Fades

[crissim]

I have problems with fades in SCS; fades from very low to very high volume level or vice versa are not regular and smooth. No matter linear or logarythm. Has anybody ideas?


Thanks c

[jkowtko]

I assume your issue is that the midpoint of the slider is at too high a volume? That's a general issue that is being corrected in SCS10 ... Mike spent a fair amount of time to come up with a better scaling of the slider.

In SCS9 the physical midpoint of the slider is -6db, and the leftmost tickmark is at -30, before it drops to infinity almost instantly.

In SCS10 the physical midpoint of the slider is now at -20, and the leftmost ticmark is somewhere around -50 or so, with control down to -72 before dropping to infinity. You can get the audio smoothly down to a very, very low level now with good control.

To me, the fade OUTs in SCS10 sound much more uniform than SCS9 ... the volume drops noticably and then lingers a bit at the very low end before cutting completely (whereas in SCS9 the volume stayed high for most of hte time and then appeared to fall off a cliff)

In SCS9 I simply extended the fade OUTs to be as long as possible -- 8-10-15 sec or more -- to allow a bit of a tail at the end. I rarely used Log mode -- only linear.

For Fade INs, I would suggest a longer time also, because once the fader gets past midpoint the audience shouldn't notice too much if the rest of the fade takes another 10 sec or so.

Hope this helps.

Thanks. John

[crissim]

thanks for your detailed description.

what about very short fades (around 2-4 sec or so) from quite high level to infinity? do you have any ideas to deal with this?

thanks c

[jkowtko]

You could try one or more level change subcues followed by a stop subcue as part of a single cue, timing each of them with an offset so they will fire one after another. That's a crude way to create your own fade plot. I just tried it and it seems to work okay:

* the first level change starts at 0 offset and brings the volume down quite a bit, two second duration
* the second level change starts at 2.1 second offset, and brings the volume all the way down, 2 sec duration
* the stop subcue starts at 4.2

It's possible that just a single level change will produce a more even fade than the fade out algorithm -- but at worst case you can create as many level changes as you want to set up the fade plot based on what you need.

Let us know if this works for you.

Thanks. John

[crissim]

dear john,

thanks for your description about the fades - that was a great help so at last i could make it quite ok. i was working as a composer in a theatre and using scs for the first time so it was a new experience. finally the production and the work was successful.

thanks again and best regards c