Vehicle Recordings for Modern Games

[Music] today topics will cover a short introduction and background on who we are how to source vehicles planning and prepping for a vehicle recording session actually the actual recording session editing and asset creation and also implementing so who are we we're an audio outsourcing company based in stockholm sweden we do sound design for film games and trailers we do complex field recording like guns ambulances vehicles and much more we produce sound effect libraries that we sell online we also have a long experience from music our composer mats matsulungian is highly skilled at composting and producing adaptive music for games and banner here on my side is also a very well established mix engineer and has done several international number ones and recorded mixed mixed the music for the mamma mia movies

so here's a small selection of titles where our sounds or music can be heard we also recorded for these two films which we are very proud of and right now we're involved in a research project together with volvo cars where we are looking at self-driving cars and the interaction between the user and the vehicle will focus on establishing a trust to feel safe in the vehicle and also on preventing motion sickness and here's what a day at the office can look like [Music]

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thank you okay hi i'm bernard i wanted to tell you a little story about how this vehicle recording once started my background and my work through life has been music recording and music producing but my hobby has been from the beginning cars and car racing and from 2000 on to 2000 2001 and onwards i was driving the swedish championships for gt cars actually in that porsche you see there and one of my fastest competitors had a computer game company called simbin they were doing simulation games for pc

computer games for in simulation games for racing cars he know he knew about my profession and asked me if if we could record some race cars and and try to do that to deliver assets for his game and what we did was we brought my race car and we hired a lot of film recording equipment and went to a race track and we also prepared the car by taking off the silencers to get an open exhaust sound swedish racetracks has very hard sound regulations but we wanted to have the straight exhaust sound so that's what we did we put some mics in different spots and put the recorders in red and i started and drove out on the track and i managed to do like four laps before the track owner came out yelling and told us to stop because it was too noisy

but we got four laps and it sounded like this [Music] [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] yeah okay and then well back in the studio we discussed how to get this organic sound into the games because what we've had heard earlier was loop-based

sounds recording on dinos and we felt that they were really dead in sounding and often roomy because the the diners were often in in in a room actually and we took to we tried to find out our own method to to put the actual driving sound into the game and what we did is in the beginning in the beginning it was to create loops with basic audio tools like we did some uh to evening out the rpm on a on a sound like this we used uh software samplers and and program the pitch wheel to get a almost a straight rpm and tried to loop and managed to do really good things and that was how it started actually and we started to record race cars for this company first and after a while we were contacted by other computer game companies to to record other types of vehicles a lot of

military stuff like tanks airplanes and that's the way it was and if you look here this is a bit like what it looked like when we were started and today it's more or less like this you see all the bags and we are lots of people coming at the same time and we can manage to do like maybe if we talking cars maybe five to seven cars a day if we are well organized okay so i will talk a bit about the sourcing of the vehicles where do we find them obviously internet is a great resource you can search for clubs with car owners you can also search authorities on license plates if you walk down the street and hear a car that you like or even search for certain models

we also approach museums and private collectors around the world and we have a huge network since bannon mentioned he's been racing i grew up in a car family as well we have a huge network among friends as well which keeps growing the more things we do it can be challenging sourcing [Music] once i tried to find tanks in france at the museum and i don't know any french about the bad except the bad words so i tried to write in english and then i used google translate and i sent them emails and i thought it went pretty well i could translate their emails back and it came to a point where they didn't understand anything and asked me to call them and then we ran into issues so then we needed a french-speaking person to help us out um another example is with a messenger 109 a german plane from the second world war which is very rare

there's like five of them with the original engine flying and i tried to get access for almost two years i think before i got an email from someone who knew someone and that opened all the doors for us and that recording was later used for for dunkirk as well because it was so hard for them to to find anything else um you need to figure out what to record uh does it have to be authentic like man of the old world where two stuff has replaced engines um [Music] and that's the case with the message midfielders 109s there's lots of them but very few have the right engine also tanks can have replaced engines and so on um and then we need to look at if you want a stock car or a modified car stock cars often sound very boring there's not much tone coming out from the exhaust pipes and you need that tone to make assets for games so for games it's often more

