The essential distinction between offline and online is that an offline process is one of construction; an online process, one of execution. In media production, online usually follows offline, as in the case of video editing, where a product that has been laboriously constructed in an offline edit suite—perhaps over the course of days or weeks—is executed by machinery following an edit decision list (EDL) in minutes or hours in an online suite.
Since the hourly rate of a well appointed online suite is typically several orders of magnitude higher than that of a small offline studio—often equipped with not much more than a desktop computer running editing software—the distinction between online and offline has long been etched into the steely heart of many a production manager.
Applying this distinction to the field of music, you might say that playing an instrument is generally an online process, and requires the talent to perform. Constructing a musical performance using MIDI step input, for example, is an offline process, and requires a different skill set.
Before Bing Crosby teamed up with Jack Mullin back in 1947 and seized on the potential for splicing tape offline to construct complete recorded performances, recording musicians had to execute a complete work flawlessly to the end while it was being recorded direct to phonograph disc—an online process. If they made a mistake, they had to go back to the beginning, scrap the disc, and start all over again.
Likewise, dialing a phone on a traditional land line is an online process. If you realize you’ve made a mistake, you have to abort—hang up—and begin again. Dialing a cell phone, on the other hand, is an offline process. You compose the number and, if you make a mistake, you go back a step and delete the wrong input—edit it out—and input the right number. When the entire telephone number has been constructed to your liking, you go online—literally, hit the green online button—and the call is executed by the service provider.
The ability to edit is what distinguishes offline from online processes.
Sound mixing for film used to be mostly an online activity. It was common practice in the early decades of film sound for an entire 10-minute reel to be mixed in a single pass, following one or more rehearsals. With the development of pick-up and record electronics for film dubbers making punching in possible, the two- or three-person re-recording team enjoyed the ability at last to go back and fix a flawed portion of a mix—usually refining their console settings listening to the sound backwards while the dubbers rewound in real time—without causing undue delay and excessive cost to the production.
Mix automation changed all that, from the introduction of console automation systems in the 1970s to today’s digital audio workstations featuring the ability to graph not just volume and mute, but just about every conceivable control parameter. Automation has allowed the offline construction of mixes to become standard operating procedure, with the mix being subsequently executed online in a single record pass or internal bounce-to-disk.
Now this has all changed again with the introduction of offline bounce in ProTools 11. This enables freezing a mix—that is, rendering the final mix up to 150 times faster than real time, according to Avid—and has made the notion of “online” something of a quaint curiosity.
Now a mix need never be onlined at all, since we are able to render into a single final file something that doesn’t ever need to be played through, prior to the playback for quality control checking and approval, after the fact.
The notion of online vs. offline, once so central to the production process and necessitating the development of the all-important EDL, is in the process of being relegated to the status of a quaint curiosity, a byway in the development of modern studio practices and procedures. It will soon be forgotten, along with such other bygone realities as the daily tape recorder alignment ritual, analog noise reduction devices, and uniformed gas station attendants.
It brings to mind the day that I finally sold my once invincible Synclavier and 16-track Direct-to-Disk recorder—to a couple of vintage synth collectors, no less. The only things I hung onto were two blank rack panels and an AC power bar. Some things, at least, are irreplaceable.
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Leap year and drop-frame time code are conceptually the same
For those in the media production industries, February 29th is a good day to revisit drop-frame SMPTE time code, because both leap year and drop-frame time code came into being for the sole purpose of reconciling two different time bases on which we do things with mundane regularity.
Take the calendar first: our calendar simply charts the sequence of the individual days that comprise a single year. The day is based, of course, on a single rotation of the earth on its axis, whereas the year is based on a single revolution of the earth around the sun. Rotation and revolution are the two different time bases on which our calendar is constructed.
Since it takes about 365.25 days for the earth to revolve around the sun, we collect four of those quarter days and add them together into a single day—February 29—that appears on the calendar once every four years.
