Webspace of Eric Brodeur

A situation we experienced on Hotel Noir was the use of two four-track field recorders to capture production sound. Ideally, one recorder should be used with enough tracks to handle the required microphone inputs.

As we processed dailies in the Avid, we selected a mixed-down audio track for our guide during the offline edit. A conventional audio turnover would consist of an EDL which is used to re-link all of the production sound tracks.

In our case we had two sets of production sound which cannot be represented in a single EDL. Also, there is no way to merge the A and B sets so we had to find another method of combining them.

What follows is a brief description of how we got both sets of audio turned over to the sound department.

Your sound team must be using an auto-conform tool such as Synchro Arts’ Titan. It ingests the EDL and builds a Pro Tools project using audio guide in the picture cut and the original production sound. If your sound team doesn’t implement this workflow you are looking at a mountain of time-consuming labor.

From the Avid, export an EDL of your sequence. In our case it referenced our A set of audio. The EDL contained a list of clips looking like this:

• A0001
• A0004
• A0011
• A0004
• A0012
• …and so on

When this is processed through Titan the four tracks of audio from set A are brought into Pro Tools.

Next, make a copy of your EDL and open it with a text editor. Replace the references to “A” with “B”. This assumes your location sound team used a consistent naming convention. In our case, set A contained tracks 1-4 and set B contained 5-8 and the filenames corresponded such as A0024 and B0024. Timecode matched as well.

Process this new EDL with Titan and the Pro Tools session will be populated with the second set of audio tracks. After some clean up work by the sound editor, the Pro Tools session will contain all of your production tracks.

Many thanks to Dan Snow at Anarchy Post for helping me find this solution.