Blackmagic Forum

I'm looking for advice on what workflow people are using to record sound to picture which can be displayed on an external monitor/s.

At present I record two talent's voiceovers into FCPX whilst it plays the timeline back on their own individual monitors using the sdi and hdmi outputs of a Ultrastudio Monitor 3G. Imagine two people watching a playback and commentating. Simultaneously, I record them into separate tracks of Adobe Audition. The recording in FCPX serves as a guide track for sync to picture which I then have to reproduce from the Adobe Audition files. Trouble is the Audition is the entire session - that's a lot of out takes and gaps to wade through on a two hour programme.

Ideally I would like to play the presenters the video and take their mics into separate tracks of a DAW, stopping and starting and ending up with individual tracks containing only the takes and in sync to the picture.

So, do you work in a pro facilities place and what do you use?

Gerry Burke wrote:Ideally I would like to play the presenters the video and take their mics into separate tracks of a DAW, stopping and starting and ending up with individual tracks containing only the takes and in sync to the picture.

It sounds like you’re talking about standard voice over. You could play the video in Logic Pro X and record there. Logic, and I assume any other decent DAW, has features that allow you to replace all or part of a sound clip, and to record variations for later consideration, on the spot. This can avoid the sound outtakes that you’re talking about. I haven’t looked into it, but it might be possible to do this directly in Final Cut Pro. I don’t record voice over/narration directly in Final Cut, but apparently lots of people do.

If you want to use Audition, I would think that it also has a replace/alternative take function. Why wouldn’t you just use markers to identify where you want the sound clips to go in the video?

You could play the video in Logic Pro X and record there./quote]

Yes that would be ideal but I'm unsure if Logic Pro X can feed out to external monitors - anyone know?

I could add markers in Audition but I'm also stopping and starting the timeline in FCPX so it's just adding another wait before we can move on to the next piece of commentary and I'm worried that one time I don't restart the recording on Audition.

The VO tool in FCPX is great - I just can't get two separate clean channels into it- it always does a mix of the inputs.

Gerry Burke wrote:You could play the video in Logic Pro X and record there./quote]

Yes that would be ideal but I'm unsure if Logic Pro X can feed out to external monitors - anyone know?

I could add markers in Audition but I'm also stopping and starting the timeline in FCPX so it's just adding another wait before we can move on to the next piece of commentary and I'm worried that one time I don't restart the recording on Audition.

The VO tool in FCPX is great - I just can't get two separate clean channels into it- it always does a mix of the inputs.

You can mirror Logic on two displays.

As I said, I don’t record sound in FCPX, but lots of people do and I’d be very surprised if you can’t record two separate tracks. You’d probably get a fast answer on this at the FCP.co forum, or in the FCPX user manual.

I’m not sure that I understand your second paragraph, but it may be a matter of process/disciple. Setting a marker in FCPX, and indeed in Audition, is really easy. You may find that you can save yourself a lot of time if you learn to use replace/alternate take when recording your voice over/narration.

Thanks Rob.

The voiceover record facility in FCPX is good but, having used it, I really don't think it can record two independent tracks of audio - will explore however.

I tend to run a safety "catch all" recording so the Producer has alternative takes later when it comes to the sound mix and I just let it run in the background - this becomes a big file, unlike the one in FCPX which only contains the right take, in sync but is a mix of the two presenters. The safety file is where these two channels are separated and is the one I have to wade through to find the take we used in the FCPX VO recording.

I could stop this recording to delete the out takes, discussion, musings etc or add markers, remembering to restart it each time when we move on to record the next piece in the script. However with over thirty of these "stop starts" it concerns me that the record button is missed! Discipline as you say.

Back when I was recording to picture, if the talent made a mistake we would stop, roll back, and drop in. If the director wanted to keep everything, which was not the norm, a separate timecoded DAT recorder would be running. We used to do this regardless of the language being recorded. This was with Pro Tools locked to picture from either digibeta or another computer.
Multi-monitors was no problem as the monitors used had separate video outs, so could be daisy-chained. For monitors that don't have this facility you could use a video distribution amp.
You can, of course, route and record to separate tracks in Fairlight.

Avid audio punch-in. pan your mic inputs left and right. I've done this on re voicing "live" sports. Why wouldn't any nle allow you to pan your mics left and right?