ndiamone
600 Club - QQ All-Star
Lots of kids, both on here and off have been asking me questions lately about getting jobs like transfer and restoration and production and engineering for real instead of just in their bedrooms or basements.
So I compiled `em all together and here it is for the curious:
Well, up-thread here http://bsnpubs.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=3024365&highlight=adobe+audition+tutorial is a little bit of a class list you can see if you can get into, not so much for the knowledge itself, although that's helpful, but moreso for the networking abilities you can get.
Show business though is still show business, and show business engineering is no different. With the unions only in Hollywood and New York, and all the nonunion jobs taken up by kids younger than you who'll do it for free, even pay to do it, entry-level jobs actually touching the equipment are going to be a little hard to come by no matter WHAT you do.
About the only thing you can really do is network yourself to death, learn all you can about all the related fields you can, and then find yourself a niche providing a service nobody else does, or better yet, be able to be a one-man-band type affair and be able to juggle a lot of hats.
There's a LOT better chance of finding yourself in the mixing pit that way than going along a preprogrammed route where a guy can say lay cable up in rafters and wire up a video or sound system for a show, and then the videographer. cameraman or balance engineer gets sick one night and you have to go on and do it.
When you DO get that kind of a chance, you have to know the show better than everybody, including the engineer who's sick and the director and producer himself, and then STILL be able to juggle all your hats without dropping any because this business is merciless. You don't get three chances and you're out. You don't even get ONE chance. Half a chance if you're lucky, and if you have ``artistic clashes'' with people, it dwindles down to an eighth of a chance or less. You can be out on your ear for any reason or no reason at all.
Which is why it's good to be familiar and even real good at all the other involved engineering trades. That way, when someone's drama one place gets to be too much, you'll always have a half a dozen or more things on the back burner waiting in the wings. So, while every other drama-mama victim is out pounding the pavement, you'll be back working the same thing somewhere else with less drama.
So if you have no stomach for people's drama and acting like toddlers and needing babysat and then being the object of derision at the same time, then stay home and go get your MBA or something and be just another corporate clone.
Everytime I resynced projects in those days I always had either the multi's....most of the time off different transfers though which NEVER sync on their own, or else the premastered music, dialogue and effects stems (i.e. some tapes of music, some tapes of dialogue and narration, and some tapes of sound effects and sweetening. That's actually how I got my nickname, N,D,M&E if you say it fast comes out Endiamone).
What I usually end up doing is laying the music track(s) down first, because most of the time, that's what's going on the most.Then I'd cut the vocal tracks apart to sometimes as many as a hundred pieces, cutting each vocal phrase apart and re-syncing each piece to the track. I might end up with a hundred little vocal pieces I have to re-sync. That kind of re-sync NOW can take D-A-Y-S, and that's with the modern computer technology.
In those days, forget it. You'd be working months and months on a three-minute segment because back then computers could only automate the miniscule speed-ups and slow-downs within a piece. So you'd be listening to a piece thousands of times, playing the track you wanted to add against tracks you already had synced. Of course after all that, by the time a guy had it how he wanted it, he'd never wanna hear it again in his life.
So that's another important thing: If you love music and movies, go into this business and you won't for long. Most engineers' favorite vacation spots are right here....with everybody else off at theirs so we can enjoy the nice dark silence. Most of us have very few if any sound or video equipment in our houses, preferring the dark silence to any form of recreation.
There's a reason the engineers' nicknames are always Mole or Crab.
We started out antisocial as kids, most of us.
If you ever saw the dorky science kid who was always in the lab, library or lecture hall while you were busy with football, getting ready for whatever career you were going to have and girls, we were inside with the other palefaces tinkering with better ways to do things.
There's an old saying: Engineers know how to solve a problem better because while you were out with the team, a girl, or networking for your eventual career, we were sitting in a dark room tweezing out answers from stubborn equipment. Since we didn't get much exercise doing that, and probably didn't have the eyesight or coordination for playing team sports anyway, we ended up here.
Couple that with the personality trait common in engineers of the answer being right around the corner or under our noses, most of us do not take the time to eat properly or at proper hours, because we want to get at that answer. So we subsist on takeaway food, vending machines and leftover cubicle-warrior food from business luncheons all of which are fattening. Add vast amounts of pop and pizza to that diet, and it's no wonder all of us engineers need our own zip codes.
