Curtis Judd 5/15/23 Curtis Judd 5/15/23

Sound for Video Session — Sweeten audio in Fairlight & Q&A

In this week's session, we demonstrate some simple things you can do in DaVinci Resolve Fairlight 18.5 to make your audio sound better. We'll cover EQ, noise reduction, de-essing, and compression. Then we'll answer your sound for video related questions.

If you’d like to learn how to make great dialogue audio for your film and video projects, please have a look at my courses including processing dialogue audio in Adobe Audition and DaVinci Resolve/Fairlight, recording sound, how to use the Zoom F4, F6, F8, and F8n, and how to get the most from the Sound Devices MixPre series of recorders. We have a course on sound for live-streaming with the ATEM Mini and just added Introduction to Izotope RX for Dialogue Audio.

Gear I often use or that we mentioned in this episode. The links below are Amazon.com, B&H Photo, Sweetwater, DVE Store, Waves, or other affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases:

- Earthworks ETHOS microphone — B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Sound Devies 888 field recorder/mixer — Trew, B&H, Sweetwater

- Sound Devices MixPre II Series Recorders - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Panasonic GH5 camera - B&H, Amazon

- Canon C200 Camera - B&H

- Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 lens — B&H, Amazon

- ATEM Mini Extreme & Extreme ISO - B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Allen & Heath SQ5 Digital Mixer - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel, pre-amp, EQ, compressor - Sweetwater, B&H

- Universal Audio 6176 channel strip pre-amp, EQ, compressor — B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

The intro and outro music for this episode is from Musicbed. Take your films to the next level with music from Musicbed. Sign up for a free account to listen for yourself.

Curtis Judd 5/30/22 Curtis Judd 5/30/22

Clean Dialogue in Acoustica — Rotate Phase for Loudness and Extract:Dialogue for Noise Reduction

In this week’s episode we start our multi-part series on Acoustica, a digital audio editor made by Acon Digital. Besides being a lower-cost alternative to iZotope RX, Acoustica is an interface for all your ‘audio editing, podcast creation, mastering, and audio restoration’ needs. With such features as spectral editing and retouch, multi-channel support up to Dolby Atmos 7.1.2, and ARA 2 integration capabilities, Acoustica is a compelling editor to add to your workflow. In this series, we walk through and test Acoustica’s Premium Edition feature set and compare it to industry standard suite iZotope RX 9.

In this installment of the series, we try out Acoustica’s Extract:Dialogue and Rotate Phase functions. First we’ll show you how to rotate phase on a recording in order to reclaim headroom during the loudness normalization process. Then, we test out the Extract:Dialogue plugin and compare its results to those from RX’s Dialogue Isolate. Let’s take a closer look!

Try out the full Acoustica Premium or Standard suite free for 30 days directly from Acon Digital (not sponsored).

If you’d like to learn how to make great dialogue audio for your film and video projects, please have a look at my courses including processing dialogue audio in Adobe Audition and DaVinci Resolve/Fairlight, recording sound, how to use the Zoom F4, F6, F8, and F8n, and how to get the most from the Sound Devices MixPre series of recorders. Our latest courses cover Sound for Live Streaming with the ATEM Mini and an Intro to Izotope RX.

Support my work creating videos by donating at Ko-Fi.com.

Gear used or mentioned in this episode. The links below are Amazon.com, B&H Photo, Sweetwater, DVEStore, Perfect Circuit, or other affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases:

- SoundDevices MixPre II series — B&H, Sweetwater, DVE Store, Amazon

- Earthworks SV33 — B&H, Sweetwater

- Shure SM7B — B&H, Sweetwater, Perfect Circuit, Amazon

- Bebob Cinema Batteries — B&H

- D-tap to hirose cable to power with cine batteries — Amazon, B&H

- Aputure 600D PRO LED Light — Aputure, B&H, DVE Store

- Impact Luxbank softbox — B&H

- Aputure Amaran 100D — Aputure, B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Aputure Spotlight Mount — Aputure, B&H, DVE Store. Amazon

- Rosco Prismatic Glass Gobo Cool Lavender creates the color pattern on the back wall - B&H

- Canon C70 Cinema Camera — B&H

- Canon RF 24-70 F2.8L Lens — B&H, Amazon

Take your films to the next level with music from Musicbed. Sign up for a free account to listen for yourself.

Curtis Judd 5/20/22 Curtis Judd 5/20/22

Dialogue edit, mix, master challenge with Austin Olivia Kendrick, Allen Williams, and Mike DelGaudio

In this week's Sound for Video Session, we are honored to have Austin Olivia Kendrick, Allen Williams, and Mike DelGaudio join us for our first dialogue edit, mix, master challenge. Our esteemed guests come from a variety of areas in the audio industry including dialogue editing, voice over acting, and boom operating for film and TV. They'll listen to your dialogue audio mix and give you expert advice on how to make your audio even better!

Learn more about our guests at the links below:

Austin Olivia Kendrick

Allen Williams

Mike DelGuadio

This episode is produced in part by our consulting producer, Rob Kristjansson. If you think you could use a little help upping your content creation game, DM him @RobKristjansson on Instagram or Twitter or email him at rob.kristjansson@gmail.com. And don't be afraid to ask him for a free consultation!

