Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey Laurel.
(00:02):
Yes?
I really don't feel like working at all today.
Then let's talk.
Alright. Well today is November 22nd, 2024.
We are gearing up towards Thanksgiving here in the United States.
That is next Thursday, the 28th, is it?
(00:23):
Something like that.
Something like that.
We are going to be talking about several topics, but one thing I realized is
there is a sale.
Okay, so we have been talking about how microphones, you know, and we do a lot of voiceovers of course in animation here.
(00:46):
And the microphone that gets used the most by Disney and other companies is the Newman U87.
Right.
It's a pretty expensive microphone. I think it's about $3,000.
We are using a clone here, and it's the Universal Audio Bach 187,
(01:09):
which retails for about $1,000, I think. You know, I think it goes for $1,200.
Sometimes you find it in sale. I think we got ours on sale for under $1,000.
But the preamps that Disney uses, and this is based on a post that we saw on Reddit
(01:32):
by somebody who works at Disney and does voiceovers.
The preamps that they use are John Hardy preamps, which I did a bunch of searches.
Very difficult to find. I guess these are very old preamps.
I think they still make them, but I couldn't find where to buy them.
(01:54):
However, there is this company, Seventh Circle Audio, and that's their website,
seventhcircleaudio.com. They make clones of different preamps.
So they make clones of another preamp that's famous, the Neve preamps,
and then they make clones of this John Hardy preamps.
(02:20):
And they have a sale coming up.
So it's going to be a Thanksgiving sale from the 28th through the 2nd, I believe.
So a Black Friday sale that actually is somewhat constrained?
Yes, that it's going to be around then.
And you can go to their website and find the details, but they're going to have 10% off.
(02:45):
And it's an interesting story because I looked them up.
This company used to make these components, and I think it started with an engineer
who just wanted cheaper versions of all the classic things.
And he started selling these kits where you had to put the things yourself.
(03:06):
You know, you had to like, you know, they would basically be like all the different components
and the boards and stuff, and you'd have to put them yourself.
Well, apparently there was a person selling them all put together on eBay.
Got it. So he would buy the DIY kits, put them together and resell them.
(03:27):
He would buy the DIY kits, put them together, resell them on eBay.
And the company started recommending that person if you wanted it all put together
because he got really good reviews.
Well, it turns out that the original owner of the company decided to stop making
or selling the kits altogether.
(03:50):
Oh, no. So this guy's out of business.
Well, he ended up buying the business, you know, and this is a I think a small business.
It's like a one person shop or whatever.
But I think from what I read for the last four years,
this person has been selling both the kits and the fully assembled things.
(04:13):
In fact, I think he favors the fully assembled versions now.
Probably most of his customers do, too.
But they say, you know, if you go on YouTube, they haven't I haven't found a review
of these John Hardy implementations clones.
But I have found big YouTubers who do audio, do reviews of the other ones
(04:37):
that are like the Nive, you know, versions and API versions and that kind of things.
And they say they sound really good, you know, that they're they're good clones.
So I'm kind of excited about this because, you know,
we've always been trying to get the Disney sound, you know, for voiceovers.
(04:59):
We want an entire studio of clones.
And so we can't afford the big, you know, microphones and the big John Hardy preamps
and all that stuff, but maybe sort of kind of we can afford the clones.
So if you're out there and you do voiceovers like us, you might want to check them out.
(05:21):
Seventh Circle Audio dot com.
They sell the kits.
They send an email, the person directly, they have an email for sales at the bottom
and ask questions. And, you know, we don't get any money for this or anything.
And we haven't used them yet.
So we're not personally recommending them, but we've read good things about them online.
(05:44):
We haven't used them yet.
But it would be interesting at some point to acquire one
and to sort of do like a comparison YouTube video because there's, you know,
a lot of people trying to find this type of gear.
And anyway, it's a.
So that's interesting, though, because Disney uses the Hardy,
(06:06):
but it seems like more people are interested in the Neve.
Yeah. So they use.
I think they use a knee for something like that for if you read the description,
they favor the John Hardy.
And, you know, the thing with audio components that I found out is that they last forever.
(06:32):
It seems I mean, you know, sure, you might have to replace some some of them
because a part went bad or whatever, but it's not like video.
