Geek Out with Nathaniel - Episode 7: Control Surfaces (and their history)

A long time ago, Avid (then called Digidesign), allowed 3rd-party MIDI control surfaces to move the faders and the pans in Pro Tools. JL Cooper made a bunch of these surfaces. They were awful. Shortly after, Mackie and Digidesign collaborated on an improved system that used MIDI in a smarter way, called HUI. HUI is still in use today, and is the main way that 3rd-party companies make controllers for Pro Tools (SSL, Tascam, etc.). But MIDI is awful, and Digidesign then built their first serious control surface, ProControl. ProControl looked and felt like a real board, and used a proprietary language over ethernet called DigiNet. DigiNet powered ProControl, Control | 24, C24, and all the ICON boards like D-Command and D-Control. For the small-budget crowd, they made Command|8 , Digi 002 and 003 all of which use MIDI in a smart way like HUI. 

When Avid purchased Euphonix, they got something special, EuCon. EuCon was the only serious competitor to DigiNet at the time. Avid promptly ended development for DigiNet and put all their resources into EuCon. The Artist series (we have an Artist Mix and Artist Control), MC Pro, Pro Tools | Dock, S3 (picture below), S5, and S6 are all built on EuControl. And EuControl is compatible with Logic, Nuendo and Pro Tools (and many more apps, too).

With Pro Tools 12, Avid released a free iPad app, Pro Tools | Control. This uses EuCon over Wi-Fi (or via the Lightning port) and is incredibly useful.

So that’s history. Here’s the lesson: EuControl uses ethernet and/or Wi-Fi and looks on the network for all available EuCon devices. Go to “EuCon Settings” in the menubar and you can see a window where you can grab any available surfaces on the network. When you move the Artist Mix and Control from room to room, remember the following:

Artist Mix and Artist Control plug into the ethernet switch (small black box), and the third cable on the switch goes to the Mac. All of our Mac Pro’s have (2) ethernet ports, and they automatically recognize that our LAN and the internet is on one port, and EuControl is on the other port. Ports are interchangeable. If you have time, fire up the controllers and experiment. It’s easy to get stuck in the habit of using only the mouse with Pro Tools. As soon as you break that habit, you’ll discover all the fast and intuitive ways you can run a session and shape sounds with a surface.

Take a look at Avid’s current line-up. These surfaces range in price from almost free to over $100k (!).

Geek Out with Nathaniel - Episode 5 - Synchronization

There are lots of ways and lots of reasons to synchronize audio/video workstations. No matter if you're syncing two Pro Tools systems, Logic to Ableton Live, or an old-fashioned video deck and Nuendo, the concepts are the same. Clock reference determines how fast everything is going. You can get clock from an AES/EBU signal, a video signal, or even an optical audio signal. Clock keeps systems from drifting. Positional reference tells the systems where they are. System A says "I'm at 1 hour, 12 minutes, 3 seconds and 19 frames... NOW!" And in each case you need to have a master and a slave.

Today, I sent old-fashioned LTC (longitudinal timecode) from Pro Tools on my laptop (the master) to the SYNC I/O connected to our desktop Pro Tools system (the slave). As long as the desktop system was online (flashing clock in the transport), it responded as the slave.
But there was an important oversight: I didn't connect the word clock output of the laptop/Ensemble to the word clock input of the SYNC I/O, so my demonstration was lacking a common clock reference. Next time, I promise!

Reading the manual on the train tonight, I was happy to discover that our old SYNC does support the HD video frame rate of 23.976: "The 24 fps LED flashes to indicate 23.976 fps." Which is exactly what we saw went I sent 23.976 LTC.

Homework: I've been reading up on RTS (Remote Transport Sync), which is a proprietary method of synchronizing two Source Connect systems over the internet. To make it work, you must instanciate the "Se ReWire" plug-in in Pro Tools so SC and PT can speak positional reference.

