X 64 Late in the Evening.. Or Late Nite Trouble..shooting

X64 at 1am

 

Do you know that feeling you get when you have worked well into the morning, after a full day of work?  Where you know you should be headed off to lala land so you can wake up the following morning and do it all over again?

 

Interestingly I find myself in the former situation, and not by choice.

 

What I mean is.. Not by conscious choice.

 

See, I belong to a select group of people who just cannot let a problem lie, in this case specifically a computer related problem, until the following day.  I know there are those of you reading this that know exactly what I’m talking about.

 

So, lets rewind a couple of hours.  Around 11PM, while editing a documentary, I realized that the computer I was working on (Dual Core, many Gigs of rama nd disk space) was extremely slow, rendering video at a slow rate, and making my normally fast edit process slowdown to a crawl. 

Naturally I blamed Windows.  X64 at that, because its an easy target of my occasional threatened silicon apocalypse.  Could you see me dressed in EPROMS, wielding my terrible USB Data stick of Destruction?

After much head scratching and task manager perusing, I realized it was not Window’s fault at all.  Turns out the NLE I  was using needed time to “Conform” (or better known convert) the video files I had imported from a capture computer. 

So now, at the very late hour, I must ask myself and you my fellow computer/audio/video geeks.. what did the Video Conform to? 

Protestant?  Catholic?

 

J

j

How Much is Too Much?

How much is Too Much?

 

Last week, I was working with an amazing talent (cindycampo.com) for the TV show I score.  I was thrust back into the role of vocal music producer which I have not done in quite some time.  I noticed two things immediately about how I’ve changed since I made the switch from pop to TV and film.

 

One, Its all in the song.  Sure I try to write pretty hooks with melodies that inspire the watcher, but really, if I go too overboard it conflicts with what’s on the screen.  When doing pop, rock, country, name your pleasure, it’s the song!  Cindy came down with two killer country/crossover/pop songs and tracking them reminded me that its all in the song.  If you can break it down to an acoustic and vocal, or a piano and vocal, and not add any other orchestration, you know you have a hit on your hands.

 

I added layers, chorus on the guitar, EQ’ed the hell out of the backups, but to no avail.  Everyone liked the original rough mix!

 

Even though I’ve done this thing for years and years, I am still reminded that I have a lot to learn about music production.  Sometimes its not how much you add, but more…what you add.

 

 

Best

Jack