I think we've talked about that in another podcast, how audio.
So people like relish the old sounding versions of things.
Right. Whereas with video, if you try to go back to a camera from like the 80s or whatever.
(06:56):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's going to sound, you know, especially if you're an indie,
because then you're buying the cameras that were awful compared to the big cameras.
Yeah. I mean, the only camera that I can think of that people still trade with the old ones
is the Arri Alexa, which is, you know, used to be a hundred thousand dollar camera.
(07:18):
And you can maybe find them for thirty thousand or twenty thousand, you know, on eBay.
And they still shoot like I think it's two K or HD and not really four K video.
But the dynamic range on those cameras was so good that people still buy them.
And their colors, right? That's what they're known for.
(07:40):
Color science and you know, you can shoot raw and all that stuff.
It's it's really, you know, a classic camera that is still being purchased today.
However, with audio, it seems like these components last forever.
So whoever was at the time at Disney putting together the whole audio chain
(08:03):
really like the John Hardy preamps.
And hey, you know, why mess with success? They have classic microphones, classic.
Right. We have tried to do something similar using plugins.
You know, if you're familiar with audio chains, you can purchase some plugins
(08:24):
which imitate some hardware. And we have done pretty well.
You know, like it sounds like the sound of it. Yeah, we like the sound of it for sure.
So really, we don't need another preamp, but it would be fun to.
I would just like to note that's on record now. We don't need another preamp.
(08:45):
But it would sure be fun to compare and say, you know, hey, we're using the Disney chain
and refer to our old podcast about that idea of procrastinating on creating stuff by purchasing.
You things, you things. But, you know, I imagine some of maybe some of the software
(09:07):
you use for writing, for example, might be on sale.
You know, these are things to sort of look for.
Yeah, obviously, this is a good time of year, especially in the United States,
to look for sales because the Black Friday sales kind of goes from November, December and January.
A lot of a lot of software, a lot of hardware.
(09:29):
I think Apple has their sale now, which is 10 percent off a bunch of things.
But we might want to find out if Scribner has some sale.
Yeah, Scribner. We'll have to check out. That's the my my software choices for writing are convoluted
(09:51):
because I normally do my first draft in storyist and then I transfer the whole thing over to Word to send to my editor.
And then she sends it back. And then I as after I fix it, I move it into Scribner for the final bit and for publishing.
So, yes. So this is an interesting topic because now I'm really curious.
(10:15):
Like, what is it that you like about each of this software and why?
We got to back up here because now granted, these are not as expensive as free apps for sure.
But I'm curious why we need all the different pieces.
Like, what did you like about storyist and what?
(10:39):
So storyist and Scribner are our direct competitors, really, for novelists.
They both are, you know, designed to take you from planning out your ideas and doing your first drafts to all the way to publishing as an EPUB.
(11:01):
But they work slightly differently in how they do it. And some of it may be just that I didn't have an updated version of Scribner when I was getting back into writing.
So it may be that I'm just not as familiar with how they do things now.
But it is extremely easy in storyist to keep everything open on the side on sort of a menu bar kind of thing, which works like an outline.
(11:38):
And then you can switch from the outline for your specific book to, since I'm writing a series, they're all part of the same document.
So then I can switch down to my research. So if I've forgotten somebody's name or how to spell the name of a place, because I write science fiction, so I make all this stuff up so I don't remember anything.
You know, trying to remember who is which person is, you know, six foot tall versus six foot four or, you know, what color of eyes the roommate of the friends, brothers, you know, teammate is all that detail.
(12:13):
I keep down in a research folder and I know Scribner gives you places for research too.
But I haven't recently at least found an easy way to switch back and forth while keeping things open.
And in storyist you can keep it open and switch back and forth. You can read all of your documents, you know, as one big document without having to really change anything.
(12:39):
Because it all always does show up as one document and you just use the sidebar to switch between them.
And this is software that runs on your iPad and yes, and it runs on the iPad and it runs on the phone and it runs on all the different computer.
I think, yes, Macs, but maybe I don't have windows maybe.
(13:02):
So I don't know because I haven't written on a computer in a long time.
