Jay Rose
Boston AES Meeting
Feb. 2011
On Tues. Feb. 8th, 2011, the Boston Section of the Audio Engineering Society featured Boston-based film/TV sound designer Jay Rose who presented "Magic Microphones and Phantastical Post". Jay started off by stating that the techniques used include Physics, Psychoacoustics and Speech Mechanics and are reproducible phenomena. He described the history of sound in film and the transition to digital from the 35mm film along with the names and duties of the various engineers involved in a film project such as Location Mixer, ADR, Foley, Music, Re-recording Mixer.
When making decisions about mic placement, understanding the Inverse Square Law is of critical importance. As a rule of thumb, if the actor can't reach it, it's too far away. Most scenes are shot with boom mics to capture the character's world but lavaliers are used instead of booms when needed. When dealing with multiple camera setups, you must also match the different shots with appropriate reverb.
Jay described the methods used to edit dialog. Using OMF files allow all sound bites to be kept properly aligned to the timeline. "Handles" are used to adjust the in and out points of the various sound bites.
Jay played a Movie Trailer that used examples which he talked about throughout his presentation and concluded by playing a vintage Max Fleischer cartoon from 1929 that described how early film sound was synchronized to film and the how the sound systems in theaters were setup to playback the sound.
Rose, a member of AES and Cinema Audio Society, is a long-time columnist for Digital Video Magazine. His books "Producing Great Sound for Film and Video" and "Audio Postproduction" are category best-sellers at Amazon. He's written dialog processing software for Orban and Eventide, and was sound designer for MGM's 2007 feature Two Weeks, starring Sally Field. Currently, he's been working on smaller independent video projects and a PBS music documentary.
