Journal Article

Mixology methods

Rose, Jay

2008

Overview

While your computer has only one mouse and can move only one on-screen slider at a time, most of us have plenty of fingers. So manufacturers developed hardware controllers, with multiple sliders and knobs that can be moved by different fingers simultaneously. Behringer's BCF-2000 is a simple one. While it's about as big as a laptop and costs less than $200, it can add real mixing control to most audio programs and many NLEs. The controls on it that look like a mixer are actually digital encoders. Each time you move one, the box sends that movement to the computer via USB, where a system-level driver sends it to the rubber bands and on-screen faders. When you play back - and here's the great part - the rubber bands talk back to the controller. Tiny motors move the faders, and duplicate what you've done with your fingers. This doesn't affect the sound, since there's no actual audio in the controller, but provides visual and tactile feedback. Many controllers have sliders for just eight tracks in their base configuration. Since a film can involve dozens of simultaneous tracks, these controllers use bank switches that assign the eight to different groups of tracks at a time. You can program all of the dialog, then move over on the \"console\" to adjust sound effects or scoring. Good audio software even lets you set up custom banks of track, group and master faders, all recallable from the controller. It's the modern equivalent of the old Hollywood practice of premixing, where all the dialog tracks would be mixed to one piece of magnetic film and all the sound effects to another, to simplify the final mix. Except there's no quality loss from multiple generations, and it's easy to go back to change a premix later. Even if you've got a control surface and lots of responsive faders under your fingers, there will be times your fingers haven't moved exactly the way you want them. You might have done an elaborate transition between two scenes perfectly, but missed where the picture dissolves by a few frames. Or you might want to adjust the level of just a single word or note. That's when it pays to remember that your software is really using control points on rubber-band volume lines, even if you're accessing them with virtual or real faders. Here are some techniques for fine-tuning those points.

• Publisher: Future US Holdings Inc. d/b/a Future US LLC,Future Publishing Ltd
• Subject: Bands / Evaluation / Management / Software / Sound effects (Performing arts) / User interface / Video production companies