A sound editor is a creative professional responsible for selecting and assembling sound recordings in preparation for the final sound mixing or mastering of a television program or motion picture. Sound editing developed out of the need to fix the incomplete, undramatic, or technically inferior sound recordings of early talkies, and over the decades has become a respected filmmaking craft, with sound editors implementing the aesthetic goals of motion picture sound design. Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. ... A professional provides a service in exchange for payment in accordance with established protocols for licensing, ethics, procedures, standards of service and training/certification. ... Methods and media for sound recording are varied and have undergone significant changes between the first time sound was actually recorded for later playback until now. ... Audio mixing is used in sound recording, audio editing and sound systems to balance the relative volume and frequency content of a number of sound sources. ... Audio mastering is the process of preparing and transfering recorded audio to a medium for future duplication. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... For other uses see film (disambiguation) Film refers to the celluliod media on which movies are printed Film — also called movies, the cinema, the silver screen, moving pictures, photoplays, picture shows, flicks, or motion pictures, — is a field that encompasses motion pictures as an art form or as part of... A sound film (or talkie) is a motion picture with synchronized sound, as opposed to a silent movie. ... Look up craft in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Sound design is a technical/conceptually creative field. ...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognizes the artistic contribution of exceptional sound editing with the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing. Founded on May 11, 1927 in California, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is a professional honorary organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of motion pictures. ... The Academy Award of Merit for Best Sound Editing is an Academy Award granted yearly to a film exhibiting the finest or most aesthetic sound editing or sound design. ...

Techniques

Equipment

The essential piece of equipment used in modern sound editing is the digital audio workstation, or DAW. A DAW allows sounds, stored as computer files on a host computer, to be placed in timed synchronization with a motion picture, mixed, manipulated, and documented. The standard DAW system in use by the American film industry, as of 2005, is Digidesign Pro Tools, generally running on an Apple Computer host system running Mac OS X. Other systems in use presently are Steinberg Nuendo on Windows XP, as well as Pro Tools running on Windows XP. Other systems historically used for sound editing were: A Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is a system designed to record, edit, and play back digital audio. ... Categories: American cinema | Cinema by country ... Digidesign is a digital audio company. ... Pro Tools 6. ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Steinberg is a German musical equipment and software company. ... Nuendo is Steinbergs premier software sequencer. ... Windows XP is one of the major revisions of the Microsoft Windows operating system created for use on desktop and business computer systems. ...

• WaveFrame, manufactured by WaveFrame of Emeryville, CA
• Several DAWs have been manufactured by Fairlight
• SonicSolutions
• AMS-Neve Audiofile

The WaveFrame, Fairlights, and Audiofile were of the "integrated" variety of DAW, and required the purchase of expensive prorietary hardware, while the surviving systems, Pro Tools and Nuendo (a successor to Cubase) are of the "host based" variety. Emeryville is a small city located in Alameda County, California. ... Official language(s) English Capital Largest city Sacramento Los Angeles Area  - Total   - Width   - Length    - % water  - Latitude  - Longitude Ranked 3rd 158,302 sq mi  410,000 km² 250 miles  400 km 770 miles  1,240 km 4. ... This article is about the demo/warez group. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Sound Effects Library

History

Early Talkies

The first sound process to substantially displace silent films in the moviegoing market was the Vitaphone process. Under the Vitaphone process, a microphone recorded the sound performed on set directly to a phonograph master, which made Vitaphone recordings impossible to cut or resynchronize, as later processes would allow. This limited the Vitaphone process to capturing musical acts or one-take action scenes, like Vaudeville routines or other re-creations of stage performances; essentially, scenes that required no editing at all. However, Warner Brothers, even as early as The Jazz Singer, began experimenting with the mixing of multiple phonograph recordings and intercutting between the "master" sync take and coverage of other angles. The original mixing console used to make the master recording of The Jazz Singer, still viewable in the Warner Bros. Studio Museum, has no more than four or five knobs, but each is still visibly labeled with the basic "groups" that a modern sound designer would recognize: "music", "crowd", and so on. A silent film is a film which has no accompanying soundtrack. ... Vitaphone was a sound film process used on several features and shorts produced by Warner Brothers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. ... A microphone, sometimes called a mic (pronounced mike), is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. ... Edison cylinder phonograph ca. ... Vaudeville is a style of multi-act theatre which flourished in North America from the 1880s through the 1920s. ... Warner Bros. ... The Jazz Singer is a 1927 U.S. movie musical notable for being the first feature-length motion picture with talking sequences. ... This is an article about the film crew member known as a sound designer. ...

