Reshoots

I started re-editing bits of Cormorant Close yesterday. There's one weak bit early in the scene which just has too much waffle. So I cut out a few lines, but now the conversation doesn't flow right. For the first time, I've hit one of the limitations of RealFilm, and it's come as quite a shock after being used to the luxury of machinima and endless reshoots. I need to re-record one line of dialogue. Just one. But David, the actor, is away for the rest of the summer, so I'm stuck with what I've got.

I can rebuild and reshoot every other damn thing in the movie: I've already replaced the original characters, redesigned the set, reblocked the whole scene (twice), added in whole new shots and tried several different edit patterns to give different emphasis to the scene. I've switched lines around, I've cut lines, and I've experimented with various different takes of each line. But the one thing I absolutely cannot do is change "I grabbed a pie and chips on the way home" to "I have." It's a tiny change, but the new line neatly segues into the next sequence and hides the fact that there's about half minute of dialogue missing. (Incidentally, the original dialogue worked fine when we did the piece in the style of a stage play, and when we did it as a radio play, just doesn't work on film. It's too much of a digression, and we need to get to the meat of the scene quicker.)

Hmm. Some creative editing will be needed.

Audio joy

Last night's dialogue recording on Cormorant Close went really well, with none of the audio problems I had feared. We started with several takes with all the cast speaking into a single mic, as if it was a radio play. This worked really well to get the dynamics of the scene and the rhythms of the individual lines into context, and helped the actors work together effectively. Over the course of the evening, we changed the interpretation several times, and ended up with something much more edgy, and with more implied dark undertones.

As the evening went on, the actors also learnt to give each other a little space at the end of each line, so as to make it easier for me to pick out the individual bits later. (They also learned to stop moving their heads around so much, which kept the levels constant!) We then did a few pickups of individual lines with one actor at the mic, to catch those few lines where they did run together, but not as many as I'd expected.

Of course, the great advantage of recording this way is that the ambience, tone, and mic sound is identical for everyone: I don't suffer from one person sounding a bit tinnier, or having a different reverb, which is pretty well inevitable when you record over the Net or in several different sessions in different places with different kit.

Today's job is to go through everything I recorded, catalogue the lines into individual files, and pick out the best takes of each one. I'm hoping that's going to be relatively easy - there's one great take of the first half, and one great take of the second half, so I'll use the lines from those takes as far as possible, and then hunt down the pickups for the rest.

Using real actors instead of recording all the lines myself is an absolute pleasure. Working on a film becomes a totally different experience. Hearing my script come to life is fun, especially when the cast deliver an interpretation I wasn't expecting. Even if I don't go with their way of saying the line, it forces me to think about other ways of seeing the scene. (I'll blog later about some more aspects of voice recording and how to get the performance you want. Then Ricky can tell me why I'm doing it all wrong.) It's also left me re-thinking about how to shoot some bits; during the session, everyone came up with a lot of ideas about the characters and how we should view them, and I'm now considering how to bring those out in the camerawork and choreography.

Audio woes

Despite Julian's best efforts, we couldn't get the sound recording set up the way we wanted for tomorrow night's session. Let me share a few painful lessons with you.

Samson C01U USB microphones are great for recording podcasts, or when there's just one of you. Really nice. But trying to connect two of them at the same time, so you can record two people having a conversation onto separate vocal tracks, is a total bitch. Don't do it. At least not under XP. (And don't even think about it with Vista or Linux. You may have more luck with a Mac.)

For a start, the audio recording software has to be able to cope with two inputs. Audacity can't, so we install an old version of Sonar LE, which came with the mics. (Sonar 4 - the current version is Sonar 7.) I'm not a big fan of Sonar, but hey, you go with what you have, right? Well, it takes Julian about an hour of frigging around before he gets both mics to input simultaneously. At all. But even when we have both inputs, one mic is really loud, and one is really quiet. Actually, that's not quite true. One appears quite loud, but when we record it and play it back, it's also really quiet. That's partly an issue with using USB mics, they just don't have the power going through them.

So we install the Samson SoftPre pre-amp software to boost the mics a bit. This comes with a somewhat ambiguous warning that basically means it doesn't work under XP if you have two mics connected at the same time; it can only cope with one mic. (In my experience, I couldn't even make it work right with one mic, but we had to try.) However, with even more frigging around in the bowels of Windows drivers, SoftPre and Sonar, Julian eventually persuades both mics to input at a reasonable level. His audio ninja skills are strong.

So now we have a stereo stream coming off each mic. This isn't what we want for voice recording, we want two mono streams. More messing about, but eventually, we get there. At this point we discover something interesting. The mic input is completely different depending on what USB socket it's plugged into. Plug it into the top back one, and it's detected as a "Samson mic". In the lower back, it's an "Unknown mic". And in either of the two sides, it's a "Samson C01U". And the input volume is different on each port. Aargh!

Now we only have one problem left. The mics have too much range, so my mic is picking up Johnnie in the background, and his is picking up my voice. We try gating the recording, but that doesn't work. So we try gating the input, and that doesn't work either. It just clips things off. Basically, the C01U is a condenser mic, and that's just the way it works. We'd need to build isolation booths.

Finally, after his third cup of tea, Julian delivers his professional opinion.

• Buy different mics, not condensers and not USB.
  
• Get some different audio software, not an old version of Sonar.
  
• Don't try recording on a laptop.
  
• And don't expect decent audio quality if you're recording in the dining room.
  

And with that, he gives up and goes home. But that's what sound recordists are for. They know this stuff. I don't feel so bad that I couldn't make it work.

Oh well, I'll have to see what I can set up later in the summer. For now, I'm going to fall back on the tried (and mostly trusted) system of using Audacity and a single C01U mic, hope I don't get too many bits with two people speaking at once, and re-record individual lines when I do.