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Matthew Furci
This week at Studio Du Chateau we discussed Lesson 3 - Digital Audio Basics.
Stephen and I spent well over an hour discussing this chapter, not because I didn't understand what was going on, but he had such a brilliant way of explaining how Sample rates/bit rates work. For example, when explaining why a someone would want to produce a track at 48k Hz vs 44.1k Hz, he pulled out a bowl and explained that if someone were to take 50 pictures of this bowl, while trying to stay perfectly still, the outcome would result in a great photo with clear and brilliant pixels. However, while taking these photos, the camera may have moved a very slight amount, creating certain distorted pixels within the picture. If the camera were to have taken 100 photos as opposed to 50, those distorted pixels would no longer be distorted, and it would come out as a clearer photo. He then related it to music and explained the reason behind having this extra "headroom" behind your music. He demonstrated it by recorded the word "Love" into pro tools at 44.1k hz. The word itself lasted for 1 second. Now he wanted to time-stretch the word for 2 seconds - and because his sample rate was at 44.1k as opposed to 48k hz, the word itself became "broken". He then demonstrated doing the same thing but at a higher bit rate, approx 96k hz - and time stretching the 1 second word into 2 seconds did not comprimise the voice.We then got into dithering which was a very "neat" trick. When adding dither to a track, you are infact adding randomized errors in the frequencies. This aids the computer into quantizing the proper notes at the right times.
Very interesting week aside from the "work". I got to man the controls on protools during a day where we had 2 actors come in to do a voice over for a commercial in english and in french. Certain challenges I faced during my first week of interning at the studio have completely vanished. I knew which microphones to use off the top of my head for each actor, and I had an opportunity to set up the voice-over room on my own, and control pro-tools during one of the recordings.
Matthew Furci
