•postbrooklyn•

I was never really sure how to use this filter until today — working on this program with about seven different interview set ups in different parts of the country, different noise environments. Thankfully, most of them are pretty quiet, but each one has just a little bit of buzz or hum or whine in the soundtrack. Apply the BNR filter, and that’s usually where I get lost. But this time, there’s enough of a pause in most of the dialogue tracks to highlight just a piece. Click on “learn.” Hit play and then stop. A little waveform appears. Super fit it and then drag the fit below the existing waveform. Then adjust the response and release down. Bring the noise reduction down, too — maybe -10 or more, but listen while you do it and you’ll hear slight alterations and a bit of flanging if you go too far. Increase the smoothing to iron out some of the flange and then tweak the frequency just a bit (probably bringing the gain up a little). Keep listening and eventually the settings will coalesce and you’re done. And the change is very dramatic, especially in headphones.

Pro Tools imports .m4a files directly. Who knew? All this time I’d been converting them into AIFs like an idiot… ah well, now I can skip the clunky iTunes conversion and get back to work.

Which I really need to do…

Just taking a break as we approach deadline on the Brain Fitness Program. What’s left to do? Well, nearly everything. I’m throwing together random compositions to buck up an overly quiet pledge break set, rendering fixes to 3D animations on another computer and hoping that sometime tomorrow all of the pieces will come together to make a coherent whole so that I’m not laying things back for final masters ten minutes before the FedEx deadline on Monday. So far, I’m not optimistic since there’s a ludicrous amount of sound mixing to be done and a very finite amount of time to do it. I’m thrilled, though, with the overall sound quality of the pledge breaks which are mixing almost in real time because the source is so clean. The full length program, though, features sound sources from ten different interview locations all over the country and will require quite a bit more finesse. And there’s still no music to go with it so far. Not to mention the sound effects that need to appear.

And I won’t even get into the captioning of it…

I still find it remarkably cool that I can flip open my laptop and knock out a quick riff on a tiny desk sized keyboard (the versatile Ozone keyboard) into GarageBand and create rough mixes of music that could pass for library music… except it’s even subtler and more useful than library music ever is. I do like that.