showed it to the mixer and he liked it. It's a higher profile show and the mixer is very particular about the edit. So I had to sort of prove myself to him, and now I'm editing dialog for that show this season, and I might still be doing the same graphic sound effects placement that I did last season as well. I started the dialog today and I'll be working on that first episode for the next couple of days. It's going to be as busy as ever.

Inversely Proportional

It's got to stay funny or it's kind of heartbreaking. Every small misstep and every functional hiccup must find its place in the mosaic of ridiculum that is being built around us all the time. I have to call my work a day or two ahead of time to get the latest changes in the schedule and ask permission to go to sleep. A show delivers late and the shockwave ripples through the schedule and simultaneously damages my paycheck and my ability to spend time with Margaret. Somehow. The only way to fight back against this kind of accidental tyranny is to laugh it off; the client wants to send us a TV show one act at a time, maybe get us the last 2 acts at 4am?

Um, OK. In this particular instance, I'm already in overtime and I'm going to hit double time at 3am, so bring it on.



This blog is a funny medium. Trying to stay on top of a daily (or at least regular) record of events is necessarily a difficult balance, because when all the really interesting stuff is happening, it means that I don't have time to write about it. And on the days that I have some downtime, I feel unproductive and think there's nothing interesting to write about. Right now it happens that I am stranded at work, waiting for the last 4 acts of this terrible show so I can edit it and go to bed. But this production company has such a terrible track record of getting us material on time that I'm sure I'll have enough time to get some writing done.

So anyway, lately, it's been incredibly busy. Between work, derby projects, and writing music, I haven't really had any time to myself at all. I took inventory and realized that I have had time for exactly 4 hours of passive media consumption (read: 2 movies) in the last 2 months. And that's how I like it. Busy > Bored. I've stayed above 35 hours at work, edited together new highlight videos for the Derby Dolls (i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOzz3zrcSXg, cut together a number of skateout songs for the teams and wrote some sneaky music for a client request that turned out rather well (I'll send you a copy if you ask for it).

(By the way, the table that I refinished looks great, with the exception of a few spots that I'm trying not to let bother me until the next time I refinish it again.)

Right now the Derby work in progress is getting the new PA system up and running. We have been renting a stacked sound system for the bout each month and in an effort to improve coverage and reduce monthly costs, Vince and I recommended that the league buy speakers to hang from the ceiling all around the track, which we are powering with some amplifiers that Vince had lying around. In order to find the best approach for hanging the speakers, we consulted with speaker manufacturers, rigging hardware manufacturers, riggers, rigging companies, and finally got the assistance of a couple of very nice union grips, available mostly because of the writers' strike. Speakers are now hung, and I ordered speaker cable and built junction boxes this week and Vince hung most of the cable last night (I hate heights and I hate scissor lifts). We're going to scrape by and have the system finished tomorrow, one day before the game on Saturday. Whew!

As usual, my work schedule promises to conflict directly and exactly with my extracurricular activities, so at the moment it's in question whether I will have to work Saturday, or whether I will be able to actually go to the bout and enjoy the fruits of my own labor.

So I'm staying very busy and meeting a lot of project goals that I have set for myself. The only thing I don't like about being this busy is that it keeps me from attaining certain other goals, broader goals, like meeting people and making friends, and going to the farmers' market each week. Oh, and writing this thing.

Oh yeah, another thing: there may be something special brewing, for which I may be going Back East for a couple of days in late April. A chance to exchange some stories in person with some of you EST folks.

Writers' Strike

A few people have asked me how the writers' strike is going to affect my work, so I figured I would take a stab at answering this question in public (while restarting Pro Tools after it crapped out on me).

Since our facility works mostly on reality TV, most of us editors and mixers are not directly affected by the strike at all. We do have a few feature films in here at the moment, but I don't think we get more than a handful of those per year, though we would like to.