Geek Out with Nathaniel - Episode 3 - Calibrated Listening Levels

Adrian and I are marking down the listening level for mix sessions. This can be really helpful to you and to clients when you're working on the same project over multiple sessions. Everyone gets accustomed to what "loud" sounds like in the room, and as you get used to it, you can take your eyes off the meters and your ears will tell you if you're in spec.

To do it, download the calibration files from the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee). Put "MidRngPinkNoise_-20dB.wav" on a new track in your session, and set the fader for unity gain (make sure the master fader is also at unity gain). Then pan it hard to one speaker and play it in loop mode. Get an SPL meter, set it to C weighting, slow mode, and hold it at the listening position, but pointed to the loudspeaker. Turn the gain knob on your monitor up and down. You might find that working on a mix for the web, or on a music mix that you're in the 65db range. I discovered that our television clients like to mix at 73db, some of our film clients like it at 77db. Crazy-dynamic film mixes in bigger rooms than ours can be set to 85db.

Keep in mind that calibrated levels are not terribly important for tracking. But they're great for mixing. And if you're disciplined, you can set the level at the start of a project and never change it. This will result in more consistent mixes without any guesswork.

Geek Out with Nathaniel - Episode 4 - Mastered for iTunes

Mastered for iTunes (MFiT) is less complex than it seems. Click here for Apple's documents and droplets for diving deep. I recommend reading them all. But here's the short version:

Apple figured out a way to make AAC encoding sound better in some ways than CD. To do it, Apple has to feed the encoder mixes that are at least 44.1Khz/24-bit. 96Khz is preferred, but 44.1 is tolerated. Must be at least 24-bits. When you're close to done mastering, you run your mix through afclip in the Terminal app, which will tell you if your mix will clip on AAC decode (the decode happens when users are listening to iTunes or their iPhones).

After some experimentation, I found that I needed to leave at least -0.7dbfs headroom on my mixes, and sometimes even more (I did -1.5dbfs recently which is a lot). This is contrary to the old CD-mixing advice which was to push the mix way up to the ceiling, like -0.3dbfs. Those mixes will fail MFiT.

You can also "round-trip" your mix by using the AAC>WAV droplet and sending the file back into Pro Tools. This will let you A/B the process. There you can cancel the two mixes and then really hear what AAC is (AAC always sounds like a swishy fish tank to me when I do this, but a good swishy fish tank).

Geek Out With Nathaniel - Episode 2 - Plug In Automation

I've often wished that every time an engineer created a new Pro Tools session that a big window popped-up and asked "Plug-In Controls Default to Auto-Enabled?" This preference box is unchecked by default, but is absolutely essential for modern mixing workflows.

Let's imagine Al is mixing dialog, with maybe an EQ, de-esser and compressor in the chain, and then he gives me the session. I keep mixing, but then I notice that the de-esser threshold is too high for one line, but everything before it sounds fine. If I pull the threshold down, it will affect everything before it, so it must be automated. But just looking at the plug-in, I have no way of knowing whether or not the threshold parameter has been auto-enabled!

To keep from going insane, I auto-enable absolutely everything in a session, but start a mix in auto-suspend mode. In auto-suspend, you can tweak, fiddle and play for hours, and then when it starts to sound good, use write-to-all-enabled for all tracks and turn off auto-suspend. This will lock your mix in, and give you the freedom to make moment-to-moment tweaks.

Geek Out With Nathaniel - Episode 1 - Dante

I've been reading about AVB, Dante, AES67 for a while, but didn't really understand what was going on until now. Here's what I discovered over the last few days:

AES67 is a standard for pushing hundreds of channels of totally pro audio over Ethernet. Dante is a commercial implementation, and AVB is a related implementation (which MOTU and Avid are deep into). I downloaded the Dante Via demo software, which lets you send audio between applications on a Mac. It's very cool. Pro Tools can use Dante as a playback engine.

You can also test Dante Virtual Soundcard. This lets you plug your Mac's ethernet cable directly into all of these zillion devices without using USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt or PCI cards! There's no doubt in my mind that all the young engineers will need to understand it in the years to come.