Sound Design MU2411 - Week 14 (12/12/17)

Assignment 1 Submission

““...and there I was, in the final hour.””

— Abe (Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty)

So, the big day finally arrived. I submitted my assignment by 10:21pm, making use of the online submission process to buy myself a few more precious hours to mix in the D-Control 5.1 studio.

Objective complete!

Those final few hours in the D-Control made all the difference...I hope!

Stemming Down

I used a Pro Tools HD iLok to make my final stems without having to delete tracks from my already maxed-out track count.

Final Export and Delivery

To complete my cinematic audio redesign, I bounced out the audio from my master mix session as a stereo audio file, and then added it into a new Pro Tools session containing the video file. This way, I was able to massively reduce the strain on my computer's CPU during the audio and video bounce process as all the main audio processing had been taken care of in the first audio-only bounce. Then, I bounced the audio and video to a QuickTime file, which I subsequently loaded up in MPEG Streamclip to convert the video codec from Avid DNxHD to H.264.

Limiting Issues

As I had to do the final audio bounce on my laptop (in order to make use of the some specific Kilohearts plug-ins), I couldn't use of Avid's Pro Limiter to do my final audio bounce. As an alternative, I used the Maxim plug-in on the Master output with the ceiling value set to -2.0dB.

On previous projects, I've usually set the Maxim ceiling value much higher (e.g. -0.3dB/-0.4dB), but after learning about inter-sample peaks, I decided to give myself more room for error and set it to -2.0dB as Maxim is not a true-peak limiter. 

Listening back however (and looking at the final waveform) the sound in he really loud sections of the trailer gets chopped off when it hits the limiter. Ideally, I would have set the ceiling higher to prevent the 'squashing' effect, but I thought it would be a lesser evil than having big transient spikes going through a higher ceiling that could potentially clip the digital 0dB ceiling.

LUFS Issues

Final LUFS reading I took in the D-Control 5.1 studio. I subsequently dropped global clip gain by aprox 3-4dB after taking this reading, so hopefully my submitted video falls within the EB -23dB acceptable range.

DEM Stem Problems

It was my intention to include separate DEM stems alongside the main bounce as part and parcel of a professional delivery package. However, despite setting up and assigning the necessary buses and routing in Pro Tools, I ran out of time to get this done to a satisfactory level that I was happy with submitting. The main problem was simply an issue of volume - the stems were being routed properly, but they were far too loud and massively clipping during the printing process. In hindsight, I probably should have just stuck a hard limiter on each individual stem to stop them going into the red, but as this was just before the deadline I was in a bit of a panic, so I decided to focus on just getting the essentials done for the submission.

For future projects however, I'll definitely start thinking about stemming earlier on the process, as it would have streamlined my overall mixing process a great deal, and would possibly have bought me more time to mix to a higher standard in the final few weeks of the project.

During the final mix, I set up dedicated individual stems for DEM and VO stems, but I ran out of time to get these done to a standard I was happy submitting before the looking deadline. Next time!

UE4 Sequencer Tutorial - Work in Progress (31/10/17)

Thought I'd cobble together a quick video on the progress I've made while working though the Unreal Engine 4 Sequencer tutorial. I'm about halfway into this very useful YouTube series, but there's still a ways for me to go yet!

Learning how to use Sequencer has been an absolute blast so far; organising character animations, placing cameras and automating their settings basically let's you be a virtual director inside UE4! Had to temporarily break off from this project due to my ongoing course work, but will try to pick up where I left off over the Christmas break if I get chance.

Audio-wise, I've incorporated a snippet of the music from my dwarf tower defence game into the clip for the time being, as well a few choice samples. Once I've finished building the cinematic, I'll go back and do and a thorough sound design treatment for the whole piece, but for now, here's where I'm up to so far:

Outdoor Gun Recording, Cumbria (14/10/17)

Well this is a bit different; I've just returned from a fun (but loud) time recording guns and rifles in the Lake District with my Futureworks game audio buddies Aaron Turner and Alex Larumbe.