But one of the things I did find with storyist, and I had had problems with this with Scribner back in the day too, was the way they update, you know, cloud updates can be a little funky.
(13:23):
Yeah, let me tell you about the cloud.
Go ahead. No, I just, my little rant about the cloud that, you know, from I think back,
even when Steve Jobs was alive, doing Apple, all the Apple announcements were about.
(13:45):
And now we can sync all your photos and all your stuff using iCloud from the, you know, all your devices.
It seemed like every announcement later was the same thing and now we can sync.
Well, I don't know if that's ever worked that great.
(14:06):
I mean, it always works eventually.
For photos, it works better for things where you're editing the same document, it can be problematic.
So I've had problems on storyist, I used to mostly write on my iPad, but then sometimes if I didn't have it with me, I would pop into my phone and, you know, do some writing and one time I was stuck somewhere unexpectedly and got a couple of pages written.
(14:37):
And for whatever reason, it didn't update before I opened it again on my iPad and it erased all of it.
So that when I opened my phone again, it had updated it back to, so it was gone.
So at that point I thought, you know what, I don't need to write on my phone, it's useful, but it's not important. If I've got a thought, I'll throw it in, you know, notes or some other program and just copy and paste it when I get home.
(15:07):
All right. So you have storyist and you write your drafts there.
And I, is that what we use in the mornings when you're reading parts.
So we do this editing exercise, I guess, where my wife reads her rough draft or, I mean, rough, it's not rough.
You know, it's sort of like she's already gone through, I think, a bunch of times, because it doesn't sound like a rough draft.
(15:34):
But then I comment on, you know, whether I got lost somewhere or, you know, and I'm often lost, so I'm like the best person, because I'm like, oh, you know, and it's not her writing at all.
It's just that I, listening to things out loud, have this thing where I just lose track a lot of things.
(15:58):
But that's actually good because a lot of people reading, you don't necessarily read straight through. You put something down, you pick it up three days later and you're like, wait, what?
So, so then, so she reads in the morning and I do notice that you can skip pretty easily using that sidebar to a section and to the end of the chapter and all that stuff.
(16:21):
And then you have this stuff in Storiest. So what about all the other pieces? What are they?
So Word, in my opinion, has the best editing and reviewing, you know, changes tracking system.
I see.
And it's normally the word best and word don't get used often, I think, on things, maybe. Maybe I'm being too harsh on Word. I think it's really the standard.
(16:52):
I mean, people will use, you know, Google Docs or some other things out of because it's free and it's available.
But Word, Microsoft Office. Yeah, I mean, that's become the standard. I take it backward.
To me, Word is always associated with formatting and not knowing how to get my page numbers on the right place and the headers.
(17:19):
Well, I will say that Word on the iPad is not nearly as nice as Word on the computer.
And that's probably true for most software. And I will also say that using three different kinds of software on two or three different platforms can completely fry my brain.
(17:42):
So trying to figure out where to change a page number somewhere becomes a challenge just because I can't remember where it is.
But when it comes to sending it to your editor and getting the you get marks or?
Yeah. So she so I export it to Word and double check that the formatting is still good and send it to my editor.
(18:06):
And then she turns the whole thing red. So that's a good point.
Story is, would you say, good at exporting to Word? Yeah, it's pretty good.
There's the exporting between things is always a little interesting, but mostly it's good.
You just need to spend time and and transfer all of the styles from one to the other and make sure that it's set up.
(18:37):
I don't do my writing in Times New Roman, 12 point double spaced.
And so I just need to make sure once it gets into Word, everything ends up the way that's.
And that's a good thing about stories. How much formatting do you have to worry about in stories?
Yeah, I don't. I just don't do any formatting and story is OK.
(18:58):
I just leave it. Well, that's not true.
There's the styles that I use are there's a chapter heading style which automatically breaks it up on the sidebar.
There's a section heading style and then there's just text and those are the three I use.
So there's so that way on the sidebar, it's broken up into chapters and each chapter is broken into sections and everything else is just text.
(19:21):
And those were already defined with a template or yes, they must have been.
Yeah, and I have used story as the lot for script writing.
That's how we found out about story is right.
I think originally, yes, because I wanted something, you know, when I write scripts that remembers, you know, has all the styles for like this is a description.
