Ralph Schaafsma

So some of you might be wondering what I’ve been doing the last six months of my life. I’ve been busy working on MJUKS a ’student tv show’ that airs and episode about every four weeks. Each episode being 15 minutes long having about 7-8 different items each being 1 to 2 minutes long.

I had multiple tasks this semester, I shall discuss each of them after I quickly lay out the hierarchy of MJUKS.

At the top we have the executive producer. He’s the man that’s the main boss, he does the external relations and basically is the main man.

Also we have the creative director. That’s the person that determines what’s get aired and what’s not. It will be the person you talk to when you have an idea for item and gives you the go ahead when he thinks your infosheet* is up to par and you can show it to the teachers for the final okay to go and shoot it.

Then we have the production leader. This is the person that arranges everything, if you need a camera or any other tool he’s the one to talk to. Having good relations with key people at the faculty is a must when trying to fulfill this roll.

Last but not least we have the lead editor. Who’s in charge of putting the entire episode together. Adjusting the bumpers and leaders, putting the items in order, adding lower thirds** and adding the voice over.

One thing I’d like to mention here, something that Sinne already said. The downside of emphasizing a hierarchy.

Now, my roll in all this. I was part of the normal crew: writing infosheets, shooting items, recording audio on set, being a camera man, editing the items together. All pretty standard but I also was responsible for some other stuff. Being part of the website team has allowed me to hone my skills as a webdeveloper, something I wanted to accomplish this semester.

As you might know MJUKS.nl is running on wordpress, the popular and mostly loved Content Management System. This semester has allowed me to understand wordpress to a degree that I can put together stuff for it pretty quickly, like my podcast website for example. But more about MJUKS.nl in another blogpost.

Another role I fulfilled in MJUKS this semester was being the voice over. How I got to be the voice of MJUKS is kind of unclear, when making the second episode me and two fellow students who are also in the website team were in charge of getting a voice actor. After having a number of people on audition someone finally decided that I was to be the voice. I was chosen for having a clear, easy to understand voice with no apparent accent, except for the Fierljeppen item in which it was very much intentional.

It’s always a lot of fun doing the voice overs. Taking place in the studio with Sinne by my side giving me directions is always crazy fun. No wonder there are a lot of outtakes recorded, which might make it on the website some time. Having Sinne in the studio with me is the reason why the voice overs actually work, it’s very hard for me to judge how my voice sounded, he’s always giving directions to get the best out of it. Another very important thing to get the best voice over is to have fun recording it, this gets you going and you can get the most out of your voice.

I’ve been asked by the executive producer of next semester to be the voice over again, I happily said yes.

*Infosheet: Where you write everything down, all the shots you want to shoot, the equipment you need, the feeling you wish to express, etc. It needs to be approved by the creative producer and the teachers before you actually go and shoot the item.

**Lower Thirds: Names on screen of the people shown.

So a while ago I touched the topic of recording audio for MJUKS. Today I want to some more about recording in the field as well as in studio conditions.

As I mentioned in my previous post I took a chance and recorded the Noisia interview with a condenser mic instead of a dynamic mic. The reason I chose to do this is because interviewees usually suck at holding a microphone at a good and stable distance. The idea was to have a dynamic conversation between two people + interviewer, and having one dynamic microphone (or maximum of two) going between the three of them is really impairing the dynamics of the conversation.

So that’s where the condenser microphone came in, taking the possibility of background noise that a dynamic microphone would not pick up in considerations plus the potential gain from having a more lively conversation I decided to go for the condenser mic. And as it turned out it was a sound decision. The music playing in the background was not overly present and by the music added to the interview it was virtually impossible to hear.

Select Noisia to see the interview

Another topic I’d like to discuss is the sometimes obvious overdubbing of audio. Sometimes people don’t seem to realize that recording something in a studio sounds a lot different from in the field. Not so much having background noise that isn’t present in a studio recording but the fact that a voice sounds a lot different recorded from 2 feet away from say 10 feet with a boom mic. One example where that is present is the item called Urban Fierljeppen, way at the end when the guy (my voice) starts cussing the voice sounds out of place somewhat. Luckily the guys who made it did a good job of letting it sound less studio recorded, too bad that they left out some backgroundnoise at the end which would’ve made the ‘transformation’ complete.

