A Delay and Waylay That Wa LA: SAE & McDSP
Like that, like some strange flash, we were gone from Southern California. We had been there for a full month, we rarely spend such an amount of time in one area but it was the start of the year, the landscape of the southern part of the state is expanse and warm in the winter and tradeshows and events were abound. Driving up the grapevine (see: Interstate 5), the next event was up in Pleasant Hill in the East Bay by San Francisco and the previous event was a stop at S.A.E. Los Angeles. Down there on Sunset Blvd, we sat at S.A.E. and had a day parked between two buildings gazing out to the beautiful streets that make up Hollywood. This day we had the amazing songwriter and producer Toby Gad and artist Chelsea Williams on the bus doing a live performance and an interview with winners of an S.A.E. contest.
exhibit a: sunsetblvd
As we were conducting the interview, there were a series of hurdles that we had to overcome like a marathon runner who is in it for the education rather than the checkered flag (Do marathons have checkered flags? I never ran one, I would not know). The first was that we had 7 people speaking at once in the interview and each had to have descript audio inputs. That was easy enough, we have enough recievers and batteries to where we just ran that all into Pro Tools 10 and grabbed the video with a mixture of our cameras and Tri Caster.
In post, though, we ran into some issues. Listening back to the audio, it was insightful and beautiful, with genuine moments and instances of everyone connecting, thought it was a bit noisy. With any of this live audio stuff, I found out, there is quite a bit of work put into the act to make it listenable. I had never attempted a project of these sorts so the tricks that I learned from this session were thanks to Ryan. What he pointed out to clean up noisy post audio was this:
MCDSP NF575 was the main tool for the session. I played with the preset settings until I got one that was somewhat close to what my goal was and then went into “solo-mode” to go after one specific buzz that was going on. In this case, it was a frequency in the highs that was the result of a A/C running in the background. Using a super small Q number, I surgically pulled out the one frequency and the audio came out clean.