(19:44):
This is dialogue. This is a character.
And that would remember the character names and things like that. Stories has been really good for that.
Now, I don't care what it looks like when you print it, you know, whether it's like because we're not turning it in.
Yeah, because that's just for us, you know, to do either film our movies.
(20:09):
It used to be our live action movies.
And now it's our VR stuff. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit because that has evolved.
But go on. So now it comes back from your editor with marks.
And then how do you integrate that whole thing back into so word has that building it's made for collaboration.
(20:31):
And so if you're using the tracking changes, it'll tell you who made the changes.
It lets them make comments and cross things out and change things without destructive. It's a non destructive editing thing.
So you can turn off all the changes and see your original or you can turn them on and just see what they've done.
Or you can use the tracking changes, which shows you all the suggestions and lets you go through one at a time and then commit them and make them permanent.
(20:58):
Right. OK. But now let's say you want to bring it back to stories.
Do you ever do that or I haven't done that.
I think that you probably could have most of the writing software assumes that you're going to have stuff elsewhere.
But it's going to be a different copy.
(21:21):
It would be a different copy and it would almost certainly screw up all the breaks and the.
Oh, yeah. So so what I end up doing is I end up bringing it into Scrivener because I really like Scrivener's
(21:42):
method of publishing things as EPUBs and the options they give you for that.
And, you know, for putting in front matter and back matter and covers and, you know, they they just
I really think that's their strong point is turning it into ebooks.
And so what I end up doing there is each section that I finish, I bring in and then, you know.
(22:09):
So I'm basically reformatting it as I go a little bit at a time.
OK, I'm while you're talking, I'm looking at the Scrivener website and I don't see any sales advertised right now.
But I have verified that if you go to seventh circle audio dot com, all one word, no dashes in between or anything,
(22:38):
it says get ready for our exclusive holiday sale at seventh circle audio announcing 10 percent off everything.
Enjoy amazing discounts on top quality audio equipment from 1128 to 12 to so.
There you go. Yep. So that's going to be the sale and I'm going to be looking at least and see what see what happens.
(23:06):
OK, so Scrivener is your outputting to ebook.
Yes. And ebook is not the same as a PDF. No, it is not.
OK, what's what is for people who don't know about this, what is the difference between a PDF and an ebook for.
(23:28):
Right. So a PDF is almost like a picture of each page, which is great if you're dealing with legal contracts and stuff.
But when you're reading a book, a lot of the book reading applications like Kindle or the Apple Books or Kobo or just any of those will let you say,
(23:54):
for instance, change the font size from bigger to smaller so that, you know, for like me, I like them a little bigger.
And if I've forgotten my glasses, I like it huge.
And so you can just change the font size very easily.
And it doesn't end up, you know, and it still fits everything on the page.
(24:17):
It's just ends up being a lot more pages.
But with a PDF, you can't do that if you zoom in, then you have to scroll sideways as well as down.
Oh, I see. So those readers are built to like the EPUB.
I think that's that's the extension.
Yes. At this point, most of them use EPUB. It used to be that Kindle used Moby, but now they use EPUB.
(24:40):
OK. OK. So and Storys doesn't do this or?
It does. It just doesn't have as many options when you're doing it.
So for on Scrivener, it's really easy to say, you know, I just want to do,
let's say the first three chapters and do that as a sample so that, you know, when you go into, you know,
(25:06):
Amazon or any of the other booksellers and you say I want a sample of the book, you can upload a few chapters as a sample.
So Scrivener makes it easy to export a sample and Scrivener makes it easy to say, you know what?
Anything that's in this style, I want to keep like let's say you have poetry in your book or you have a lot of times at the beginning of chapter,
(25:31):
they'll have like little quotes or something and you want that to keep a different kind of formatting than you want the rest of the book.
Scrivener lets you easily choose how to do those and easily change things without changing how you're writing it.
So you can change how it looks on the export.
If anyone from Storys is listening to this, I got to tell you that there are two main features here that we need that would make your tool be the best tool.
(26:03):
Right. The one is if you could send out to people a version for editing and had like the revision marks and all that stuff in some fancy way.
You know, it'd be cool, I guess, if you could share it through a website or something like that maybe or.
