Boston Section

As no national disasters occurred this month, the Boston Chapter of the AES finally met with Mark of the Unicorn for our October meeting. Smaller problems arose over the meeting venue, and a last minute switch was necessary, but a fine evening of dining and information was enjoyed at The Chateau restaurant in Waltham. It appears that this location may become a staple in the schedule of the BAES.

Joining us from MOTU was Dave Roberts, chief MOTU evangelist (my words, not his). Dave brought with him a complete recording system including a 5.1 monitoring set up. His system centered around an Apple Titanium G4/500 Powerbook which performed all the hard work. The new MOTU 828 Firewire interface was used for input from several instruments, and output to the surround monitors. Of course, the centerpiece of the evening was MOTU’s Digital Performer software of which there is a new version, 3.0.

The focus of Dave’s presentation was on digital audio recording, editing and mixing, particularly in surround. It is important to note that Digital Performer uses only the host computer’s processing power and no additional DSP. Dave showed us truly stunning abilities in this new software.

Dave Roberts briefly described the MOTU hardware line. It is interesting to grasp that MOTU, unlike many other software manufacturers, is, and has always been, in the hardware business. For years MOTU has built some of the best regarded MIDI interfaces and digital synchronization boxes. They have kept up with technology making all of their present interfaces USB based, and have developed a proprietary MIDI timestamp protocol which limits MIDI jitter (by their report) to 1/3 ms. Of course, you must use their software in conjunction with their interface to employ this resolution. MOTU provides some of the best known digital audio interfaces as well, with capabilities to handle ADAT lightpipe, TDIF, large numbers of AES/EBU or S/PDIF digital I/O, and of course various A/D/A from high quality 20 bit to 24 bit with 96KHz sampling rate. What is most interesting about the MOTU interface approach is the modularity which allows up to three interfaces to be chosen, as the user needs, to run simultaneously via one PCI card. As mentioned, MOTU has kept up with technology and provides a cascadable Firewire interface for more mobile recording set ups. Please see their web site http://www.motu.com/ for more details.

Getting down to the meat of the evening’s discussion, Dave began with a demonstration of DP for video post. A trailer of the recent Lara Croft movie ran in perfect sync with multiple tracks of audio. Dave demonstrated how all editing and cueing was locked to the picture so that the audio position and video position were always together. He demonstrated spotting an effect to a visual cue, and seamlessly time stretching the audio to fit the video timing with no pitch change or audible artifact.

Dave then showed the new Sequence Editor window. While not an earth-shattering innovation, this new edit window allows editing of digital audio and MIDI (in piano roll fashion) in an integrated window. Essentially, DP makes good on the age old promise of computer editing: being able to treat audio and MIDI as similar. Moreover, each track can be individually resized.

Briefly, Dave showed the basics of recording, overdubbing, and adding plug in effects. Everything was done in real time. Thanks to the design of MAS (MOTU Audio System, their audio engine) and direct hardware monitoring, both monitoring and plug ins function latency free. Finally someone has overcome the last bugaboo in host-based audio recording.

Turning to surround sound mixing, an innovation new to the 3.0 version of DP, Dave showed several clever schemes. First is the new Audio Bundles window. This area allows the user to specify and name appropriately all of the input/output/and buses, thus abstracting the conceptual device (eg: Avalon 737 input) from the physical objects (eg: analog input #7). This becomes most important as you can set up multiple internal 5.1 mix buses and handle them each as a single object! DP is smart, providing you with a stereo panner on tracks assigned to a stereo bundle (output or bus) and a surround panner on tracks assigned to a surround format bundle. Surround bundles can be quad, LCRS, or true 5.1. More complicated surround formats may be forthcoming (ES or 10.2) as standards evolve.

MOTU handles their surround panners as simple plug ins. This cleverly allows third parties to provide alternate panners. However, MOTU includes 3 panners in DP; a standard coordinate panner, an arc panner, and an effects based panner called Spatializer. In each panner control is available over position in space, as well as control over each speaker (to allow jumping effects), and divergence between front phantom and center images. Individual control at each panner is available to feed the LFE, and any InputSprocket compatible joystick can be used as a physical panner.

Spatializer is unique as a panner plug in as it uses not only standard volume information to create localization effects, but includes shifting Doppler and reverb information as well to reinforce spatial cues. It sounded very interesting. Of course, all parameters are fully user adjustable.

Every parameter of each panner (and all plug ins in general) is fully automatable. Furthermore, all automation is editable as lines and curves overlying the audio in a track. DP 3 includes numerous new tools for editing these lines like parabolic or Bezier curve tools, and scaling functions. Interestingly, as these lines only represent 1 dimensional data (left/right or front/back), automation data from 2D panners is split into 2 lines of data for editing. As we discussed with the Steinberg folk last season when they showed us Nuendo, it seems that a conceptual flaw exists representing 2D information this way. While simple edits are possible, any complex circular or irregular motion would be nearly impossible to edit or "draw in" across two separate lines of automation edit data. It is not clear, of course, how best to represent 2D information for editing, perhaps as we discussed with Steinberg, using some small interval "snapshots" which are movable like an adjustable frame-by-frame movie. In any case, it is good to have things for companies like MOTU to conquer.

In the end, Dave Roberts showed us a dramatically powerful, host based audio editing system which handles multiple surround formats, provides several mechanisms for panning, and deep editing features both for audio editing and for automation data tweaking. That all of this runs without a hitch on a Powerbook is astounding!

-- Jordan Tishler