April Showers
I've been pretty scarce lately for most people as work on The Early Mixes reaches a conclusion. It has all but dominated my time and cut severely into my sleep, but the results have been well worthwhile, and the film is looking quite nice right now, fits together well and sounds quite good. I expect to have a locked edit next week, and then it's all up to marinshellstone.
I was unable at the onset of post-production depend on having a discrete 5.1 audio track, but I felt that would have been something of overkill for a film like this one, and I really wanted to try my hand at making an old-fashioned stereo surround mix. To that end, I was careful when working on the sound to make sure that I wasn't making it either too centered or too diffuse, and also to avoid creating a false surround image, which is a great danger when blending sounds that might compete with one another. I am happy to report that while it is in no way discrete, standard Pro-Logic gives my film a very nice and appropriate ambiance.
I had mentioned a few weeks ago about how Varinia reacted to my SACD of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. Well, since hearing how amazing that recording sounded with the outstanding clarity the greater bit depth DSD offers, I have scoured the internet searching for jazz SACDs at a decent price; since the format has gone moribund, the discs themselves have become extremely valuable. I've picked up Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else, John Coltrane's Blue Train and A Love Supreme and Miles Davis' Relaxin', and I'm always on the lookout for more as long as the price isn't too steep. Jazz and the SACD format were made for each other.
I have organized a new section in my music collection for high definition audio formats. All SACDs, DVD-Audio and DTS discs, as well as those HDADs, which are DVD-Video discs with 192/24 PCM tracks (I have John Williams' original Close Encounters of the Third Kind album and James Horner's Glory score in this format) are now in a separate section (with the single exception of Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek: Nemesis, as a collection trumps the format, especially now that they can all be played on the same machine).Since getting the OPPO DLP-93, I've been enjoying the Netflix feature. I was in one of the closing Blockbuster prowling for good deals on Blu-ray discs and they were hawking their online service. Figuring I would expand significantly on what was available to me to watch, I signed up for it. I then got home and registered the OPPO with Blockbuster, and checked out what this former rental giant had to offer me.
What a lousy service. Seriously. You only get one disc at a time, and the streaming is a joke. It's in a pay-per-view format, and the selection is severely limited, as opposed to Netflix, where your account gives you unlimited access to any of their streaming content, with more and more material being made available all the time (this is especially useful for television series). Once I've finished the trial period I'm going to cancel the account with Blockbuster. If this is their attempt to be competitive, it's pretty damn pathetic and I'll be glad to see them tank.