Warner Bros. developed increasingly sophisticated technology to sequence greater numbers of phonograph sound effects to picture using the Vitagraph system, but these were rendered obsolete with the widespread adoption of sound-on-film processes in the early 1930s. Sound-on-film refers to a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying picture is physically recorded onto photographic film, usually, but not always, the same film strip of film carrying the picture. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Mechanical Editing

In a sound-on-film process, a microphone captures sound and converts it into a signal that can be photographed on film. Since the recording is imposed linearly on the medium, and the medium is easly cut and glued, sounds recorded can be easily re-sequenced and separated onto separate tracks, allowing more control in mixing. Options expanded further when optical sound recording processes were replaced with magnetic recording in the 1950s. Magnetic recording offered a better signal-to-noise ratio, allowing more tracks to be played simultaneously without increasing noise on the full mix. Film refers to the celluloid media on which movies are printed. ... The 1950s were a decade that spanned the years 1950 through 1959. ... Signal-to-noise ratio (often abbreviated SNR or S/N) is meaningful both in the context of Electrical engineering and, informally, for Usenet or other newsgroup-like services. ...

The greater number of options available to the editors led to more complex and creative sound tracks, and it was in this period that a set of standard practices became established which continued until the digital era, and many of the notional concepts are still at the core of sound design, computerized or not: A digital system is one that uses numbers, especially binary numbers, for input, processing, transmission, storage, or display, rather than a continuous spectrum of values (an analog system) or non-numeric symbols such as letters or icons. ...

• Sounds are assembled together onto tracks. Many tracks are mixed together (or "dubbed together") to create a final film.
• A track will generally contain only one "type" or group of sound. A track that contains dialogue only contains dialogue, a track that contains music should only contain music. Many tracks may carry all the sound for one group.
• Tracks may be mixed a group at a time, in a process called predubbing. All of the tracks containing dialogue may be mixed at one time, and all of the tracks containing foley may be mixed at another time. In the process of predubbing, many tracks can be mixed into one.
• Predubs are mixed together to create a final dub. On the occasion of the final dub, final decisions about the balance between different groups of sounds are made.

In the era of optical sound tracks, it was difficult to mix more than eight tracks at once without accumulating excessive noise. At the height of magnetic recording, 200 tracks or more could be mixed together, aided by Dolby noise reduction. In the digital era there is no limit. For example, a single predub can exceed a hundred tracks, and the final dub can be the sum of a thousand tracks. Music is sound expressed in the structures of tones and silence. ... The foley artist on a film crew is the person who creates and records many of the sound effects. ... NOiSE is a one volume manga created by Tsutomu Nihei as a prequel to his acclaimed ten-volume work, Blame!. It offers some rather sketchy information concerning the Megastructures origins and initial size, as well as the origins of Silicon life. ... Dolby Laboratories, Incorporated (Dolby Labs) is a company specializing in audio compression and reproduction. ...

Digital Sound

The mechanical system of sound editing remained unchanged until the early 1990s, when digital audio workstations acquired features sufficient for use in film production, mainly, the ability to synchronize with picture, and the ability to play back many tracks at once with CD-quality fidelity. The quality of 16-bit audio at a 48 kHz sampling rate allowed hundreds of tracks to be mixed together with negligible noise. The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive. ... A Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is a system designed to record, edit, and play back digital audio. ... The Compact Disc logo was inspired by that of the previous Compact Cassette. ... For the financial services company, see Fidelity Investments. ... The sampling frequency or sampling rate defines the number of samples per second taken from a continuous signal to make a discrete signal. ...

The physical manifestation of the work became computerized: sound recordings, and the decisions the editors made in assembling them, were now digitized, and could be versioned, done, undone, and archived instantly and compactly. In the magnetic recording era, sound editors owned trucks to ship their tracks to a mixing stage, and transfers to magnetic film were measured in hundreds of thousands of feet. Once the materials arrived at the stage, a dozen recordists and mix technicians required a half an hour to load the three or four dozen tracks a predub might require. In the digital era, 250 hours of stereo sound, edited and ready to mix, can be transported on a single 160 GB hard drive. As well, this 250 hours of material can be copied in four hours or less, as opposed to the old system, which, predictably, would take 250 hours. Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ...

Because of these innovations, sound editors, as of 2005, face the same issues as other computerized, "knowledge-based" professionals, including the loss of work due to outsourcing to cheaper labor markets, and the loss of royalties due to ineffective enforcement of intellectual property rights. 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Paper shredding can be contracted out Outsourcing (or contracting out) is often defined as the delegation of non-core operations or jobs from internal production within a business to an external entity (such as a subcontractor) that specializes in that operation. ... In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain types of information, ideas, or other intangibles in their expressed form. ...

Other Fields

In the production of radio programs and music, persons who manipulate sound recordings are known simply as "editors," in cases where the producers themselves do not perform the task. Radio broadcasts have been a popular entertainment since the 1910s, though popularity has declined a little in some countries since television became widespread. ... Music is sound expressed in the structures of tones and silence. ... In the music industry, a record producer (or music producer) has many roles, among them controlling the recording sessions, coaching and guiding the performers, and supervising the recording, mixing and mastering processes. ...