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Star Trek ~ Project Potemkin "The Chair" S03-C NOW ON-LINE

P

Potemkin_Prod

Commodore
Commodore
After a long mission, the Potemkin receives an upgrade to the bridge, much to Captain Grigory's disapproval. But there's one thing that the repair crews could never replace...

Starring Jeffrey Green as Captain Alec Grigory, Dakota Dodge as Ensign Teddy Burroughs, Andrew Ross as Lieutenant Gordon Avery, Rachel Riemke as Lieutenant Sara Rose Mallon, Sara Higgins Mackenzie as Ensign Ziandra Yanari, Ashley Longacre as Lieutenant Commander Seka Jameson, Leslie Lewis as Ensign Layenna Ava, John Wallace as Commander Dutch Mooney and Abby Evans as Lieutenant Tyler Landon. Special Guest Star Thomas Miles Goosmann as Commodore Standish.

Written, directed and edited by Randall Landers. Space-based VFX by Chris Cameron. Ship-based VFX by Mark Berge, Rick Foxx and Randall Landers. Music by Tony Lunn. Unit Photographer: William C. Searcy. Produced by Dave MacKenzie. Co-Executive Producer: Rick Foxx. Executive Producer & Web Series Creator: Randall Landers.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zyAJk2vE9U[/yt]

https://vimeo.com/123471720
 
This was cool!

I haven't kept up with these as much as I probably should, but I think the sound is an improvement over the last one I saw. That's always good to see (or hear, I guess).

I like your episodes that are set on the bridge because I love your bridge set (it's nice to see a physical bridge set that isn't TOS style). Although I think it could benefit from not being lit quite so brightly, but it still looks cool...
 
Thanks, Brendon! We appreciate the kind words!

We are continually trying to improve our work. This one and Frazier's Angels both had much better sound.

Our bridge set is overlit from this damnable mercury vapor light that we can't turn off unless we power off all the outlets in the warehouse. So we just lived it for two years.

We've moved our sets to a new studio, and are in the process of reconstructing them (or in the bridge's case, building it from scratch). Hopefully it'll turn out even better!
 
One of the reasons I think Potemkin looks so good is our visual effects wizard Chris Cameron. Here's a brief look at the VFX he did for "The Chair."

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm5aGXH1Mq0[/yt]
 
Potemkin_Prod said:
Thanks, Brendon! We appreciate the kind words!

We are continually trying to improve our work. This one and Frazier's Angels both had much better sound.
Click to expand...

Pardon my incredulity, but you consider this as having better sound? I found it muddy and hard to hear a lot of it, and when I turned it up enough to make out most characters a few others (notably those at the helm) were booming. I accept that the source audio may not be perfect, but why are the levels all over the place?
 
Sorry, but it sounds much better on my system than other recent episodes. We've made a lot of progress, and we've got a long ways to go. Perhaps you'd care to make a donation for a new sound system and microphones?
 
To be fair, I've had this issue with Intrepid, where what sounds good enough on my system, sounds awful on others. I'm no expert on this, and continue to struggle with sound myself, but I've seen it often enough to believe what you're both reporting is likely true.
 
"The fault, dear Randy, lies not in our audio gear, but in our mixing."

I did specifically mention the audio levels, which is a separate issue from the recording.

I ripped the audio out of "The Chair" and dropped it into Final Cut. Right of the bat the audio problems are really apparent when I look at the audio profile. Here're a few seconds of that:


Click to embiggen!​


I can't even make out much of what the blueshirt is saying here because it's muddied into the music, but the fragment above illustrates the general problem with the audio herein: the levels are all over the place. The general dialog audio levels bounce around at between -24db and -18db, which is much too low. But occasionally, when a few characters close to the camera, it jumps into the more standard -12db with spikes up into -3. That's much too big a range.

In short, your mix is at fault. You have to adjust the volume levels line by line so that the mean average stays in the same base range of about -12db. Even if raising the levels of some audio makes it noisy, better noisy than unintelligible.

And, FYI to any fan filmmaker: you should not be judging the mix purely on the basis of what it sounds like to you over your audio gear. The meters are there to help judge the levels.

I'd suggest opening the project, shutting off all the sound effect and music tracks, run the film and watch the meters dance. You'll see that they're not mixed to the same average level. It should be easy enough to adjust from there.
 
I will take that into consideration, I assure you, but bear in mind that all my work with videography and sound is self-taught. If we elevate every take to -12dB, we end up with white noise, hiss and even the ping of the batting cages near the studio. Even with Audition, we're often unable to adjust to relieve those flaws. So I compromise so that it sounds good on my gear. Given some of the other problems we've had with YouTube in the past, have you given an ear to the Vimeo version, and are the results the same?
 
Potemkin_Prod said:
I will take that into consideration, I assure you, but bear in mind that all my work with videography and sound is self-taught. If we elevate every take to -12dB, we end up with white noise, hiss and even the ping of the batting cages near the studio. Even with Audition, we're often unable to adjust to relieve those flaws. So I compromise so that it sounds good on my gear. Given some of the other problems we've had with YouTube in the past, have you given an ear to the Vimeo version, and are the results the same?
Click to expand...

I listened to it on both, and I find the same lines had to parse on both.

I had similar problems on the first film I directed for the 48 Hour Film Project back in 2008. We had one actor who tended to speak lower than the others, some shots where it was tough to get the boom mic in close enough for ideal sound, plus, as the day wore on the traffic noise from a nearby major boulevard added an ocean-like roar to a lot of the audio. I ended up having to do a lot of work to balance things out, and I even did some tricks where I faded the traffic noise in as ambience before lines which had to be boosted so much that you could notice the "ocean roar". Below is the film, and you can hear some of the problems in the "family discussion" scene. I have a version with more fixed up audio than this (plus a revised matte shot), but haven't rendered it out yet.

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​
 
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This is a great tutorial posted by one of the Dev's of an upcoming game, Star Trek Excalibur. Hopefully it can be of help.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAJMgR_4x1M[/yt]
 
batboy853 said:
This is a great tutorial posted by one of the Dev's of an upcoming game, Star Trek Excalibur. Hopefully it can be of help.

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Click to expand...

Them's some pretty good basics. I was going to try to use Audacity to clean up some audio on the film I posted above before putting the final version to bed.
 
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Audacity's a good program, but Adobe Audition 3 is now available as a (legally) free download, since Adobe no longer supports it. I don't remember the website I got it off of, but if a google search doesn't turn up one or more clean sites, I will try to dig it up. I mention this simply because I feel that Adobe 3 has a substantially better noise reduction function than earlier editions. It also allows far quicker multi-track work than Audacity.
 
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