The reason why it sounds good is because there aren’t any other voices in the item to compare it to. For example in some episodes where the voice over (me) ask interviewees questions it’s obvious that it was not recorded on the scene.

A way to counter this is to listen to the scene audio and determine which frequencies are less apparent from the studio recording. Removing bass is an easy way to make something sound more ‘real’. Another thing that is very hard to fix are mouth sounds that you only pick up when recording from very close up. Luckily we don’t have that problem with our items but sometimes people record sound for example tutorials with the microphone basically inside of their mouth creating these mouth sounds that would make you want to throw up. It sounds unprofessional for it sounds like you try to eliminate background noise by putting the microphone very close to your mouth.

My advice? Get a better microphone, or just leave the background noise in. Noise is not distracting then say a baby screaming in the background. Also I’d rather have a low white noise then your voice sounding like it’s underwater from all those nice noise remover artifacts.

One other thing I’ve noticed when listening to podcasts, everyone seems to think that voices need mono 98kb/s + and 44khz. This is about twice the bandwidth you need to bring out a podcast. I export mine on mono 48kb/s on 22khz and the difference between 98 is not really noticeable, unless you take something like music into account. To be honest I really hate when I need to leave home in 5 minutes and I want to have a podcast to listen to that I have to download about twice the size that it really needs.

This weekend we had an interview with the awesome guys from Noisia**. Too bad we again encountered problems with the audio equipment. This time the condenser-microphone was basically giving a brief burst of static every once in a while for an unknown reason. Luckily that hardly happened when something important was said but still it’s a mayor pain in the ass.

This time around I decided to use the condenser mic for an interview instead of a dynamic one. Having the people who are being interviewed hold the microphone themselves just looks silly and you’re never going to get consistent audio quality from that. A risk I took was to use the condenser mic for the interview with semi-blocked music in the background. For it is great that the camera gives an audio signal output which is so low you can hardly hear anything. How am I supposed to check if the audio is good if I can’t even hear it, all them levels are jiggling fine but I can hardly check it. So we’re going to see if the audio is good enough, as far as I could hear it sounded fine also the volume was way more consistent than if we were to use a dynamic microphone. If you’re not the guy asking the questions you cannot correct the way the microphone is being held. Let alone if the interviewed need to hold it themselves.

So yes, I took a risk and we’ll see how it plays out. I’m just annoyed by the sheer amount of malfunctioning hardware we got. Soon I’m gonna see what the fieldmixer is like they say school has, I’m not thinking it has a limiter but it might give me a controlroom (aka my headset) signal boost.

For those not in the know, a limiter(/compressor) is a device (or part of a device) which checks if a signal is not passing a certain threshold. If that happens it dims that signal to the maximum allowed and then sends it on to whatever recording equipment you’re using, leaving a good non distorted signal. I’m not sure if the mixing table in the big studio at school has one build in but why should it? -It’s a controlled environment where the guy in charge should set things right. If it’s a ‘in the field interview’ then it’s a whole different deal.

On another note I’m thinking of using my own microphone. I’ve got an omni condenser that might be better to use for interviews like this but then again we’ll have to see if using a condenser all together is good enough to do the job. Or look into getting school to buy some small pin-on microphones which they use a lot on talk shows and the likes. That would make our job a lot easier not to mention to make it look more professional.

Another thing I’ve taken myself to do is try and help with the audio editing for the final product, the episode. I’d like to be there when the voice-overs are being recorded and give pointers here and there. Plus I’d like to do some recording all together in the big studio which a small group of us recently got access to. I might bring my own equipment and see how it handles itself to it’s more expensive counterparts.

**Noisia:
Noisia is a group of complete mentals making drum and bass music. We knew they were that way so we made our interview in such a way that we used that to bring out their true nature and show them as crazy as they are. Personally I haven’t been into drum and bass that much but after being to their show I do see potential, there were some awesome songs!

