Wednesday, October 31, 2007

More on Mixing


Chance Shirley points out a couple books in the comments section regarding the "Are there any &%$ books on mixing?" question. OK, so I gotta say, everything Jay Rose says is true and correct. His books are much higher end than the titles (with the words "digital video") might suggest. And he does give some actual advice about mixing -- although it's primarily for television rather than theatrical.
There's another book called The Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound by David Yewdall. The author is a bit pompous and likes to regale the reader with tales of how much smarter he is than the directors and picture editors he's worked for - which isn't a problem except that his technical understanding of digital audio is woefully inaccurate and he says things which are simply dead wrong. Looking at the amazon.com listing I see that this is the second edition of his book. Perhaps an editor has gone through and fixed the dumb things he says. On the good/interesting side of things however, this book is the only one I know of which attempts to explain the M&E tracks used for overseas deliverables as well as P-FX and X-FX tracks.

Today's issues -- still fighting with the Depth of Focus node in Blender. At this point I've given up and all I want is to render this dang robot stuff out and I'll draw freakin mattes around the parts I want out of focus. The depth of focus node seems to blow holes in the Alpha channel of certain textures. A cool looking effect if that's what I wanted but it doesn't work for this movie. And no, unlike with audio, with all this 3d/compositing/nodal stuff, I have no idea what I'm talking about. . .

Hey. Happy Halloween! And today's the first day of the AFM. You know what I want? An AFM catalog. And here I am in New York. I wonder how I'm gonna get one. I also wonder what the teaser to Solar Vengeance looks like...

1 comment:

Chance Shirley said...

Now that I think about it... I might have an earlier edition of the Yewdall book at home. And you're right -- it isn't particularly informative.

Guess I'll try the Rose...