Yeah, it would be. Yeah.
(26:25):
Actually, if you could just make a copy that was in Storys and send it out for collaboration, though, to be fair, you can do that with Word and that doesn't always work either.
So sometimes it's just the fact that everybody already has Word.
But this could be version one.
You know, version one of Storys collaboration.
(26:47):
And, you know, to be fair, we probably should double check at some point if they have that.
Right. Some of these things they may have.
And I know they have their own publishing things.
I just like the way Scrivener works better for the public.
Okay. And then, yeah, if we could have all those things that Scrivener has, then that would be awesome.
(27:11):
But moving along, there's, it made me realize about the way that we've been writing scripts recently because we have a unique issue with our scripts.
Right. Because it's VR, we have more than one storyline going on simultaneously.
(27:32):
That's right. Our movies are meant to be watched from different points of view at the same time, you know, different characters.
You can walk up.
It's a virtual reality story in which you are able to walk around.
You know, in fact, recently somebody was asking what the difference is between a VR movie and a 360 3D movie.
(28:00):
Got it. And a 360 3D movie that you would see on YouTube, for example.
Right. You can look around. You can.
It still looks three dimensional. But the big difference is you can't walk around.
Right. It's almost, I don't know if people look at the, you know, real estate apps or whatever, but sometimes they have those things with real estate where you can jump from a place to a place, but you're not really moving. You can't just wander freely.
(28:28):
And in YouTube, you can't even do the jumping around. Right. You're just stuck.
Unless the person who made the movie moves the camera to another location, you're there. Right. But it's still really, really cool. I mean, you can look around.
You can, if you have a VR headset and even if you don't, you can take your phone and move it around and sort of look around.
(28:52):
Even on computers, they let you like, you know, grab and drag so you can see.
Right. Now, the headset on is even cooler because you're actually there.
However, a VR movie, which is what we're working on, is basically an application that you run.
(29:13):
And it can run in the VR headset as another game or something like that. You know, the, and you can walk around.
Right.
And because of that, we have different, you know, we're trying to make it kind of like you would in real life, you know, where there's like things happening at the same time.
(29:35):
Right. So if, you know, for instance, in a diner scene, if you walk up to one table, there's people having a conversation.
If you walk to another table, people are not having the same, you know, they're not necessarily talking about the same thing.
There's a whole other story with other people's lives.
And you can follow the threads.
And especially because our scenarios are where people are working together in making a movie, you know, so it's a movie within a movie.
(30:09):
They're going to connect at some point. The stories are going to connect.
So you can follow each thread and then you can like come back.
And it's meant to be watched multiple times.
But anyway, talking about how do you write a script for something like that?
And what software do we use?
Which is none of the other ones.
(30:32):
Tell them why you chose the software that we're using now.
So for that one, I use Pages, which is Apple's software.
And honestly, we could have used Word or any of the others.
I'm just why, why, why would we do that?
(30:53):
Part of it is I'm just really comfortable in Pages when I write letters or, you know, just random stuff.
I often do it in the templates.
Yes, templates are good.
It's really easy to change formatting.
But the other reason is honestly, I like being able to look at my recents list and have them be the thing that I'm looking for.
(31:16):
So my recents list in Pages is related to our movies and my recents list in Storyist is related to my novels.
But yes, so we set it up with a bunch of columns.
And so did you set up a table? Is that what it was?
Or what is it?
I didn't. I thought about doing a table and then I thought if I was going to do a table, I could just do an Excel.
(31:39):
And I didn't want to.
OK, but you can set it up to be multiple columns.
Yes.
And they just keep going down each column.
Yes.
And so parallel things, things that are happening at the same time, they're just sort of in the same row.
But there's no row per se.
(32:01):
You're just like doing it yourself.
It's not shaded rows, but just like in a book, there's different lines.
By using like the paragraph marks, equivalents or whatever.
Exactly.
OK. And yeah, it's like now what we have is like, let's say we have eight characters.
I don't remember off the top of my head how many characters are in this particular scene.
(32:26):
But what's nice is that we sort of pair them up, you know, characters.
So we're only talking about so we're only talking about a set of four columns, maybe.
Yeah, I can't remember. I think we have four columns.