Thanks to Aaron being a member of a shooting club, we got the opportunity to record a gun club going trigger happy on an outdoor military shooting range. As gun and shooting sounds are prevalent in so many different types of video games, I was thrilled to get the chance to collect some genuine gun sounds for my personal sample library. It was a great experience, as it was a really good opportunity to both capture some hard to acquire sounds and put in a good chunk of time to learn the ins and outs of operating the ZOOM F8 field recorder.

Not that you can tell from this picture, but these folorn blimps are picking up some tasty ricochets and reverberations from the neighbouring hills.

As we were there as guests on the range, we of course had to abide by the house rules so to speak. We couldn't take photos of our recording setups on the range as we were the shooting was taking place on military base (and I didn't want to piss off a bunch of dudes with guns) so forgive the lack of pictures on this one. Also, we had to record the gun sounds in and amongst the normal itinerary of the shooting club; in other words, we could only record the guns going off en masse, and not individually catalogue each particular rifle in our recording process. However, as the various shooters began to disperse and head home as the day progressed, we were able to collect some more isolated recordings of gunshots towards the end of the session.

For the majority of the recordings, we used a pair of Line Audio CM3 cardioid mics with a Rode NTG1 shotgun mic going into the ZOOM F8. We set up the mics behind the line of shooters (we couldn't the impact sounds of the bullets hitting the metal targets for safety reasons) and experimented with various combinations of XY, ORTF and spaced mic pairings. On occasion, we also used a ZOOM H6 recorder with the proprietary shotgun mic attachment on occasion to capture the sounds of the blasts at a further distance from the main recording rig.

One problem we encountered during the recording session was that we didn't have the ability to consistently monitor what we pointing the mics at. Due to the ridiculously loud volume of the various rifles going off around us, I didn't want to risk removing my ear protection and damaging my hearing to listen to the incoming mic signals. While this decision helped preserve the structural integrity of my eardrums, it also meant that some of the recordings aren't amazing; listening back to a few of the audio files in Pro Tools today, some of the quieter gun shots sound muted and off-axis; problems which could have been easily avoided in a quieter recording environment.

A secondary problem is that there's also a lot of background chatter on the early recordings as the shooters are nattering away to each other in-between bullet barrages. Clever editing will no doubt help remove the bulk of the gabber, but as it's pretty consistent during the early hours of the session, a lot of this material might just be simply unusable...unless I ever need to do ambient sound design for a game/film scene set in a moderately busy outdoor gun range that is. 

However, despite these flaws, I think that overall the recording session went pretty well, especially considering it was our first time operating the mighty ZOOM F8. I still need to go through and edit the recordings, but from a quick listen I think we've managed to grab some pretty useable stuff. Here's a short clip of a meaty .50 calibre rifle for posterity:

FMOD Demo Level - Desert Work in Progress (21/09/17)

Thought I'd put together a quick work-in-progress post to show my current progress on my integrated FMOD and Unreal Engine 4 Desert project. At the moment, it's pretty much identical to the finished tutorial level that came with Sally Kellaway's excellent FMOD tutorial videos, save for one thing...a giant sentry robot!

Using UE4's Sequencer, I've created a (very rough) animation sequence where the robot patrols back and forth from the edge to the middle of the level. I've attached a FMOD events to the robot's skeletal mesh and animation sequences and attenuated the sounds attached to these events with the distance parameter so the player can hear the machine's footsteps and engine sounds as it approaches.

Big thanks to Phil Davison for troubleshooting a crossfade issue I was having with my mixer snapshots; now the grenade tinnitus effect has a nice smooth fade crossfade with the environment sounds as opposed to an abrupt switch over.

Engines and Middleware 1 - Assignment 1: Audio Implementation

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One of the big pieces of work I submitted back in April this year was the audio implementation assignment of my Engines and Middleware 1 module. Working in a group with my friends and fellow game audio students Adam White (@AdamRWhitehead) and Aaron Turner, the objective for this module was to take an existing Unreal Engine 4 game with all the original audio assets removed, and substitute them with our own (hopefully suitable) replacements.

The specific game we were given for this task with was the tower defence strategy game from the UE4 example game projects collection.

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