Gear used or mentioned in this episode. The links below are Amazon.com, B&H Photo, Sweetwater, DVE Store, Waves, or other affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases:

- Universal Audio VOLT 276 USB audio interface — B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Earthworks SV33 studio vocal microphone — B&H, Sweetwater

- Earthworks ETHOS microphone — B&H, Sweetwater

- Neumann U87 Ai microphone — B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Epiphan Pearl 2 live stream appliance — B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Epiphan Pearl Nano live stream encoder — B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Sound Devices MixPre II Series Recorders - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Panasonic GH5 camera - B&H, Amazon

- Canon C70 Camera - B&H

- Canon RF 24-70 f/2.8L IS lens - B&H, Amazon

- TA3-M to XLR-F Adapter cable to feed microphones to C70 or Blackmagic Pocket cameras - B&H

- ATEM Mini Extreme & Extreme ISO - B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Allen & Heath SQ5 Digital Mixer - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel, pre-amp, EQ, compressor - Sweetwater, B&H

Take your films to the next level with music from Musicbed. Sign up for a free account to listen for yourself.

Curtis Judd 5/20/22 Curtis Judd 5/20/22

Work Session: Processing audio and cutting the storyline for a YouTube video

In this work session, I'll process the audio for one of my upcoming YouTube videos and then cut the storyline.

Gear used or mentioned in this episode. The links below are Amazon.com, B&H Photo, Sweetwater, DVE Store, Waves, or other affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases:

- Universal Audio VOLT 276 USB audio interface — B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Earthworks SV33 studio vocal microphone — B&H, Sweetwater

- Earthworks ETHOS microphone — B&H, Sweetwater

- Neumann U87 Ai microphone — B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Epiphan Pearl 2 live stream appliance — B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Epiphan Pearl Nano live stream encoder — B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Sound Devices MixPre II Series Recorders - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Panasonic GH5 camera - B&H, Amazon

- Canon C70 Camera - B&H

- Canon RF 24-70 f/2.8L IS lens - B&H, Amazon

- TA3-M to XLR-F Adapter cable to feed microphones to C70 or Blackmagic Pocket cameras - B&H

- ATEM Mini Extreme & Extreme ISO - B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Allen & Heath SQ5 Digital Mixer - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel, pre-amp, EQ, compressor - Sweetwater, B&H

Take your films to the next level with music from Musicbed. Sign up for a free account to listen for yourself.

Curtis Judd 5/20/22 Curtis Judd 5/20/22

Work Session: Finishing a YouTube Video — ZOOM F3 Review

This is work session where I'm working on my review video of the ZOOM F3 audio recorder. It is just a chance for use to hang out and get some work done. And you can see how I typically edit my videos in Izotope RX, Final Cut Pro, and whatever else might be needed.

Gear used or mentioned in this episode. The links below are Amazon.com, B&H Photo, Sweetwater, DVE Store, Waves, or other affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases:

- ZOOM F3 32-bit float audio recorder — B&H, Sweetwater, DVE Store

- ZOOM F6 32-bit float audio recorder — B&H, Sweetwater, DVE Store, Amazon

- ZOOM F8n Pro 32- bit float audio recorder — B&H, Sweetwater, DVE Store, Amazon

- Earthworks SV33 studio vocal microphone — B&H, Sweetwater

- Earthworks ETHOS microphone — B&H, Sweetwater

- Neumann U87 Ai microphone — B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Universal Audio Volt 276 USB audio interface — B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Epiphan Pearl Nano live stream encoder — B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Sound Devices MixPre II Series Recorders - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Panasonic GH5 camera - B&H, Amazon

- Canon C70 Camera - B&H

- Canon RF 24-70 f/2.8L IS lens - B&H, Amazon

- TA3-M to XLR-F Adapter cable to feed microphones to C70 or Blackmagic Pocket cameras - B&H

- ATEM Mini Extreme & Extreme ISO - B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Allen & Heath SQ5 Digital Mixer - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel, pre-amp, EQ, compressor - Sweetwater, B&H

Take your films to the next level with music from Musicbed. Sign up for a free account to listen for yourself.

Curtis Judd 3/4/16 Curtis Judd 3/4/16

SoundWorks Collection: Dialog Editing & ADR Featuring Gwen Yates Whittle

If you haven't heard of the SoundWorks Collection and you are an audio for film enthusiast, you might like to have a look at the great content they create for film sound students like us. One of the things I've found very interesting and informative is their Conversations with Sound Artist Podcasts which is sponsored by the Dolby Institute. In this episode, for example, Glenn Kiser interviews dialogue editor Gwen Yates Whittle who has worked on a number of large films that you have probably seen.

Curtis Judd 10/27/15 Curtis Judd 10/27/15

Video Editing Apps: Which Should I Use?

Short answer: Try a few for a month each and go with the one that works best for you. Power Director was my first consumer level editing app. You could actually sync audio to video in the app but it was manual. And it crashed quite often (this was a 32 bit app back in the day).

