Pro Techniques from MidCan Production

by Randy Alberts

MidCan President Wayne Sheldon

If it weren't for Winnipeg, the vast middle of Canada would not light up much at all on a population density map. Exactly half way between bustling Montreal and Vancouver, this city of kind people, 40 museums, and the world's largest multi-cultural festival is where Mid-Canada Production Services (MidCan) has done its best work since 1977.

Being Winnipeg's finest and one of Canada's largest production providers specializing in television, film, audio and video services, MidCan spent over $1 million the past five years improving its facility. Upgrading its Avid Media Composers and D-Beta suites, building a new 1,800 square-foot studio/theater, and installing HDTV broadcast capabilities and three 128-track Pro Tools TDM/ProControl systems have kept all involved plenty busy. President Wayne Sheldon, post editor and sound mixer/editor Bruce Little, and the MidCan staff are now enjoying the increased workflow their new Digidesign and Avid tools help provide.

Bruce Little

"We save hours in audio production because our Avid and Digidesign systems are so compatible," says Sheldon. "In these times of tight budgets, moving projects seamlessly from Avid Media Composer to Pro Tools saves us so much time when it comes to audio post."

MidCan's credits include work for most every Canadian broadcaster, such as CBC, CTV, ABC, NBC, and PBS, and sponsoring Freezeframe, Manitoba's Annual International Festival of Films for Children. Bruce Little was very helpful in describing the busy studio's Avid-Digidesign workflow and providing the following two tips for users in the audio-for-feature film world.

Pro Technique 1 —
Improving workflow when moving film and Media Composer sound files into Pro Tools for feature film finishing
MidCan has in the past six months begun adding feature film work to its thriving television, audio and video businesses. When using OMF Tool or DigiTranslator, Little suggests to first ensure one is working in non-drop frame mode.

"You need to create tapes to work from in order to continue the neg cut and sound edit," says Little, whose own credits include The Genius of Lenny Breau, Dracula: Pages from A Virgin's Diary and Wolves of Wall Street. "After breaking the film down into four reels, approximately 20 minutes per 35mm reel with each reel starting at the hour mark, you then make sure you are at film rate and your pull-down switch is set to .99.

You will know when the pull-down switch is set correctly because a message in the digital cut window will read, 'You are able to output picture or sound in sync with a video reference (23.976 fps)' — and if it's not set properly, the cut list will not match the video copy and will drift significantly. I've learned this lesson more than once doing this procedure.

Next, put the head and tail video and audio pops in the sequence, one frame, two seconds before and two seconds after picture. This is a good way to make sure everything stays in sync. Now output the reels to whatever format is requested. Now your cut lists will match your video copy, and you can send that off to the neg cutter and get on with your sound edit."

Little goes on to suggest duplicating all reels made for video outputs and deleting all video tracks from those, properly re-labeling each, and creating a new Avid sequence that starts at 01:00:00:00. Then, to save time later, one should copy all the reels into the new sequence at the appropriate time codes — Reel 1 at 01:00:00:00, Reel 2 at 02:00:00:00, and so forth. He also reminds users at this point to decide where to put their audio media for importing into the Pro Tools session.

"Here at MidCan we use removable drives so it makes this process a lot easier," assures Little, who is currently working on MidCan's production of Magnificent Obsessions for the Life network. "I keep all my audio media on one drive from picture edit all the way through to sound edit so I don't need to consolidate a thing. If you aren't doing this, you'll need to consolidate all of your audio media to your Pro Tools drive before doing the OMF export."

Choosing "OMF Composition" in the file export window is Little's next direction, and making sure one is using OMF2 and audio only and SD II format before placing the OMF file on the same drive as the audio.

He says that it takes a couple of seconds before he's able to pull his removable audio drive and sneakernet it next door to his Pro Tools edit room. There he launches OMF Tool 2.8 or DigiTranslator and translates his Pro Tools session.

Click image to enlarge

"This creates a 24-frames-per-second Pro Tools session," Little continues, "which is exactly what you want. After you launch the session, you'll need to change the session to 29.97 pulled down to be in sync with your video tape that you created in your Avid system.

Now you can load your picture into Pro Tools. Fortunately, I have the AVoption on this one particular workstation, which is great for cutting dialog and sound FX, plus it speeds up my progress a lot without having to sync to video tape, which is also great. Next, make sure your beeps line up, which can be done off of tape as well, and now you've got it."

Pro Technique 2 —
Marking scenes before editing in Pro Tools
Little suggests when one first starts cutting to picture that working in Pro Tools' Grid mode is best to insure that every edit will line up, then simply switching to Slip mode when working in more detail. He also suggests that it helps enormously to first go through an entire film and mark every scene with markers before beginning edits.

"You can easily cut ambience and effects for these scenes and then copy and paste them accordingly, and you can even do this without picture because you have all the scenes marked!" says Little. "You can cut the specifics later, which makes things fast and easy to navigate. Now if the director wants to add a barking dog or strange wind sound or something like that late in the production, you can easily just jump to those scenes and quickly drop them in."

Little and his staff work on Avid MC8000 v7.1 and Digidesign Pro Tools|24 (running Pro Tools 5.1.1 software) edit and mix stations. Recently upgrading to an Apple Macintosh G4 733 and a 13-slot Digidesign expansion chassis, he worked on his last feature film using MidCan's Mac 9600/300 MHz with G3 upgrade card, a Pro Tools|24 MIXplus system with an extra MIX Farm and Vintage Farm card, AVoption, and a ProControl.

"We also have two other MIXplus systems here in our recording studio, and another for edit or rental," concludes Little. "I was amazed that the 9600 could do the job with Pro Tools. I used every available track and every TDM time slot available, as well as playback of AVR 8 video, and the system was rock solid! MidCan is in construction of a new studio designed by Pilchner Schoustal in Toronto, and I think for this new room we will have two dedicated MIXplus systems so we can do even bigger sounding projects."