We do this because there's no such thing as a quarter-day: you couldn't start a New Year at 6:00 a.m. After all, a day is a day and cannot be partitioned like that. It's an integer.
It's important to see that the concept of the yearly calendar comprises 366 days—February 29 is not imaginary. But rather than adding it every four years, what we are really doing is dropping it from the calendar in every year that is not a multiple of four. If the year is not divisible by 4, then we drop February 29 from our count of days in that year.
It's exactly the same with drop-frame time code, where frames are analogous to days, and hours to years. A video frame is a whole thing, an integer, and we count 30 of them in one second. But the rate at which they proceed is a bit less than 30 per second, more like 29.97 frames per second.
This is the same sort of fractional discrepancy that exists in the annual rate of 365.25 days per year.
We deal with it the same way, by dropping 2 frames from the count at the very beginning of every minute that is not a multiple of 10. In that first second, there are only 28 frames.
So frames 00 and 01 simply do not exist at the beginning of every minute of time code that doesn't have a zero at the end of it (10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 00 minutes being the exceptions), just as February 29 does not exist in any year that can't be divided by 4. It's as simple as that.
Why go to the bother of doing this? For the calendar, it's long been considered important that the seasons start at roughly the same time every year: if we didn't have February 29 as a corrective, then the beginning of Spring, for example, would progress steadily back through February, January, December, and so on as the years rolled by.
For producers, it's important that the time displayed by your time code reader agrees with the real-time clock on the control room wall. Without drop-frame time code, a one-hour program as measured by your time code would actually run 3 seconds and 18 frames too long, and that would wreak havoc with broadcast schedules.
Note that what we are NOT doing is cutting out frames from our program and leaving them on the cutting room floor, as some of my former students at the Toronto Film School used to believe. Those "dropped" frames are simply never there in the first place, just as February 29 will not "be there" in 2013, 2014, and 2015. The calendar works as "drop-day" code.
The takeaway from this blog entry is that if you can intuitively grasp the concept of leap year, then you've already got the essence of drop-frame time code. Conceptually, they are one and the same.
Take the calendar first: our calendar simply charts the sequence of the individual days that comprise a single year. The day is based, of course, on a single rotation of the earth on its axis, whereas the year is based on a single revolution of the earth around the sun. Rotation and revolution are the two different time bases on which our calendar is constructed.
Since it takes about 365.25 days for the earth to revolve around the sun, we collect four of those quarter days and add them together into a single day—February 29—that appears on the calendar once every four years.
We do this because there's no such thing as a quarter-day: you couldn't start a New Year at 6:00 a.m. After all, a day is a day and cannot be partitioned like that. It's an integer.
It's important to see that the concept of the yearly calendar comprises 366 days—February 29 is not imaginary. But rather than adding it every four years, what we are really doing is dropping it from the calendar in every year that is not a multiple of four. If the year is not divisible by 4, then we drop February 29 from our count of days in that year.
It's exactly the same with drop-frame time code, where frames are analogous to days, and hours to years. A video frame is a whole thing, an integer, and we count 30 of them in one second. But the rate at which they proceed is a bit less than 30 per second, more like 29.97 frames per second.
This is the same sort of fractional discrepancy that exists in the annual rate of 365.25 days per year.
We deal with it the same way, by dropping 2 frames from the count at the very beginning of every minute that is not a multiple of 10. In that first second, there are only 28 frames.
So frames 00 and 01 simply do not exist at the beginning of every minute of time code that doesn't have a zero at the end of it (10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 00 minutes being the exceptions), just as February 29 does not exist in any year that can't be divided by 4. It's as simple as that.
Why go to the bother of doing this? For the calendar, it's long been considered important that the seasons start at roughly the same time every year: if we didn't have February 29 as a corrective, then the beginning of Spring, for example, would progress steadily back through February, January, December, and so on as the years rolled by.