I started off eons ago doing digital re-sync's and remasters off 16 and 24 track premaster elements (quarter inch M&E's), but they weren't all on the same tape and there was no sync.
So, I'd have to start by finding the two or three instrument tracks that were playing most of the time, usually drums, rhythm guitar and piano. Those would be on their own tracks fortunately on succeeding reels of twin-track, and usually have enough bleed-thru coming through the headphones to know where you were in the piece.
That was the easy part. Then you'd progress to the vocal tracks and background singer tracks and perform the process up above, and then conclude with the sound effects tracks and sweetening.
And remember, this was all on single-track full-coat film to which we transferred the various twin-tracks. In case you don't know, single track film isn't really single, it has a thin strip of mag near the top as well as the main wide mag track on the bottom so it doesn't fall off the spool from being lopsided. We'd just record the premaster on the balance track at the same time as we recorded the iso track on the main track.
Computers for sound mastering had just come in then, but only for adjusting the speed of the tape or film up or down during a piece. So after weeks and weeks of doing pre-lays onto twin track 35MM, and listening to each succeeding layer thousands of times to find out where the miniscule speed ups and slow downs were and by how much, then we had to go on the computer and program the miniscule speed ups and slow downs throughout the piece from whatever transfers we had done.
Now you can do it on a Plangent Process at Chace Productions in Hollywood in a matter of a day or two instead of months and months. That's a process which can read the bias track recorded on top of and by the same head as the music on any magnetic tape or film, retrieve it, and re-sync in the computer to the original bias track.
And here we all are still tweaking manually and doing our own laybacks in Adobe Audition. But, hey. People still cut records and release their music on 8-track like Cheap Trick. (shaking head and going to get a donut to build my big engineer belly even bigger and contemplate the state of musical affairs these days---munch munch munch fadeout).
So, if you want wealth fame, girls, a gym-rat body and a house in the suburbs filled with the prerequisite 3.5 kids and a dog and fence, then this is not the world for you. Learn to love the big belly you probably already have if you're reading this, take advantage of your antisocial tendencies and make use of the addiction to answers being right under your nose you probably already have, and you'll be fine.
So I compiled `em all together and here it is for the curious:
newbie question said:
Well, up-thread here http://bsnpubs.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=3024365&highlight=adobe+audition+tutorial is a little bit of a class list you can see if you can get into, not so much for the knowledge itself, although that's helpful, but moreso for the networking abilities you can get.
Show business though is still show business, and show business engineering is no different. With the unions only in Hollywood and New York, and all the nonunion jobs taken up by kids younger than you who'll do it for free, even pay to do it, entry-level jobs actually touching the equipment are going to be a little hard to come by no matter WHAT you do.
About the only thing you can really do is network yourself to death, learn all you can about all the related fields you can, and then find yourself a niche providing a service nobody else does, or better yet, be able to be a one-man-band type affair and be able to juggle a lot of hats.
There's a LOT better chance of finding yourself in the mixing pit that way than going along a preprogrammed route where a guy can say lay cable up in rafters and wire up a video or sound system for a show, and then the videographer. cameraman or balance engineer gets sick one night and you have to go on and do it.
When you DO get that kind of a chance, you have to know the show better than everybody, including the engineer who's sick and the director and producer himself, and then STILL be able to juggle all your hats without dropping any because this business is merciless. You don't get three chances and you're out. You don't even get ONE chance. Half a chance if you're lucky, and if you have ``artistic clashes'' with people, it dwindles down to an eighth of a chance or less. You can be out on your ear for any reason or no reason at all.
Which is why it's good to be familiar and even real good at all the other involved engineering trades. That way, when someone's drama one place gets to be too much, you'll always have a half a dozen or more things on the back burner waiting in the wings. So, while every other drama-mama victim is out pounding the pavement, you'll be back working the same thing somewhere else with less drama.
So if you have no stomach for people's drama and acting like toddlers and needing babysat and then being the object of derision at the same time, then stay home and go get your MBA or something and be just another corporate clone.
newbie question said:
Everytime I resynced projects in those days I always had either the multi's....most of the time off different transfers though which NEVER sync on their own, or else the premastered music, dialogue and effects stems (i.e. some tapes of music, some tapes of dialogue and narration, and some tapes of sound effects and sweetening. That's actually how I got my nickname, N,D,M&E if you say it fast comes out Endiamone).
