Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1179544
45 I'M ALMOST OUT OF TAPE, I MEAN MEMORY CARD SPACE Finally, returning to my initial comment, what is required of sound is not accuracy, but believability. "Verisimilitude trumps veracity" as I am fond of telling my students. And what is "believable" changes from generation to generation, or even more rapidly. When "moving pictures" were first shown in public, a black-and-white film of an approaching locomotive caused a panic in the audience. Now, they know better. When it comes to sound, there are changes in believability, too. Until fairly recently, most movies were boomed, and perspective sound was the norm. The proximity effect of directional mikes helped to heighten this effect. Then radio mikes were developed, and soon From Breathe (2019), Upper: Boom Operator Joe Bourdet mikes male lead Jeremy Guskin, who is also wearing a radio mike. Lower: Just because I mix from a kit doesn't mean I can't sit! evolved to be practical—and then ubiquitous. Now, close-miked sound is gradually becoming the new normal. The Laws of Physics have been superseded, too—at least for movies—and now thunder is simultaneous with lightning, the sound of aerial fireworks with the flash, etc. There is another new development—several related ones, actually. Movie theaters have changed, and not for the better. In the "good old days," they showed only one picture at a time, and were reasonably quiet. Today, multiplexes abound, and you can hear the audio from theaters on either side of yours, not to mention the sound of most of the audience eating popcorn and talking. In some theaters, outside traffic noise intrudes, and even the HVAC systems are not silenced properly. This increase in the noise floor has forced the projectionists to raise the volume of the sound track, either making the loudest portions too loud, or compressing the dynamic range excessively, or both. As a result, the re-recording mixers have to adjust the release tracks to have the softest sounds above the noise floor of the theater, and then compress them so the loudest levels won't be above whatever maximum the local authorities have ordained. The new HDR (High Dynamic Range) standards can work for the picture, but not the sound in these venues. As mentioned earlier, you can ride the gain manually during production and produce a track that will have an acceptable dynamic range, but what that range is to be is continually changing. PLAY IT FORWARD I was very lucky to have my very first day's recorded ¼-inch tape sent to Lee Strosnider's transfer house. He realized that the problems were not caused by my incompetence, but rather by defective rental equipment and incorrect instructions in its use. He kindly rented me his own gear, and taught me enough to get started, so I could bootstrap myself up from there. That was the beginning of a 45-year mentoring, which soon became mutual. Many others also helped me along, and eventually I was able to return the favor (though in many cases only Karmically because by then, those people were mixing in more heavenly locations than I was). Beginning in 1988, I taught sound part-time at UCLA for 25 years, until the department suffered a mission drift and became more interested in making money than having the students learn