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minnjd

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Everything posted by minnjd

  1. minnjd
    Awesome work SME. My head hurts from reading it but there's a lot of good information.
  2. minnjd
    Oh here I thought that was for Blade Runner 2049 and I was about to take the gloves off ?
  3. minnjd
    Just got home from a screening of The Last Jedi. A favorite reviewer of mine says this is a movie of incredible 'moments' tied together by underwhelming material, and I agree. The sound mix was certainly aggressive though. It's been a while since I've heard such active use of the surround speakers. Shit was flying everywhere. The bass was very, very similar to TFA and R1 but not quite as one dimensional as the latter. I'm guessing we'll eventually see the same 30Hz bump with some content below that. A handful of effects seemed to have a little extra depth to them but they were few and far between. I will say this movie has a very high ratio of stuff that blows up real good, including a couple of near apocalyptic infernos.
  4. minnjd
    FYI Nolan got a new effects mixer with TDKR: Gregg Landaker. Previously it was Lora Hirschberg. BTW, am I the only one who noticed that the graph had the peak bass between 50-60Hz? That's different..... I'm guessing this movie will 'slam' something fierce but there will be little underneath that. With every movie Nolan seems to be making his soundtracks more and more artificial in his never ending quest to be LOUDER than everything else.
  5. minnjd
    Figures. Nolan still prefers f**king raw noise over quality.
  6. minnjd
    That's a pretty steep dropoff. Only about 17-18 Hz for extension.
  7. minnjd
    Well look at that downhill ski slope.........
  8. minnjd
    Those looks like bass graphs from the 'music' soundtrack, right? Typically that doesn't represent the bass levels of the movie itself. Hans Zimmer is pretty notorious for searching for the brown note on his soundtracks but a lot of the time it get's reduced or modified in the final mix once all the sound effects are competing for the same frequencies. Still, might be a nice surprise.
  9. minnjd
    I didn't ever say that I thought the movie had bad audio or visuals. Technically the movie is very well done and nearly flawless. I just didn't always agree artistically with the choices Villaneuve made regarding the visual and audio design. That's purely subjective to my tastes. Of course it goes without saying that my taste in movies is perfect. By that measure everyone else should finally come to terms with the fact that Titanic is a great movie
  10. minnjd
    Just wanted to add that I did like the movie and my points were mainly nitpicking. The only real issue I had was that the big apocalyptic event the movie was building towards got abandoned in the last twenty minutes for a much smaller ending that was fine on it's own but felt out of place.
  11. minnjd
    Just saw Blade Runner 2049. I don't know who did the sound design but it sounds like they took some cues from the Transformers movies. There are a lot of loud, groaning bass sounds when ships fly around and the music score is almost entirely comprised of massive low end metallic drones. Explosions and guns had some really good punch to them as well. so it's got a lot of bass. The theater I saw it in is probably good down to the low 30's so no clue if there's subsonic stuff going on or not, but given the intensity of the higher level bass I'm gonna venture a guess that it's filtered. The movie itself was pretty good, but not perfect. Visually it was spectacular. It shares some common threads with the original but it is definitely it's own movie. It's far darker and more oppressive visually. It sounds different, and while there are hints of Vangelis in the score, most of it is comprised of thunderous foghorn blasts that seem determined to wake the dead. It also feels very different. Blade Runner was a small story set in a big world. 2049 visits a lot more of this world and feels more apocalyptic in it's scope.
  12. minnjd
    I'm guessing someone will measure it 'officially' soon enough. Won't be me though. I've really cut back on my movie purchases this year (single income family situation), and I'm pretty sure this movie isn't worth my hard earned cash. It was funny reading the note that came with the theatrical distribution though. It gave explicit instructions of where the sound levels should be set (85dB reference). I asked the theater owner in my town is he followed it. He laughed and said 'no'. Smart man....... Judging by the previous movies and Bay's own penchant for excess I'm guessing the audio will be wall to wall racket with some heavy clipping. Look at the average on that graph. It's rare for it to get that close to the peak unless there's damn near constant bass.
  13. minnjd
    Personally I thought the warp booms sounded very close to the real thing......
  14. minnjd
    GOTG2 looks pretty much like the first one. Think it was the same sound team.
