Yesterday I was at Wilburland mastering a number of film scores for composer/fiddler Judy Hyman. Judy is perhaps best know as the fiddler in The HorseFlies and Boy With A Fish, but has also been very busy the last few years composing and performing soundtracks and winning awards for documentaries including "John James Audubon: Drawn From Nature", "Through Deaf Eyes" both for award winning film producer Lawrence Hott, and "The Cultivated Life: Thomas Jefferson and Wine" and "Dream Anatomy" for Madison Films.
Judy has also embraced the new recording paradigm by composing all the work at home in Digital Performer. Then I come to her house to engineer the recording of some real instruments on her own home ProTools system which I helped them design and install. Then either she or I can do composite edits of the best performances. When all the tracks are recorded it all come back to me at Wilburland for the final mix.
Technically speaking, my objective in this mastering was to bring the levels up to "pro standards" for film soundtracks without changing the essential sound and dynamics of the original mixes. I feel that limiters can be best suited to this task as compressors tend to impart their own sound. After auditioning all the limiter plugins I have the one I choose was the Massey L2007 Mastering Limiter. This $79 plugin allowed me to make the program much louder without the usual sonic penalty of some other limiters. I was able to push pretty deep into this limiter before I started hearing it crunch up. You can download a free demo it it here.
No comments:
Post a Comment