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1 week ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
As an editor, I am often responsible for the mixes on my projects. These include commercials, short-form documentary-style productions, corporate videos, and branded content. More often than not, the final mix is done within Premiere Pro as part of the whole project. These mixes are usually simple – dialogue, music, and a few sound effects. Anything more complex goes out to a pro audio studio. Nevertheless, these mixes need to be as good as they can be.
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2 weeks ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
Noam Levinberg is the driving force behind Safari Pedals plugins, but his other career is as a mastering engineer with 20 years of experience. Watch his videos and you’ll see a custom mastering console on the desk and a rack of outboard hardware. These are the inspiration behind the newest Safari Pedals plugin, the Sun Bear bus compressor. Although this is marketed as a mastering grade compression plugin, it’s equally at home on stems like a drum mix, as well as on your stereo mix bus.
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3 weeks ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
Safari Pedals introduces Planet of the AmpsIt’s pretty easy to pick out the playing of guitar heroes, like Stevie Ray Vaughn, The Edge, Slash, Wes Montgomery, Jimi Hendrix, and others. As most musicians know, the tone is in the fingers. Give any one of these icons any combination of gear and they’d still sound very much the same. But let’s not take away from the gear they use, including guitars, amps, and effects pedals. Those certainly contribute to the tonality of their music.
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1 month ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
The Kiive Audio Kstrip blends three icons into a single pluginMixers and audio enthusiasts alike talk about the sound of certain vintage analog mixing consoles. What they really mean is the character of specific elements of a given console. That usually boils down the in-line components of the channel strips. Those include preamps, EQs, gates, and compressors. Depending on the brand and model, a console might integrate some or all of these pieces into each channel.
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1 month ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
Over the years I’ve used about twenty different linear and nonlinear editing and color correction systems on feature films, documentaries, and other long-form projects. This time I’m cutting a feature length documentary with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio. The film is about land management issues in the vast region outside of Yellowstone. I live in Florida. The director and the rest of the post team live in Montana.
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1 month ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
The term “insert standard” is often bandied about in production and post circles. Just like “professional quality” or “studio quality” it’s a term that is at best ill-defined and often quite meaningless. There are some industry bodies like NAB, SMPTE, AES, and others that might set guidelines or recommendations, but these have little or no legal weight. Often these guidelines come too late to have any real meaning.
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2 months ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
Admittedly, I’m being cheeky with the title. You aren’t going to turn your digital audio workstation application into a vintage Neve console. However, most DAWs use a virtual mixer window that mimics a standard hardware console with faders, buses, and a 2-bus (stereo output). As such, depending on the plugins you use, your DAW for all intents and purposes can be set up to mimic an SSL, Neve, API, or any other brand of audio console. Add a physical control surface and you are even closer.
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2 months ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
One major area of advancement for many NLEs in the past few years has been the integration of transcription and caption capabilities. These features service a wide range of needs, including generating editorial transcripts, foreign language subtitles, and closed captioning to meet legal ADA requirements. What was once a time-consuming human task has become fast and largely automatic, yet still relatively accurate.
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2 months ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
Until the introduction of Avid Media Composer, my linear editing suites typically included ElectroVoice or JBL bookshelf speakers as the main monitors. These were paired with smaller Auratones. The point was not only to create the best possible mixes, but also to understand how your mix would translate to smaller systems with a narrower sound spectrum. As technology moved from bespoke, hardware-centric edit suites and audio mixing studios to desktop systems, the rooms shrunk accordingly.
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2 months ago | 
digitalfilms.wordpress.com | Oliver Peters
I started my career in radio and the audio side of TV. So, I’m quite familiar with recording and editing analog audio tape. Until digital files became a reality, open reel audiotape was the transfer format for voice-overs, music, and radio commercials. A number of brands were “must haves” in studios during the heyday of analog recording and mixing, but Studer was at the top of the list. The company’s reel-to-reel machines were iconic in classic recording studios and still prized today.