And so we're sort of writing what is being said at each one of those things that are supposed to happen in parallel.
(32:52):
Right. And people will move from one column to another.
So, for instance, if we start out with everybody altogether, then that just goes in one column.
And if there's like one person off, then they'll be in a different column.
But then later as people start splitting up and then as they switch who they're talking to, you know.
(33:14):
And that's one of the reasons I didn't use a table, because for at least in my brain, a table needs to have, you know, headings.
And then that's always going to be these characters.
But in this, it's a little more fluid where, you know, maybe one of the directors is talking to the actors.
But then maybe later one of the actors wanders off to talk to a different character.
And so I don't want a column where I feel like this heading has to be right.
(33:38):
And now we're the ones who are going to be performing this.
But I can just imagine you handing a script to an actor with four columns.
Like, do I say all these lines at the same time in every character's voice?
Well, the truth is, it's not the final script, right?
This is sort of the pre-planning. This is the pre-planning.
So the scripts will each be following one character through.
(34:04):
Right. And the thing that we do, and this is why this is so important, is because we then turn that script into reference videos.
Ultimately, that's what we do. And we call them reference videos.
I don't know why, but I think the name stuck. But it's just a it's supposed to give us a guide, I guess.
(34:29):
It's a reference. It's a reference.
So that we know who's talking when. And then we have an exact timing for the dialogue.
We have an exact timing for the actions and the facial expressions so that when we're, you know, adding different things, we don't have to think, OK,
now we need to pause for four seconds before the next person speaks.
Right. That would be that would be crazy.
(34:51):
But we basically put the movie together in editing by taking all these reference videos and saying, OK, we have a timeline here of when things are supposed to happen.
We're going to take the other characters' clips and insert them around the same time.
Right. And so that the timing is exact.
And so if we are performing a set of characters and we do it like in in what do you call it in real time, oh, in real time.
(35:23):
Where you're like, you know, basically waiting, pausing the amount of time that you're supposed to be pausing.
Right. So that all the parts will sync at the end when we film.
Because we have headsets on and we're listening to, you know.
So if you're doing the voice for, you know, one of the directors, then you will hear the reference video with the other characters talking and and you'll even hear your own line.
(35:54):
So you can, you know, say it at the right time.
And, you know, if you're going too fast, if you need to sort of speed up a little to get back on track or, you know, the reverse or slow down.
But it makes it a lot easier as I'm lining things up in the audio and in the movement later.
If you're at least all aiming for the right timing, because you can hear everything else going on while you're putting your lines in there.
(36:24):
Yeah. And, you know, we're going to we keep meaning to make a video explaining how we do.
Because we've we've had to invent a lot of things.
I mean, you can't just go into YouTube and say, hey, how do I film a VR movie?
(36:45):
Right. I mean, you can. Well, later, because we'll have some videos on that.
Hopefully you could do that. But we could not find anything good.
We just sort of had to invent, especially, you know, like, how do you write the script? How do you do all this stuff?
Even our brainstorming is kind of wild because we're like, OK, well, now let's switch to this set of people and what are they talking about?
(37:11):
And it's become sort of layered storytelling where, you know, at first we were getting a little stuck, like, OK, what do we do?
And then we just Jose was just brainstorming a ton of completely random ideas.
And then we started saying, OK, well, you know what? These sort of fit together and these sort of fit together.
And, you know, we pick because we have at this point three set locations and we're like, so this set location, we want to kind of have these stories.
(37:35):
OK, well, these side stories kind of fit with this main one, you know, and this and so sort of arranging it by where we want it to take place.
And then a little bit by timing, this would happen first.
This would happen second. And then once you pick the main storyline, then you sort of figure out where to place the others.
And it's this layered approach to creating stories.
(37:57):
Right. And yeah, I think that's really helped out to just sort of think of, oh, this is a funny situation.
Right. Don't know where it's going to fit right now, but we'll just write some notes about it.
Yeah, that that would be funny. And this would be funny.
And then try to figure out, you know, there's a whole process.
(38:21):
And I think we probably should save that for another podcast.
We're getting along.
And maybe call this one done.
All right. Well, well, I guess I should get back to work.
Then we'll talk another time. All right.