Film / TV / Media Crew - Technical, employment opportunities and ranting

Yeah, everything I do is shared on ISIS, so I’m safe. Good to hear that the switch wasn’t too bad though, in case it does come up.

cheers everyone i may be asking on here if anyone has any shadowing opportunities to get my head back around working in post again but
Still not sure if I'm heading back to London's famous London

Thank you, plenty of places to make some enquiries!

@MCamb and any other audio folk

Loudness/LUFS/EBU R128

Halp.

Literally, every single time we have something for broadcast we get into a last-minute panic here (assuming we don't send it out to an audio post place which we never do because budgets).

We usually edit on Resolve or Premiere. Resolve allegedly has some kind of normalising loudness feature but when we put in our parameters it doesn't normalise to them (meaning we're probably using it wrong) and we get QC flagged on Honeycomb.
Premiere again has some preset effects you're supposed to just toggle on and again no joy.

After much faffing we usually figure it out but it's hours and hours of exports/uploads/fails/tweaks/exports/uploads etc before we get there.

Is there any software we can just run an exported file through to set at a predetermined loudness that works every time?

We tried a demo of eFF which was brilliant - a desktop app you just opened the exported file to and it fixed any audio issues and baked it into the file without touching the video: https://emotion-systems.com/eff-2/ Colleague looked into it and had a quote for like 10 grand.

Doesn’t adobe Audition do something like this?

Though I’m an AVID editor, so no first hand experience

I suspect it will be the same tool that's in Premiere but we'll take a look.

We're currently on export 18. I'm developing bruxism.

There is a tool, a fairly good one that is often updated to stay in line with broadcast spec changes..

Been a while since I’ve used it but will have a think and get back to you!

Nugen LM Correct probably fits the bill, ideally in conjunction with a decent meter, Nugen VisLM is great.

I’m assuming Premiere/Resolve run VST/AU plugins?

Ah yeah that’s the one ☝️

Also check out izotope insight 2, though I don’t think that will fix problems for you but analyses and tells you where your problems are

Thanks for the Nugen LM tip - looks promising in the demo I'm trying - though when I hit 'correct' (in the stand alone app) it doesn't seem to be doing anything - doesn't seem to be an option to save etc. Maybe because it's a demo only? I'm a bit hesitant to drop 350 quid if I can't actually see it work.

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Honestly feels like you've got to be REALLY into audio to work in audio.

Haha 😂

https://vimeo.com/362102818/5013d213d2

going fucking bananas

Hmmm Nugen demos are fully functional for a limited time so you should be good. How is it running in your session? As an insert? Or can you select audio files and get it to analyse and render a corrected version?

Not really that familiar with how premiere handles sound.

I'm using the Stand Alone version rather than a plugin. I read the manual and it suggests that it creates a second saved file in the same location but it's not doing that - that said I have finder open at the same time and see a file momentarily pop in but then disappear. Going to reinstall and see if that does anything.

Strange. I’ve only ever used it in pro tools so can’t really help you there.

Might be worth trying it in premiere, should be able to run your mix through it and export a corrected mix.

Managed to get a -23 .wav! Hooray!

However when I bring it into Premiere I get the same old shit. It's obviously fucking Premiere and I fucking hate it.

Tech specs are here: https://support.honeycomb.tv/en/support/solutions/articles/19000025051-uk-roi-commercials

I bring the EBU R128 compliant .wav the Premiere timeline under the video file I need.
Ctrl-M to export.
On the Effects tab I select Loudness Normalization:
Loudness Standard: EBU R128
Target Loudness: -23 LUFS
Tolerance: 0.5 LU
Max True Peak level - 1dBTP
Configure True Peak Limiter: ON
Look-Ahead Time: 12ms
Release Time: 200ms
I then hit export and BOOM - a file at -26LUFS.
I try it again without having normalization switched on at all on effect - BOOM - a file at -19.9 LUFS.

Literally hitting my head with a colouring panel as I type.

Solved. Literally down to the broken fucking nonsense software that is Adobe Premiere:
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/35463160-loudness-normalization-export-bug

On another audio note, any sound recordists around in Clerkenwell on Monday for 2 hours?
1-hour interview (2-3pm) with some prep/transfers either side. Looking for timecoded recording of a single subject.

I was following your struggle with interest, glad to hear you got sorted. Premiere has given me so much jip this year, the whole tweak>export>fail cycle is bloody relatable. We are quite entrenched in the Adobe Creative Suite which makes switching NLE a bit trickier.

How do you find Resolve? I've heard good things.

The worst thing was that I was thinking I'm an idiot and don't know what I'm doing but actually we were doing the right thing and buggy software was the problem.

I'm really close to dropping our subscription or at least some of them. We've got 5 licenses here so that's what... 2.5k per year. It's not a small sum for a small business for exhausting experiences like that. I'd certainly consider dropping to 1 or 2 so we can still use After Effects and Potatochop when required but as a whole we all use Resolve for editing these days.

I personally love Resolve. We have lots of Blackmagic hardware from cameras and vision mixing stuff to colouring panels so I'm possibly a bit biased.
If I could figure out how to export for commercial spec (for some reason when we export xdcam op1a mxf the colours are ridiculously saturated) we'd def use that for broadcast delivery instead of premiere which would be another nail in the latter's coffin.

Anyone have any dealings with frame.io was on a call with them today and their product looks really good. Pity I don’t have any authority to buy it.

It’s ok. Getting better including integration with NLEs. Still quit a chunk of money to get the most out of it so your whole team would need to really commit to the change. Some clients are ok with it. Others less so. It’s very easy for clients to use, they just wilfully ignore anything that isn’t email. And frankly they ignore those too sometimes.

yeah I get you in terms of clients, its all well and good saying click this link or comment in this viewer, if they are external clients with no stake in it, a lot of the time, they just act like they're a really old person who just needs to see it on vhs on their tv, and can't be arsed to learn a little bit more to use something new, no matter how intuitive it is to use.

I was unconvinced before but seeing their presentation has made me quite excited about it. Company I work for is in the process of building something similar, but how long that will take to get up and running, is anyone's guess.

In the meantime it's still a case of wetransferring video files with burnt in timecode to clients, or sending links to WIP's in vimeo.