As far as I can tell, the strike is going to affect us positively in the short term and, maybe, negatively in the long term, if it lasts that long. Since reality shows (theoretically) don't have scripts and thus don't have writers, production companies are focusing on producing more reality TV during this time. And networks are airing more of it to fill the airtime between commercials. This is, for example, why the most hyped thing on NBC is the new American Gladiators series that is starting up (sort of the 'less talk, more rock' approach to dealing with the strike). So we will end up getting more work from the production companies that already come to us, and hopefully we'll get new clients as production companies expand their reality departments or as new companies start up to generate content.

In the long term, it's likely that other post-production audio places in town will shift focus to work more on all the reality programming that is going to pop up, so they may try to take some of our business, and we could be negatively impacted by that. But it's more likely that they will be working on shows from production companies with which they already had a working relationship. So they are probably not going to take clients away from us.

There is also the pipe-dream hope that we'll get some new clients who start up to make reality TV, get some success, and then after the strike ends, they'll start producing some scripted shows and they'll continue working with us on those, so we'll have more of that type of work around the facility.

Surrogate

Vince and Stephanie took the holiday opportunity to go Back East for a couple of weeks. So I have been staying at their place and taking care of their cats. That's actually most of the reason I started this blog; I'm in someone else's house without all my usual distractions and my friends are out of town.

Cooking in someone else's house is kind of interesting. I had to run home to get my pie tin, since apparently they don't place as high a priority on baking as I do. You get used to doing things certain ways with the tools that you have, and if the toolset changes a little, you have to, say, roll out a pie crust with a wine bottle. There's no shame in that.

Also, did you know that not everyone stocks sesame oil, nutritional yeast and tofu at all times, just in case? Weird, huh? Thanksgiving dinner turned out great, anyway. I wish I had a camera to take pictures of the tofurky, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, sautéed kale, cranberry sauce, and apple pie. After I finished off the apple pie a few days later, I made a pumpkin pie as well.

Later this week I think I am going to do 'butter'y-French style seitan with a red wine and beet reduction. I have a few especially toity recipes that I am going to try out. And if I find a camera in a drawer somewhere, I'll take pictures.

The cats are pretty great. Devo is enormous and friendly and behaves more like a dog than a cat. I think he is smart enough to figure out that being aloof only gets you cred temporarily. Duncan is a beautiful deep grey and he's legitimately shy. He spends most of his time under blankets, though as he gets used to you he'll come out more and warm up. In the presence of any guests, myself formerly included, he would always disappear somewhere. They are really very insistent about feeding time, though. In particular, they wake me up in the morning by knocking my glasses off the nightstand or putting their cold noses on me.



This housesitting venture also coincides with a dry spell at work; I haven't been to the studio/office in a week and a half, and this after working a full week and putting in at least 20-30 hours at the Roller Derby track to get sound and other production elements ready. So after being in high gear, these two weeks are a little disorienting. I've been reading, watching movies, and trying to write some music for the library, though it's a little slow-going since most of my gear is back at my apartment downtown, and I didn't feel like lugging all of it up to Hollywood.



In truth, the setup that I have cobbled together reminds me a lot of the portable composing rig that I put together when I was living in France: it's functional, every thing has its place, but it's just a little awkward everywhere and not at all ergonomic. Of course, in Brittany it was all arranged on a hundred-some-year-old desk, not an Ikea jerker. And the view from my window was a two-hundred-some-year-old cemetery, not the Hollywood Bowl. But still. it reminds me just the same. And I managed to get some writing done on that setup. We'll see.



In Vince's absence I have also been recruited to work on the finishing touches on the audio for the movie we have been working on for, uh, ever. We just had some sync issues so I pulled down all audio files for the whole movie and I am told by the video guy and the director that sync is solid now. It feels good to wrap up a project that big, and now I'm kind of anxious to start whatever is next. The screening is on Friday, though I just got an email saying that now I may have some work that evening. Perfect. Of course. It couldn't possibly work out any other way.