After ten years or so of watching their audio post production brethren work with an ever improving set of tools, production sound mixers are bringing digital, non-linear recorders on to sets across the globe. Of course, as their aural counterparts in post found out a decade ago, file-based workflow, with all its allure of compact, multi-track recording, is not without new and painful headaches.

Along with the clarity and flexibility of file-based recording, many issues have yet to be resolved as these audio professionals transition into this brave new world. While those issues are not constantly impacting how work is done on the set, they are causing some conflicts when the sound files go to the telecine houses, which, in large part, have been slow to adjust to the new technology. And as always, whenever there is a synch problems, the sound recordist gets the blame.

“There’s an old adage that still holds true, ‘If a sound mixer gets more that one call from the telecine house, that usually means they’ll get fired,'” notes Peter Schneider, partner at Gotham Sound, an audio rental and sales house in New York. "Unfortunately there's been a lot of problems with the telecine houses trying to figure out solutions to deal with this new media and the sound mixers have been taking the heat for it."

For that reason, there are those production sound mixers that are not rushing headlong into relying on these machines 100 percent of the time. On the recently wrapped feature films Anamorph and The Babysitters, production sound mixer Noah Timan used a Fostex PD-4 timecode enabled portable DAT recorder in conjunction with the the Sound Devices 744T four-track file-based digital recorder.

The Sound Devices machine was a recent purchase for Timan. "I bought it a year and a half ago, and although it is a wonderful machine, I don’t think it will continue to be the main recorder on my cart, at least for the time being.”

The tracks that Timan recorded on the Sound Devices machine were not sent to Telecine, mainly because the machine does not offer a removable media that can be processed in a Telecine house. “Most of the Telecine houses that I work with, with the exception of one, have a Fostex DV40 and those work from an optical disc,” he says. “In order to create an optical disc from the file (with the Sound Devices recorder), one needs to first transfer all the files off the flash card onto a computer, organize the files, put them in folders, then burn and verify an optical disc. In a feature film context that is very time consuming, especially for something that I have to get done at the very end of the day. In an office setting, it’s really straightforward, but on location its success depends upon things like consistent AC power after camera wrap, good laptop firewire recognition, successful disc burning without real supervision, and several other variables that are sometimes hard to come by on your average movie set.”

Although he did not send file-based audio to Telecine on those projects, he does look forward to the time when houses will be able to utilize any deliverable media. He points out that Aaton’s InDaw system is helpful, but many houses have yet to add it to their equipment roster.

To address the present issues, Timan’s current feature production is his first using the Fostex DV824, a non-linear file-based recorder with a built-in DVD-RAM drive. Timan notes that this machine offers a more compatible solution to today’s existing workflow. “I’d love to be able to send in my tracks as data files in any format, and I think that some options, like the CF card that Sound Devices uses, are more reliable than optical discs. I also think that staying away from UDF file format, which is used by most DVD-RAM recorders, generally offers a lot more flexibility for everyone. But the reality, at least for the moment, is that telecine houses want something they can simply stick into their DV40 that will work fairly automatically, without any potential issues. This means that we have to either submit optical discs or reinvent the wheel with telecine on every project, with limited potential for success. The Fostex PD-6 and the Deva recorders, which seem to be the most popular, deal with DVD-RAM as their primary media, with considerable limitations on other options. So it’s not a surprise that most telecine houses are content to restrict the welcome mat to DVD-RAM or DAT media.”

Matthew Schneider, director of technology at the New York-based PostWorks, New York, admits that the part of the reticence to start working with file-based audio was the cost of bringing in new machines. Another was the change in the approach to the work. However, he’s quick to add, “In hindsight, which is 20/20, I have to ask myself what the big deal was.

“There was a capital investment and there was, although in the context of dailies it was slightly less, a learning curve,” he continues. “Once you buy a machine and you pop in the DVD-RAM disc into a Fostex DV40 or DV824, or whatever your studio machine is, then the process isn’t that different. There have been complexities and little intricacies that have been introduced along the way that are unique to this workflow, but from a global standpoint in a dailies context it really isn’t that different from controlling [sound] from a DAT [tape].”

In fact, Schneider goes on to say, “You’ve got time code, just like before when you had a DAT. There are little things that are nice such as because it is essentially a DVD you can skip to the next track easily as if you’re playing audio CD. Little nice things like that along the way do make things a little simpler. It is the little idiosyncrasies along the way that have been introduced once more and more manufacturers got into the game that is where it got very challenging.”

From his point of view, file-based audio introduces the opportunity for a new workflow and that is to record audio at 48.048 kHz. “In many respects that’s the most ideal way to record your audio in the field, even though most people don’t do it. To a great extent most people don’t do it either because there is lack of familiarity or a lack of comfort,” he says. “It seems different and also not all editing platforms will support it.”

Sure, 48.048 wasn’t new with file-based recording, he admits, but it became a more accessible work flow with its introduction. “From a conceptual standpoint that is when things got confusing for people. It also meant that things were a little different for post houses like PostWorks,” he explains. “It meant that if you’re going to pursue that kind of a workflow, first of all everyone has to be on the same page and everyone has to get why are we doing it.”

Getting on the same page takes a commitment to communication and there are many on both sides of the audio community who report that, so far, that commitment is lacking. Production sound mixer Danny Michael, whose projects have included the recently wrapped The Departed, Annapolis, The Interpreter and The Stepford Wives, points out that more often than not he is talking to an account manager at a Telecine house rather than the person who is actually working on his tracks. “We’ve lost that contact and there could be more of that,” he says of the decreased level of communication between the two departments.

“We had a teleconference before we started working on The Departed with everyone involved in post production at Warner Bros and the people at Technicolor,” he reports. “I’ve got to say, I was kind of surprised at how much some people knew very little about what the other side had to deal with and was dealing with. That was kind of an eye opener. Although it was good thing to have that kind of teleconference, ultimately I think it does seem that we’ve kind of gotten away from people having direct contact with each other.”

The importance of communication also rings true for production sound mixers who are working on episodic television programs, reports Law & Order: Special Victims Unit mixer Bill Daly. Before the crew made the jump to a Fostex PD-6 (with an additional burner in order to provide Telecine with two discs), Daly and his Law & Order compatriots compared five different recorders and then sent the material to Telecine. “We worked with them to make sure that they were happy and we were happy,” he says. “The biggest thing that came out of that was how much we had to communicate.

“Sound reports became a big issue,” he continues. “When you have a medium that could be two tracks, four tracks or six tracks, your sound reports can’t be written like a doctor’s prescription. On episodics, basically, no one has any time. Telecine doesn’t have time. The editors don’t have time. There is no time to dub, so time is a big crunch for us and the more we’re on the same page, the better.”

In the final analysis, the key to production sound mixers and Telecine houses working together with these new tools is providing clean tracks in a timely manner. Given that, the promise of digital audio may have just as much of an impact as digital video has in quality and creativity.