Then I upgraded to one of the lesser versions of Sony Vegas. Not bad, but also still 32 bit. Not quite as crashy but not exactly stable. crashes were more common when the timeline was longer than a couple of minutes. No way to live if you really want to produce content.

When I first started editing video a little more seriously, I had a look at Premiere Pro (then version 5.5) and Final Cut Pro X. At that point, I really liked how fast and responsive FCPX was but it crashed. A lot. About every 5 minutes. I don't know why and maybe it was just my particular computer at the time, but that wasn't going to work for me. So I settled on Premiere Pro, starting with CS 5.5 and kept with it up through CC 2014. Premiere keeps getting better and better. But it is sort of like Photoshop in that it is still using the same basic approach as NLEs have used for a long time. The timeline is like a table and you lay out your clips on the table. If you make an edit where you decide to pull a clip from earlier in the sequence and then want to insert it farther to the right, you have to move everything around. Or at least I never learned a better, more efficient way to do it. It might just be me.

Then I decided to give Final Cut Pro X (10.1.something) another try. They definitely fixed the instability issues I experienced on my first try. But this time, FCPX made me angry. Well, not really angry, it just didn't make sense. But I forced myself to stick with it for a full month through the trial period.

And eventually, it all clicked and made sense and saved me a lot of time when I needed to pull a clip or add a new clip from the middle of the timeline. The magnetic timeline just shifted everything over perfectly. And that included all the secondary footage and titles and everything. Rad!

The metadata and search features were nice though I believe a lot of this has been added to Premiere since I moved to FCPX. The library structure, while a little maddening at first because Apple uses different names for things (e.g., project = timeline or sequence), is very useful. I can have a library of related videos broken down into separate events. So my YouTube series on a particular topic, can all live in a single library which makes it easy to re-use clips between episodes. I always found that more difficult in Premiere, having to import an additional project or just go find the clip out on the hard drive.

Audio workflow: No, FCPX doesn't round trip audio to Audition like Premiere with a simple right click. But for short pieces like I typically cut (usually no more than 10 minutes in length, often less), I actually post-process the audio in Audition first, then bring it all into FCPX and sync to the video and then cut. So my audio post is already done. This works fine for simple pieces where you're not doing any sophisticated sound design. This inverted process works nicely for most of the corporate pieces I do.

Same goes for color grading. I pull all the raw footage into Resolve first, color it, export, then bring it into FCPX for editing. Am I crazy for doing this? It is completely backwards from traditional post workflows. I think it works fine for short pieces. But I totally see why they do it the inverse way for longer pieces. No way do you want to do all the post work on every single clip when you will eventually only use 3% of the footage.

So for now, I've landed on FCPX as my editing app of choice. But now there are more options than ever.

DaVinci Resolve 12. I cut one of my recent YouTube pieces in Resolve 12. Wow. They've come a long way even in the last 2 releases. I think that I would consider Resolve 12 a genuine candidate and for those on a tight budget, a very good candidate. The free version seemed to have everything I needed to get the job done. I was a little clumsy with it, simply because it was my first edit, but it looks really great. The only thing is that you have to have a full-fledged computer with a discrete graphics card. So this isn't going to work on your MacBook Air or a similarly spec'd PC. In many ways, Resolve 12 felt very much like Premiere to me.

There are other options of course, some of them free. HitFilm 3 Express is available for free. I simply haven't had time to dive in and assess it. There's also Lightworks. Avid Media Composer is still in wide use in the feature film and TV markets. So many options create an almost dizzying landscape for the budding video editor.

But my take is that you just have to find what works for you. Most of them have a trial period. I'd suggest you download them and give each of them a month trial to see how they fit your style.

Then make a decision and learn the ins and outs. Don't waste time endlessly trying every new version of every new NLE. I keep up on what comes in the new versions but have decided to switch no more than every 2 years or so. That's why I'm staying with FCPX for now.

Curtis Judd 1/30/15 Curtis Judd 1/30/15

iMac 5k Display Color Accuracy

http://youtu.be/Ls1G_q1DZhM From the time that Apple announced the iMac with 5k Retina Display, I wondered how color accurate the display measured. As a photographer and videographer, I didn’t wan to put all my money into an all-in-one computer that had a beautiful, but color chaos screen. So here we use an XRITE i1Display Pro colorimeter to get a read on how well the color would work for basic photo retouching, video editing, color correction and grading for an enthusiast producing for the web. (This is obviously not a reference display for color critical work. Look to brands like Flanders Scientific and Sony for displays in that range).

Curtis Judd 12/31/14 Curtis Judd 12/31/14

Fixing Sound That Only Plays In One Speaker

One question that I get quite often is, “My recorded sound is only coming out of one speaker. How do I fix that?” This is usually a result of recording a mono mic into a stereo recorder or camera. The fix is very simple in Adobe Audition and most other audio editing apps (like Audacity which is free). This same fix also applies to cases where you recorded two mics into a recorder and one mic only comes out of one speaker, and the other mic only comes out of the other speaker. http://youtu.be/BKepIceNf1M

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