DIY 360° Audio Hacks On A Budget

Andrew from Deity Microphones here. I am here with Helena and Anna. They are from Nocturnal. You might know them from VRLA, USC lecture you guys gave. Today they are going to show us how to incorporate 360 audio into our workflow on a budget. You guys ready? Let's do it. Let's do it. 360 video is all the rage. It's all over your news feeds, on your social media content, but what are most people though missing out on? Yeah, spatial audio is a game changer. It lets you put your viewer in the middle of a 360 sound field and then you also get to use z-axis for depth. That's really cool. What kind of hardware though do we need to do to pull that off? There are actually two microphones that we've used on our productions. We've got the Sennheiser Ambio, which is an ambisonic microphone, and we've also used here 360's 8 Ball, which is a quad binaural. Okay, what exactly though is an ambisonics? A regular microphone gives you more of a directional audio. Ambisonic microphones capture a 360 sound sphere. What else do we need in terms of microphones? Unlike a standard production, you're actually going to want two different mixers. We like using the Zoom F8 because it gives you eight dedicated channels for your ambisonic microphone and then you've got a whole other mixer to input as many lavalier microphones you might be using. It's really important that you link all of your channels so that the volume is consistent across all axes. You guys are still using lavaliers for 360 audio? That's correct. We're just using standard lavalier mics on all of our actors so that we can use those as point sources in post-production and split those across that 360 space. Don't tell anyone. You guys mentioned we can do this on a budget, so how are we doing that? You'll want to keep really good notes on set and keep track of all your metadata because then you can use that information in post and spatialize everything where it needs to go. But what kind of metadata are we having to keep? A couple of things. You'll want to know where your actors are in relation to not only your camera depth but also in the 360 space. And what that means is you're going around like a first day seawood with a measuring tape and actually measuring out the different distances so that you know in post what those distances are. And bonus points if you just take quick notes on the actual space that you're recording in. Room reflections and reverb will be really valuable in post-production. What about walking path? You want to also have a walking path so if your actor is moving around the camera or around the space you want to make sure that's noted in your sound report. What do we need to worry about though during rehearsal? Rehearsals are really important. It allows you to preset levels of where your actors are going to be especially if there's a change performance. If the levels get really low or even really high you'll be able to anticipate that and mix accordingly. What about wireless do we need to be concerned about during the actual production? You want to make sure you have a reliable wireless system with your lavalier mics because if you need step offset or hide under something you want to ensure that that range is going to be big enough that you're still capturing clean audio. There's a lot to really think about but more importantly let's see how that metadata gets used in post. So this is post-production but what exactly are we looking at here on this screen? So this is Reaper. It's a low-cost DAW. I use Pro Tools Ultimate but Reaper is what you can use on a budget and this plugin right here is the Facebook 360 Spatializer which is also a free download and it comes with a template to get you started. So everything we're looking at here is free? Yes. We like free on the channel. So what exactly are we looking at though when it comes to interaction? There's a lot of dials and sliders and everything. What do we got? The main ones are your azimuth elevation and distance settings and those are essentially just your x y and z axis and so that comes from that metadata that you kept on set because you'll know exactly how your actors are moving and so you can use these dots right here these points. These are your lavaliers. So that's a lav. Exactly. So that's your point source and you can move it around and automate it based on how your actors are moving which is where those sound reports come super in handy. Right so that's that trace line of our actor's path. You can actually automate keyframe essentially everything. Exactly. So what is our controls over here with global room and everything? So you can set also the room's width height and length and so when you're measuring that room on set and making sure you get those that metadata from set you can then transfer that into post and set those room reflections to be accurate to what you had on set. So instead of having an expensive ambisonic microphone you're just using that lavalier point source and essentially simulating it in this virtual environment. So it's a virtual ambisonics microphone and that's some cool stuff. So other than lavaliers what else can you do in this spatial plugin? It's super useful for building out ambisonic ambiences and so if you can't actually go out and record those you can also build out virtual ambisonic ambiences. So if you're in a forest you can put birds here, birds there, you know something over here and build that all in. So you're spatializing your foley and your sound effects. Exactly. Oh that's really cool. We don't get to do this kind of stuff with the post-production also a lot so this is really cool to have you guys in today. Yeah thanks for having us. Thank you for watching. Like, follow, subscribe on all social media platforms at Deity Microphones. Leave a comment below and tell us what we should make our next video about. The best comment is going to win the V-Lav which is really good for specialized audio. It's coming out next month. You can check it out later. I'm Ed from Deity Microphones. Thank you for watching.