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www.postmagazine.com 44 POST NOVEMBER 2014 CONTINUED FROM PG 39 TOOLS FOR THE TIMES ed by Michael Carnes, renowned for his earlier work with Lexicon. The biggest change to Cole's workfl ow has come from the new iZotope RX 4. Instead of working with AudioSuite plug-ins, as he did in the previous version of RX, there is an option in RX 4 that allows him to send audio to the standalone application, and monitor the standalone application through ProTools very easily. "All the tools are right there within one application and you can mix and match and undo to any level you want," says Cole. "When you're fi nished, you can send it back to ProTools. It's a little bit diff erent from how I've used it in the past but it's really powerful. It combines all the features of the RX 4 into one pass." Another new feature of the RX 4 that Cole fi nds helpful is Ambience Match, which learns the ambient noise on a source clip and then processes that onto another selection the user chooses. "You no longer need to go through all the handles on a piece of audio to fi nd room tone. Ninety percent of the time Ambience Match is right on the money and just what you need. It's such a time-saver." Cole is currently working on a project recorded in a relatively small, live environ- ment with numerous open mics. The soundtrack is peppered with ADR recorded in people's offi ces and other diff erent locations. Between the iZotope RX 4, Expo- nential Audio reverbs, and the FabFilter Pro-Q 2 EQ, Cole is able to get the track where he wants it to be. "What is really helpful for me is the visualization aspect of the Pro-Q 2. You get this great spectrum analyzer that allows you to see where the problems are," he says. Trent's Foley work includes the fi lms Sin City, Running Scared and Ladder 49, as well as the TV series Star Trek Enterprise, and in-game cinematics for Resident Evil 6, Sunset Overdrive and Batman Arkham. He's taken his years of experience working in nearly every Foley stage in town and applied that knowledge when building his own custom Foley stage at his home studio. One of the best features, he says, is the solid cement foundation his stage is built on. "It's one of the hardest surfaces to get right and I had it right here at home. I sound-proofed and insulated the room really well and built my own pits. Now I can cover my Foley needs right here at my home studio." In the quest for super clean recordings, Trent ingeniously added a Cedar DNS 2000 to his signal chain, so the sound travels through the mic, pre-amp, Cedar, and into ProTools. "The Cedar DNS 2000 is generally a dialogue restoration tool used by re-recording mixers but it works really well in my signal chain for reducing hiss, noise and rumble. It's not the newest tool on the block but it certainly helps when recording multiple tracks of footsteps on carpet or sounds inherently not very loud to begin with," Trent divulges. When deadlines and budgets are tight on animated projects, for example, Trent sometimes opts to do footsteps via MIDI keyboard using Avid's Structure software, which he did recently for the upcoming animated special, How Murray Saved Christ- mas. By doing the footsteps himself, he was able to dedicate the one day allotted for Foley entirely to working with a Foley artist on the detailed sounds that couldn't be done with library eff ects. "Foley is all about performance," says Trent. "My job as a Foley mixer is to capture the Foley artist's performance. We were able to con- centrate on specifi c prop sounds that needed to be tailored to details." The MIDI footsteps are used in tandem with artist-performed Foley. "The art and talent that a good Foley artist brings to the project, I don't think (or hope) will ever disappear." Cole and Trent agree that budgets for audio post don't look like they're going to get better in the future. The trend, says Trent, has been awful: less money, less time, twice the expectation, fewer people hired for the project, and tremendously adverse conditions all being done for fl at bids that are insuffi cient for the work. "I wish the industry could recognize in a budgetary sense the importance of special- ized work that all the people in the Foley world, the editorial world, and all of the post sound departments do. We're working for far less money and putting in far more hours," says Trent. "Those of us who take our art and our profession seriously don't know how to do a bad job. I still have to be happy with myself and the work I turn in at the end of the day." www.postmagazine.com FOR MORE ADR & FOLEY, VISIT US AT we were able to cut between the action in Amsterdam and New York in a really playful way to bring the event back to life and make sense of it for a passive online audience." Watson notes that cutting through the clutter applies to Internet as well as broadcast advertising these days. "The Internet is a busy place. You can't expect to stand out or be seen if you throw up mediocre content. The story must be compelling. That could be achieved through the subject matter or production values — but without one of these factors, chances are no one will see your fi lm." WHITEHOUSE POST — HP Big-wave surfer Ian Walsh used an HP Pavilion X360 computer to help him fi nd the amazing South African swells documented in Ghost Wave, an eight-minute fi lm shot by director Taylor Steele, via 180LA, and edited by Brandon Porter of Whitehouse Post, Los Angeles (www.whitehousepost. com). The fi lm resides on HP Computers' YouTube channel. Earlier, Porter edited a :30 broadcast spot about Walsh hunting down the next big wave, which was designed to drive viewers to the Web to watch a longer spot and trailers, and leave their comments about the surfer's quest. "The writers whose comments HP liked had their names machine-etched onto Ian's surfboard in a 'drop into history with Ian' pro- motion," says Porter. Fans kept up with Walsh's hunt online through a series of on-location social media postings following him to South Africa where he and his team, aided by HP, honed in on the location of the massive surf Walsh sought. Porter traveled with the team as it captured travel footage, interviews with key support staff and curious locals, and stunning shots of the big waves. Eager viewers around the world were waiting for fi lm of Walsh's ride so Porter had less than a week to edit the fi lm. "Being there cut down on the time I needed to get familiar with the material," he notes. "Since I knew what happened and I knew the certain beats we had to get, I could put the fi lm together a lot faster." There was debate about how long the fi lm should be. "Taylor [Steele] does a lot of surf movies so we wanted the feel of a Taylor surf fi lm," Porter explains. "Two minutes wasn't going to be long enough for the epicness of the event, but my original cut of 14 minutes was too long, so we aimed for just under eight minutes." Steele shot 5K anamorphic with two Red Epics, which enabled Porter to reposition or push in on shots as needed. He boarded a plane home, armed with a MacBook Pro, Avid Media Composer 8 and a 4TB hard drive containing eight days of 5K footage. He didn't have time to transcode on the plane, but using Avid's new ability to AMA link to the RAW media, he was able to review the footage and make selects, getting a jump on the edit back at Whitehouse Post. Still, "there was so much interesting stuff that my original cut was 14 minutes," says Porter. "I had to step outside the box and look at what kept the story moving as opposed to what I thought was interesting. I had to keep viewers engaged, to weave the story together without repeating or dragging. Once I had the interviews strung out then it became easier to fi ll in with beautiful footage." Mark Gethin at MPC/LA performed the color correction; Flame artist Chris Nollert at Whitehouse Post's sister company, Carbon, did the conform. Ghost Wave captures all the excitement of Walsh's big wave quest while subtly showing how HP facilitated the adventure. "We felt we were making a fi lm, not an ad, and I think we succeeded in that," Porter says. "We didn't cut any corners for the Web. We did our best work and gave Ian's ride the respect it deserves." CONTINUED FROM PG 34 TARGETED, ENTERTAINING & INTERACTIVE! VISIT US AT www.postmagazine.com FOR MORE ON ADVERTISING & THE INTERNET,