What I usually end up doing is laying the music track(s) down first, because most of the time, that's what's going on the most.Then I'd cut the vocal tracks apart to sometimes as many as a hundred pieces, cutting each vocal phrase apart and re-syncing each piece to the track. I might end up with a hundred little vocal pieces I have to re-sync. That kind of re-sync NOW can take D-A-Y-S, and that's with the modern computer technology.
In those days, forget it. You'd be working months and months on a three-minute segment because back then computers could only automate the miniscule speed-ups and slow-downs within a piece. So you'd be listening to a piece thousands of times, playing the track you wanted to add against tracks you already had synced. Of course after all that, by the time a guy had it how he wanted it, he'd never wanna hear it again in his life.
So that's another important thing: If you love music and movies, go into this business and you won't for long. Most engineers' favorite vacation spots are right here....with everybody else off at theirs so we can enjoy the nice dark silence. Most of us have very few if any sound or video equipment in our houses, preferring the dark silence to any form of recreation.
newbie question said:
There's a reason the engineers' nicknames are always Mole or Crab.
We started out antisocial as kids, most of us.
If you ever saw the dorky science kid who was always in the lab, library or lecture hall while you were busy with football, getting ready for whatever career you were going to have and girls, we were inside with the other palefaces tinkering with better ways to do things.
newbie question said:
There's an old saying: Engineers know how to solve a problem better because while you were out with the team, a girl, or networking for your eventual career, we were sitting in a dark room tweezing out answers from stubborn equipment. Since we didn't get much exercise doing that, and probably didn't have the eyesight or coordination for playing team sports anyway, we ended up here.
Couple that with the personality trait common in engineers of the answer being right around the corner or under our noses, most of us do not take the time to eat properly or at proper hours, because we want to get at that answer. So we subsist on takeaway food, vending machines and leftover cubicle-warrior food from business luncheons all of which are fattening. Add vast amounts of pop and pizza to that diet, and it's no wonder all of us engineers need our own zip codes.
newbie question said:
I started off eons ago doing digital re-sync's and remasters off 16 and 24 track premaster elements (quarter inch M&E's), but they weren't all on the same tape and there was no sync.
So, I'd have to start by finding the two or three instrument tracks that were playing most of the time, usually drums, rhythm guitar and piano. Those would be on their own tracks fortunately on succeeding reels of twin-track, and usually have enough bleed-thru coming through the headphones to know where you were in the piece.
That was the easy part. Then you'd progress to the vocal tracks and background singer tracks and perform the process up above, and then conclude with the sound effects tracks and sweetening.
And remember, this was all on single-track full-coat film to which we transferred the various twin-tracks. In case you don't know, single track film isn't really single, it has a thin strip of mag near the top as well as the main wide mag track on the bottom so it doesn't fall off the spool from being lopsided. We'd just record the premaster on the balance track at the same time as we recorded the iso track on the main track.
Computers for sound mastering had just come in then, but only for adjusting the speed of the tape or film up or down during a piece. So after weeks and weeks of doing pre-lays onto twin track 35MM, and listening to each succeeding layer thousands of times to find out where the miniscule speed ups and slow downs were and by how much, then we had to go on the computer and program the miniscule speed ups and slow downs throughout the piece from whatever transfers we had done.
Now you can do it on a Plangent Process at Chace Productions in Hollywood in a matter of a day or two instead of months and months. That's a process which can read the bias track recorded on top of and by the same head as the music on any magnetic tape or film, retrieve it, and re-sync in the computer to the original bias track.
And here we all are still tweaking manually and doing our own laybacks in Adobe Audition. But, hey. People still cut records and release their music on 8-track like Cheap Trick. (shaking head and going to get a donut to build my big engineer belly even bigger and contemplate the state of musical affairs these days---munch munch munch fadeout).
So, if you want wealth fame, girls, a gym-rat body and a house in the suburbs filled with the prerequisite 3.5 kids and a dog and fence, then this is not the world for you. Learn to love the big belly you probably already have if you're reading this, take advantage of your antisocial tendencies and make use of the addiction to answers being right under your nose you probably already have, and you'll be fine.
