5.5 question

[Rich LePage]

Hi again,
Good to know-- always the best info from you-- thx.
Are you using the ILOK with the Waves stuff too?
I had trouble initially, but Waves' support was pretty
speedy and got it resolved. Worked fine on the first
machine I set up, but moving to other machines
was weird at first. You can't use the standard ILOK
Windows client drivers sometimes-- Waves sent me
to a special area where there were some other drivers
that worked on a Win ME machine I wanted to put
the plugs on too.

I think I managed to open an SF as raw in Cool Edit once,
but I honestly don't remember how (or if) I got it back to
MTU, likely it was saving it out as a WAV in CEP.

But usually I just do it as save to WAV first in
Medit, and then bring into
CE Pro, with disk space a non-issue now
that's just easier.
You do of course lose markers then, and I still use
the file flag markers a lot when I do v/o stuff in NYC,
since that keeps the flags with the file, not just
ref'd on the segments. I usually just have a "scratch"
mix file open in the NYC sessions, thus the file flags
become impt for finding good takes or ref points
when I get it back to the burbs here for all the
post work.

And of course, you can't store file flags in the header
if it's a WAV. I thought about broadcast WAV, but
all the stuff you've written about problems currently
with that is so true and I sure do wish that could
be made to happen. But at least by time I take
the stuff into CEP to process it, I've usually edited
it first that way, or at least done basic assembly of
good takes as a quick first pass.

You're right, it sure would be nice if you could
open SFs in anything else. I had been bugging Syntrillium
about that since they supported so many formats, but
alas, then they sold to Adobe and support is far more
"corporate" now with them. Up through the last
Syntrillium versions of CE Pro, they were still promising
that they would strongly consider directly allowing
SFs as an "openable" format.

Interesting observation about the rounding- gotta
mess with that some more and do some A/B'ing.

I totally agree with your view that you really can't
trust anything but a ref CD on known monitoring.
I always seem to notice subtle changes, sometimes
good ones, sometimes not.

And you are so right about little tiny gain changes
making huge diffs, too. Makes me wonder if in reality
they are as little as they indicate they are - in Medit,
and most other things. Yeah, I see the meters, etc,
but my ears are hearing bigger subjective differences
with very small gain changes -- and that's been true
ever since I've been doing any CD mastering-- long
time now. I very often find myself doing very small
gain changes with zones in MTU-- like .1 or .2 db,
or maybe .5 here and there-- and sometimes
I walk away and say "you're hyping yourself"
but then come back and listen again and still
notice the difference when I disable those zones
as opposed to enabling them.

I know many of the clients never hear the
little stuff I sweat sometimes for hours, but they do
usually comment how "smooth" or "transparent"
the stuff is. And when I get in work like that job
I was noting in the earlier post and hear what folks
sometimes let go by elsewhere, I get pretty astounded.

But I used to find years back I sometimes
was hyping myself when evaluating new gear-- the
out of box thing-- yeah, THAT's better, right? only
to come back later and say WHAT? (Haven't we all
been there with mixes sometimes too?).

So I too am a big believer in the baseline, known
configuration, thing -- also in getting away from
the project for a while and then coming back and
reviewing it. Wish I could every time, but luckily with
most things, I can-- at least to some extent.

All best regards to you and all here.