the kickstarter experience pt 6 - recording, editorial, metadata

Recording day was pretty stressful, but also all kinds of fun.

As soon as the regular work day wound down, I grabbed a coworker and our intern and we headed to the trolley barn.  

I posted some pretty heavy updates on the kickstarter site about the whole experience with photos and vids, so check that out here.

The long and the short of it was that I got some unexpectedly cool stuff and lost some mics unexpectedly due to various issues, as is to be expected in big complex time crunched recordings.

If I had it to do over again I'd have put the schoeps in the blimp outside of the car (although that blimp did have some near misses in traffic) and I would have not put the 421 on the controller because its recording was completely destroyed with RF.

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Once everything was back in the studio I spent a few weeks editing.  Details and pics here.

My process was to put all of the files into a protools session and line them up chronologically.  This gave me about 7 different perspectives of 2 separate 30 minute trolley runs.  I did whatever processing was necessary per track (mostly gain matching and a little eq) and then came up with a composite mix to deliver in addition to the split out onboard tracks.

I then went through and listened to each individual track soloed out and edited out any craziness I came upon.  This process took for damn ever.

With the entirety of the tracks placed, processed and edited I listened through again and divided each set vertically by event.  In this way the files I delivered would be sure to line up to one another in post, so that an end user could potentially create a new mix from the individual mics that would line up quickly and easily.  I then used a quickkey script to rename the individual regions.  This also took for damn ever.

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With everything edited and exported I then went into metadata mode. Details and pics available here.

Soundminer is really the best tool for metadata editing, as it can do batch changes with ease and will embed the metadata into the bwav header.  I used my standard process of copying the filenames into the description field and then using batch functions to add more data in groups.  I then copied the descriptions down to the bwav description fields, added the photos and embedded all of the metadata.  This took time, but not as much as the editorial.

With all metadata embedded I triple checked everything in the protools workspace and in itunes.  

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Last step was to export the different versions into different folders and set up different logins on our ftp for the different backer levels.  Then post the files, download them from home as a test run, open the downloads and (finally!) distribute the links to the backers.

The entire post process is what really takes a good amount of time and is a primary reason that I feel one would have a heck of hard time raising any serious money doing even very successful kickstarters.