you're better off with a modified exhaust system while for film it's the other way around often and then you need to understand what the client is looking for as in this case if the client wants the volvo in the lower picture and you find the volvo in the upper picture the client is not going to understand really what you did sourcing is extremely time consuming some clients want video approvals on every car you find so you need to find a car first you need to make sure it has the right information and then you need to make a video with it where you record the engine running and some blips and stuff and then you need to send that to the client and either you get an approval or a disapproval and if you get if you get a disapproval you need to start all over again and if you can't find the correct vehicle i can be old collector items and stuff then you need to find a substitute that's as close as possible so you need to do a lot of research on that

and once you get to actually record you might want to be cost and time efficient you might need like bannon said we do between five and eight cars in a day so you need to find all these cars you need them at the same location at the same time so then you need to look at if there's a location nearby where you can get all the cars or if you need a transportation to to collect the cars and bring them to the location and nowadays we have the luxury actually having a person dedicated to only doing this which is very very helpful it saves us a lot of time then we have the planning and the preparation planning is everything as i it says here you need paperwork in place you need an agreement with the owner to clarify what you expect to get

involved and more important also you need an agreement with the client that covers access fees track rentals travel expenses equipment staff insurances delivery dates and so on and very important is to also cover the what if we make sure that we can't be held responsible for things that we can't control such as cancellations due to weather delayed flights vehicles not starting and damaging vehicles and so on um as an example you in the the film we showed earlier there was this huge bomb plane flying by and uh when we went to canada to record that plane we were not sure about the weather so we needed to have three days even if we just needed one day to record we needed the two extra days in case there would be bad weather so there's it's things like that that you need to consider all the time uh and the reason was i had a client who asked for vehicles that were driven on

snow and sweden is known for snow i guess we didn't think it would be a problem at this time of the year but there were no snow in sight at all we looked everywhere we followed the forecasts all over sweden and there was no snow so we got a bit panicked and then i saw on facebook a friend of mine was out skiing somewhere across country so i called him and i asked him where are you and he got us the number to the skiing facility and we had them open it up for us night time putting on all the lights so we could record their night time and we could deliver on the dates but if we didn't if we wouldn't have had the claws that we can't be held responsible then it would have been problematic if we didn't find any snow another example is with one client we recorded very very old vehicles and uh when we came to one location the vehicle didn't start at all it did start the day before so so they were kind of puzzled it didn't start this time but in that case we needed to add in the

agreements that uh for every recording session we would make sure there was a mechanic at the place as well so they would start the vehicle the day before to make sure it ran and when we came to the location there would be a mechanic so in case it didn't start we at least had the chance to to work with this mechanic to get it started also with damaging vehicles we learned the hard way we recorded the lamborghini that broke down it's not fun it was not our fault but that meant we couldn't deliver anything to the client and they didn't pay for anything so we had to cover all the expenses ourselves on the other hand and when it comes to responsibility we take full responsibility for everything that we can affect making sure that we have equipment that works that we have staff that is doing what they should and so on so you need to take your responsibilities as well

another part of planning and preparations is finding a location we started out driving on public roads driving cars for 200 miles per hour and it's irresponsible and it's dangerous you get a less controlled recording session which gives a less good result so don't try it at home and today we always try to rent a track if possible so when you know where you will be recording you need to look at a map and try to identify disturbances and problems with the location it can be nearby airports it can be railways highways or other noise disturbances but it can also be safety regulations restrictions and limited daylight depending on where you are so you need to identify all these identify all these things you need to explain the intention for the people at the location if it's an

airport for instance and explain in detail what we need to do that we're attaching equipment on their vehicles uh the driving that is required staff from the airstrip we need to be out on the actual airstrip we're not worried but you're not allowed to do that everywhere and maybe you need to do like a very very low flybys um again when we recorded that plane in canada it's a huge bomber plane from world war ii there's only what was only one flying at the time when we did that we were at the commercial airport where they were not allowed to do flyovers on a low altitude so to work around that the the pilot reported to the tower that we're coming in to land they came in and when they were where we were they reported to the tower back again we were aborting the landing and then they took off again and they repeated that seven times i think

