The time has come, now, MIX!

Just thought I'd give a quick update, I've finally got my hands on an OMF with synced sound for Isolation, after spending the past couple of days syncing and doing some very basic mixing in Final Cut Pro. It took the guys a long time to get to a point where they're happy with picture lock and won't be changing anything. Brilliant, I can finally get to work! James has also got some royalty free music that he really likes, so they don't need me to compose a score, though I said I might elaborate on the short pieces of music with something similar if I have enough time over the weekend.

Here's a picture of the session, with files freshly imported from the OMF. The movie file is a very compressed .avi, I did this for a number of reasons: I don't need a high quality video to mix sound, it saves space, but most importantly, it leaves more computer resources for Pro Tools to run smoothly without any delays. You'll notice how I've 'checkerboarded' the audio clips (in FCP). This is to make it easier to create smooth transitions and fades between clips, which can be further helped by increasing the handle length when exporting the files from FCP. You'll also notice how every clip has a duplicate underneath, this is due to the way Final Cut handles mono, I'll be deleting the duplicate tracks. One final note is the stream of green and red clips at the top. These are the camera audio files that I left in because I knew there was a few scenes towards the end where they were actually really clear.

Here, I've created some new stereo tracks, and bussed the highlighted clips to the 'Music' track, which is set to record its input. The reason for this was to collapse the layered music clips into a single stereo clip, and avoid having to create multiple music tracks for a short piece of music. It's just streamlining the workflow really, but when tracks become too jumbled up, it can be a nightmare.