So last Friday we launced the MJUKS site and man did it suck. First after we finished the design and workings of the site we put it online in a ’secret’ folder so it didn’t show up immediately unknowingly we didn’t realise that that would totally mess up the database structure if were to move it up a folder. So when we were able to launch it on the main directory we got a lot of nice database errors. So currently we are using a redirect untill we reinstall wordpress in the main folder or use create a htaccess redirect. Also what bites my ass right now is that the redirect is way too slow,  school has put it some kind of nifty delay on how fast you can go through webspace so there is like a 3 second delay.

However, it is working. A few days ago we installed google analytics, a spam filter, and removed the bugged RSS button. So now we can see where all those hits are coming from.

Still the website is far from its full potential. It just basically shows the videos, you can vote and comment and that’s it. We’re going to put a lot more user input into the site. Polls, behind the scenes, suggestions, forums, etc to make it more a community.

Soon the old MJUKS content will be online as well. Something that some groups failed to realise is that MJUKS is a whole and all the items should be on one webpage no matter which group made it.

Check it at mjuks.nl!

So the last couple of days I’ve been hella busy working on the MJUKS website. It’s currently ready for first release.

**I said as I positioned myself comfortably after which I bumped over my cup of coffee spilling it all over the table**

Currently it it’s functioning like a normal wordpress blog, you create a post which is shown in the sidebar on the front page and then it’s also listed within one of two category pages, either Items or Episodes.

In the future we will work towards a more dynamic approach so the sidebars acts more like a playlist.

Today we had some problems getting the site to run online, we weren’t able to create a new wordpress database as we do not have the rights to. An email to the guy in charge got quickly responded to and we are waiting for our database to be ready to receive them datas.

Hopefully tomorrow, the deadline, things will work properly and we can upload our items. If not, then I’ll host it on my own darn webspace.

Today I’ve been busy working on the MJUKS wordpress port. It’s getting along pretty well. XHTML strict is a thing of the future, right now I just want this thing to do what it’s supposed to. Some time in the future we can work on estethics. Currently the front-page is pretty much done next to a few styling issues. Tomorrow will be about making the single pages and category pages function. After that we’ll need to see how we can load movies in dynamically instead of going to a seperate post which is the case now. Although that’s not necessary for the inital MJUKS-WP release.

A few features that the site currently has are:

1. 1-5 Star rating per post
2. Easily added flash movies
3. Randomized headers
4. RSS feed

More about that when the times comes.

So on Friday last week we finished editing our Parcour item, it was quite a bitch to make seeing that we had not enough good footage and filler shots. We had to make a lot of comprimises, like leaving out an entire interview, but the results are good enough for a first item. I pretty much understand Final Cut now to the point where I can edit stuff pretty quick, it’s a nice enough program once you get used to it, however it was somewhat difficult because I’ve never fully used a mac before. Basically I could do the editing I did for this item within a day instead of the week or whatever that we ‘needed’ now.

I was glad to hear that the audio I recorded on the scene as ‘the audio-guy’  was pretty good. Next to an occasional windgust or scream in the background (which was actually me) the audio was fine.

The only thing that busts my balls in Final Cut is that it seems that the audio can only be moved by frames so it’s impossible to line up music. Now I’m pretty sure there’s an option somewhere to do it more precisely but still it was quite a bitch.

So today we made some good progress by getting some proper music for the Le Parcour item we’re making for Mjuks. No Brakes by The Offspring is what we’re going for right now.

The rest of the day I pretty much spent grabbing more good shots from the raw footage. Too bad a lot of the footage was just plain garbage and we could’ve used a lot more insert shots. Oh well, that’s the way you learn. Now we’ll have to make this into a proper item with the resources we’ve got.

Tomorrow I’ll be focussing on the website of Mjuks, kicking the shit out of Wordpress to get it to do what I want to. Today with the help of Steevee we got the hardcoded catergory filter to work. So it’s down-hill from here.