  15. minnjd
    Well the potential for movies to cause permanent hearing damage is certainly there, no doubt about that. Under reference playback I think it can hit peaks of well over 110dB if all channels are bumping. By and large it's rare for any movie to hit that level for extended periods, but some can average over 90dBA (Transformers AoE comes to mind). Even though Nolan's movies can get awfully loud and compressed I'd never for a minute say they were anywhere near as relentless loud as that. I do think that many (most?) theaters can't handle a Nolan soundtrack in it's element though. I remember a lot of ink being spent on how Interstellar was mixed to the very limit of an IMAX sound system's capability. Take that kind of thing and put it on a traditional multiplex sound system and it's pretty much guaranteed to sound like crap due to amp distortion. The EQ issues between theater and home playback are a lot less of a problem since they started doing HT mixes. Even if they don't do a full nearfield remix they usually re-equalize the theatrical track to tame the boosted treble frequencies. They may not give a hoot about bass but even HTIB systems can reveal overly trebly sound. And yes, I too wonder if the OSHA standards might be a bit lacking. I run our church band at about 90-92 dBA and after a technical run through and two services my ears definitely feel like they have cotton in them.
  16. minnjd
    I know I'm probably over reacting, I'm just feeling like this today: As far as Nolan having hearing damage, I doubt it. I think you can sustain a constant 90-100 dB for up to two hours a day without permanent hearing damage (according to OSHA). Even with as loud as Nolan's movies get it's doubtful they'd hit that limit.
  17. minnjd
    Just read a depressing article. A guy at a site I follow is a big Nolan fan and he drove 500 miles to see Dunkirk in 70mm. That's pretty cool, but he then went on to say two of his favorite audio demo discs were The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar due to their 'incredible sound.'
  18. minnjd
    Well it's his problem when he has his mixers crank effects up so far that they become compressed, honky, clipped messes (DKR, Interstellar) with heavily filtered LFE's.
  19. minnjd
    Well I've read two reviews of 'Dunkirk' that specifically mention extremely loud and deafening sound effects. Sounds like Nolan hasn't learned his lesson from the feedback to Interstellar.
  20. minnjd
    Don't get your hopes up on that. Greg P. Russell has mixed the effects on all the previous Transformer movies and every Michael Bay movie since Bad Boys so it's almost guaranteed he's doing this one too.
  21. minnjd
    Anybody want to make bets on how bad the new Transformers movie is going to sound ?
  22. minnjd
    When I started doing this I just followed maxmercy's instructions . Didn't put any real thought into it.
  23. minnjd
    I watched Rogue One tonight, so I can add subjective opinions to the numbers... This is definitely a 30Hz humpfest, and most big low end effects have a distinctive 'tone' to them as a result. It's so apparent that it becomes distracting at times. For instance (and this is a spoiler if you're one of the holdouts that still haven't seen this one), when the Death Star destroys Jeddha City, there are a few big shots of the planet's surface lifting up and shattering due to the shock wave. It's visually impressive. Those shots also call for some incredibly deep, room shaking bass. Now, the bass that is there is loud, and it does pressurize the room, but you can definitely feel that the lowest octave or so isn't quite there, and the 27-36Hz frequencies have been boosted so much that it almost sounds like a sine wave has been put into the effect. It reminded me a bit of Interstellar in a way. Whatever clipping is present is masked withing the louder effects, so for the most part it isn't noticeable (on my less than ideal system anyway). Some explosions do have that 'crunch' to them that usually indicates that they are clipped, but it is brief and the soundtrack is well balanced in terms of volume spikes so at no point does it get fatiguing. Overall this soundtrack is a bit of a disappointment. The bass is much more one dimensional and generic than in The Force Awakens. Even the brief Force rumbles are less interesting. On it's own it might have been okay, but coming after Hacksaw Ridge it's a big letdown.
  24. minnjd
    Rogue One: A Star Wars Story-Disney/Lucasfilm DTS-HD MA 7.1 Supervising Sound Editors: Matthew Wood, Christopher Scarabosio Sound Designers: Christopher Scarabosio, David Acord Re-Recording Mixers: David Parker, Cristopher Scarabosio, Michael Semanick, Luke Dunn-Gielmuda, Tony Villafor Level: 4 Stars (111.33dB composite) Dynamics: 5 Stars (29.42dB) Extension: 3 Stars (17Hz)- LAAAME Ugh. Lot of people had high hopes for this one (me included). Well here it is. It's got some loud bass, but a major 30Hz bump is pretty much guaranteed to overpower the at times decent ULF that is present. And to no ones surprise there is clipping to be found, including some nasty flattops during the Jeddha destruction. The surrounds are spared but all three front channels and the LFE clip at -.5dBfs and clip heavily. While this is better than The Force Awakens and its -3dBfs limiter it's still a damn shame. I haven't had a chance to watch the film yet to see how bad the distortion is. Coming in after Hacksaw Ridge this mix is even more disappointing. I'll add my thought once I view the disc. P.S. As a side observation despite sharing almost the exact same sound crew as TFA, RO has a different mix philosophy regarding bass. The main channels drop of sharply at 30Hz and are actually quite flat as far as bass activity. The heavily peaked 30Hz material and pretty much all the ULF is contained in the LFE.
  25. minnjd
    If I get time tomorrow evening I'll get Rogue One numbers up.
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