The OMF and video files tend to be delivered on DVD±R or on a portable hard drive as the DV video files can be quite large — around 200MB per minute of video. My last project came in at over 50GB of data! There may be situations where you will still receive the video on a ‘tape’, whether it is VHS or DV or Beta. You will then need to capture this video from a player into the computer and so create your own QuickTime movie. Use your preferred video editing application to capture the video. Mac users will probably have iMovie somewhere, as it comes free with most Macs, or you can use Final Cut Pro — you don’t need the latest version and so you can pick up a second-hand copy for a song. Make sure you export it as a DV QuickTime movie, not a DV stream, and all should be fine. On Windows I would recommend getting QuickTime Pro and using that to convert the video files from, say, Adobe Premiere to QuickTime format. If you get your video on a DVD Video disc, you will have to rip the disc and then convert the results into a QuickTime movie, which is a slow process.
Wherever possible, then, get the client to supply a QuickTime movie as a video file. Pro Tools will be happy and it won’t take you forever to get the video file into the correct format. Note that if the file is delivered to you on a DVD±R, you’ll need to copy it off onto a hard drive before trying to import it into Pro Tools. Put the DV movie onto a different drive to your audio files — your boot drive will be fine if you don’t have another drive other than your audio drive. While you’re on the ‘phone to the client, try to make sure they send video with ‘burnt-in’ timecode. This is where the timecode is overlaid, in numbers, on the video so at any point you can see the exact timecode point. This is very useful to check that the video file matches the Pro Tools timeline by going to the end of the video track and comparing the burnt-in timecode with the Pro Tools counter.
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Mike is Pro Tools genius and an award winning ‘audiomeister’, defined as ‘a person of great skill and authority in sound’. His vast array of credits include music (from classical to rock), drama and documentaries across all the BBC Radio networks, as well as audio post production for video and TV, ‘new media’, live sound, commercial CDs, DVDs and podcasts, helping clients tell their stories with sound. He has been described as "an oasis of calm in a stormy creative world"; "quick, creative & easy to work with"; "always going the extra mile"; and "invests himself in the success of your project"’.
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Seven radio producers – all based in the north of England – have joined forces to launch a new co-operative venture – ‘Radio Wizards’. It’s equally remarkable that their aim now is to work together on every kind of sound production... except radio!
"It’s taken over a year to get to this point," says ‘wizard’ Mike Thornton, "but now we’ve got a viable business plan, we’ve launched our website and we’re already starting to attract commissions. As a facilities provider we decided to facilitate this partnership and set them up with a web site to help kickstart this excellent partnership."