For producers, it's important that the time displayed by your time code reader agrees with the real-time clock on the control room wall. Without drop-frame time code, a one-hour program as measured by your time code would actually run 3 seconds and 18 frames too long, and that would wreak havoc with broadcast schedules.
Note that what we are NOT doing is cutting out frames from our program and leaving them on the cutting room floor, as some of my former students at the Toronto Film School used to believe. Those "dropped" frames are simply never there in the first place, just as February 29 will not "be there" in 2013, 2014, and 2015. The calendar works as "drop-day" code.
The takeaway from this blog entry is that if you can intuitively grasp the concept of leap year, then you've already got the essence of drop-frame time code. Conceptually, they are one and the same.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Seller Beware—When You're Being Shopped for a Price
I got an email last week asking how much I would charge to mix 5 songs for a band's EP. I wrote back asking whether I'd be recording the original tracks, or just mixing tracks that someone else has already recorded for the band. Both, came the reply, and how much would it cost?
I wrote back to ask about the band, number of players, what instruments, etc., so that I could price out the job using the appropriate recording facility, and asking for a couple of possible dates when the band wanted to start recording. This is an important question, because in sales, there's a strong relationship between price, availability and delivery. You can sometimes get a better deal on studio time that would otherwise remain unbooked.
At this point, the answers started to get vague. What was clear, however, was that I was being shopped for a price. In other words, the prospect (not yet a client) had no intention of coming to me for the job, but was only trying to get a handle on the price of a job that most likely he was bidding on himself.
This happens to everyone from time to time, and is one of the reasons why it's not a great idea just to shoot out a price in response to an inquiry. Every job is different in some way, and a big part of the sales process is asking questions to qualify the buyer.
Asking questions not only keeps valuable business intelligence—your pricing policies— out of the hands of your competition, it also saves you from wasting time with tire kickers who would otherwise take up a lot of your time, but never end up buying anything.
The 80-20 rule seems to apply here: 80% of your business comes from 20% of your prospects. This is further refined so that in turn, 80% of your income comes from 20% of them. In other words, 4% (20% of 20%) of your potential clients are responsible for about two-thirds (80% of 80%) of your business.
Asking questions is your best line of defense here, and a genuine prospect will appreciate that you're drilling down in order to provide the best possible service.
I wrote back to ask about the band, number of players, what instruments, etc., so that I could price out the job using the appropriate recording facility, and asking for a couple of possible dates when the band wanted to start recording. This is an important question, because in sales, there's a strong relationship between price, availability and delivery. You can sometimes get a better deal on studio time that would otherwise remain unbooked.
At this point, the answers started to get vague. What was clear, however, was that I was being shopped for a price. In other words, the prospect (not yet a client) had no intention of coming to me for the job, but was only trying to get a handle on the price of a job that most likely he was bidding on himself.
This happens to everyone from time to time, and is one of the reasons why it's not a great idea just to shoot out a price in response to an inquiry. Every job is different in some way, and a big part of the sales process is asking questions to qualify the buyer.
Asking questions not only keeps valuable business intelligence—your pricing policies— out of the hands of your competition, it also saves you from wasting time with tire kickers who would otherwise take up a lot of your time, but never end up buying anything.
The 80-20 rule seems to apply here: 80% of your business comes from 20% of your prospects. This is further refined so that in turn, 80% of your income comes from 20% of them. In other words, 4% (20% of 20%) of your potential clients are responsible for about two-thirds (80% of 80%) of your business.
Asking questions is your best line of defense here, and a genuine prospect will appreciate that you're drilling down in order to provide the best possible service.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Message to You by Catherine Bacque
Here's a track co-written with Catherine Bacque and produced for her upcoming release, inspired by the script for the short film "More Than Words," in pre-production by Raindance Canada's James Cooper, screenplay by Yaw Attuah and Zachary Herrmann. (Members of our creative team are featured in this slide-show video.)
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