Graham wrote:
>But do you think it will be possible to be a
>bit more of a chaos magician and make the
>outdoor/simultaneous recording setup work?
>That has a type of purity too - although not
>of sound sources.
>
>what do you think?
Definitely try the chaos magician approach (nice phrase)!
Simultaneous recording with modern digital tech is amazingly
flexible.
Having just dealt with some very messy audio post for a film,
which was recorded without any sync at all, I can say that you
will probably be able to sync up to prominent sounds without
much trouble. And it will probably stay in sync much longer than
you might expect. We had some independent tracks recorded on a
compact flash recorder, and once synced they remained within a
fraction of a frame for well over 30 minutes.
When identical clips are out of sync by very short intervals, it
can produce comb-filtering, or a tinny "flanging" quality. If
the clips are NOT identical, comb-filtering is usually less of a
problem. In most multitrack audio apps, you can shift clips very
precisely, so it shouldn't be hard to eliminate comb-filtering
and even achieve near-perfect sync if you need it. But
distinctive background sounds picked up by multiple mics may not
sound bad even if they're scattered around quite a bit. As Dan
pointed out, even fairly long delays can "read" as a single
event.
The "precedence effect" is our tendency to perceive the "first"
of two identical sounds as the original one. (We're assuming
sounds from a conventional stereo speaker setup, on either side
of the listener.) If the delay is below about 3 ms, we hear a
single centered click. Between about 3 ms and about 12 ms, we
hear the sound as coming more and more from the first speaker
(the sound appears panned, even though the levels are equal).
When the delay exceeds about 12 ms, fusion is lost and we start
to hear two clicks.
The main advantage of the studio approach is that it gives you
tremendous flexibility in timing and otherwise editing the
dialog. You can edit the dialog without editing the roomtone.
But if you're going for a "verit=E9" approach, then you may not
want to edit the dialog.
Just remember that if there IS recognizable roomtone behind all
the dialog, then it's much harder (sometimes impossible) to move
things around, remove burps and sneezes, clip out mis-spoken
phrases, etc., without creating unacceptable side effects. It's
hard to chop the dialog into "scenes" without creating boundary
effects -- when the roomtone "cuts" we read that as a scene
change, either in location or in time, even if the new room tone
is almost the same as the old.
ac
Allen Cobb
http://timbreproductions.com
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