So for years now, we’ve been working with audio that is delivered from sound recordists in either a polywav format or lots of single wavs. Typical track layout will be:
Track 1: Mix L
Track 2: Mix R
Track 3: Boom
Track 4: Contributor 1 radio mic
Track 5: Contributor 2 radio mic
Track 6: Contributor 3 radio mic
etc.
I work on shows where there are sometimes 14 contributors – each with their own radio mic. For understandable reasons, I don’t always want to put all this audio on the timeline as a lot of the time only 2 or 3 of my contributors are on screen.
Currently Avid makes it *** near impossible to identify what’s what on your timeline after you’ve laid it down. Particularly with polywavs. You can choose to show the text ‘clip tracks’ on the timeline, but this only gives you A1, A2, A3, etc. none of the metadata for the track labels is included. Most of the time I have different track layouts on different shoot days, so a track number is useless unless I continually cross-reference it with a table.
My current work around is to demand mono wavs from the sound recordists. I then turn off ‘Autodetect Broadcast Wave Monophonic Groups’ in the import settings. I then have lots of clips instead of a polywav. When these come in, I can see the metadata is there, but Avid has generated a column for every track for every clip and then filled in the track column for each clip only if the track is the current track. If this sounds difficult to understand – that’s because it is difficult to understand!
This is what you get…
NAME TRACKS TRK1 TRK2 TRK3 TRK4 TRK5 TRK6
TEMP-6T01_1.WAV A1 Mix L
TEMP-6T01_2.WAV A2 Mix R
TEMP-6T01_3.WAV A3 BOOM
TEMP-6T01_4.WAV A4 JACK
TEMP-6T01_5.WAV A5 BOB
TEMP-6T01_6.WAV A6 JIM
After a load of renaming clips (I add the track name to the clip name) and colouring up clips (each track a different colour – this is why I use monowavs), I finally get useful information that is translated to the timeline so that I can see what’s where.
Surely Avid should be able to read the metadata from polywavs and monowavs in such a way that we can have a timeline text option ‘clip track name’?
This has been unsatisfactory for far too long. I appreciate that most people are doing single camera shoots with one or two audio sources, but Media Composer is a pro product and should be operating as such. On many occasions, audio doesn’t make its way to the dubbing suite for the final mix simply because it is lost in the offline edit because editors find it too difficult to organise.
In an ideal world, the polywav would be able to display each track’s name on the timeline AND you would be able to colour each track independently (rather than the whole clip) so that you can easily identify what’s on your timeline.
I have more than 1 crate of beer sitting here waiting for someone at avid taking the reins on this and sorting it out!