so if there is uh will there is a way you also need to keep an eye on the weather forecasts is it a cancer or is it a go sometimes you don't really know and then it's a bit of a gamble if you're abroad language might be an issue so it could be a good thing to have the translation the maneuvers you want to perform translated on a paper or an interpreter you need a good driver we are lucky to have bannon who's extremely experienced whenever we can we let him drive not planes though and tanks maybe but but cars and then you have the unknown and the unwanted this first example here that i'm going to play to you is uh in swedish but i think you will get it

she's obviously not too happy she eventually called the police police came and they were super excited what we were doing they didn't care about the poor lady and the other example is from a very frustrated uh recordist birds you birds die you birds [Music] we were recording uh old planes and there were obviously birds different kinds of different kind of warbirds i guess so here's a simple rule of field recording there's always birds if you want to record planes and there's always planes if you want to record birds

next part of the planning and preparation is equipment you need to charge batteries of course and all that you need to bring zip ties gaffer tape cables memory cards backup drives sync to machines you need to look at the weather some zip types they break if it's too cold some gaffer tape doesn't stick if it's too cold or wet and you still need a gaffer tape that's very gentle to the vehicles especially if it's like luxury vehicles so there's these kinds of things to consider you might want to have rental equipment if we go abroad and record planes we need tons of sandbags and microphone stands and cables and it's much better of course to rent that on the location and have it delivered to the airport than trying to bring that in your luggage another thing is packing your bags which might sound ridiculous but we have

learned the importance of that as well the hard way we try to bring as much as possible in our in our carry-ons it causes you some issues in the security but it's well worth it uh the rest that we can't bring in the carry-ons we split up in different bags but i would advise you not to put all the recorders in one bag and all the microphones in another bag because when you go to japan and you change flights somewhere and then you're arriving in japan and one bag is lost then you only have recorders or only microphones and it will make it very difficult yep you will banner we'll talk a bit more about the equipment okay here's a picture of the basic recorders and the microphones we have just put out on the table just for you to see and i will show you a list here we start with the recorders uh we

usually record vehicles at 96 kilohertz 24 bits and occasionally especially for special sound effects we go up to 192 kilohertz but usually 96 for vehicles the on-board recorders we use on on on the vehicles are often this first list sonosax r4 plus six confusion some f8 sound devices 702 and the new mix pre and for exterior we use sound devices 788 702 t sex confusion and some smaller recorders like the sony d100 and m10 and the olympus ls 12. and yeah that's just the list of of the equipment and then we will look a bit closer on the microphones so this is the basic setup we do for for recording cars the car here is a mclaren 570s i think it has a twin exhaust

what we use on the xos always is basic is the dpa 4062 they can stand 155 db they are taped on this one here one there and one there and then then we have two electro voices re50 which are really good to take up a little bit more of the low frequencies and you can see it here one there and one there and also we have an extra 4062 sitting a bit from the exhaust to to get a bit more of the low low um frequencies because the wavelength has some time to to grow from the sound occasionally we we use some extra mics also for low end and bite and i will show you some examples a bit later if we look here we have an engine this is a that's on for 240 fahrenheit 247. we use dpa 4061s and 4062s

on noise level often the 4062s we put on the intake and on the intake if we can we all we try to open the intake to to and put the microphone inside if it's possible we use the shore vp88 for stereo image when you're mixing the engine and you want some steering image it's very difficult to get a good steering image if you don't have a stereo microphone which you can pan a bit out we use occasionally of course the the sennheiser mkh-8020 it's actually you can see it here on the picture and the crown p set p set m and actually we try with different mics all the time to get the different sounds out of the engine here we have a setup for the interior of the car it's a stereo pair dpa 40 21s which you

can see here uh with uh we had two cop suction cup yeah it's here on the on the window a stereo repair and we have a the sennheiser ambio mic for vr reasons and also it has a good sound for the interior and occasionally we we also use extra extra stereo pair of dpa 4061s i think the next one is also this is from and mercedes amg ttr and also the mv mic okay let me see yeah for the exterior microphones uh we i have to show you the basic uh configuration we use almost always for uh recording this is an airfield north of stockholm which we often rent an old military airfield which is not used anymore for

for for airplanes so we basically start at we have the station a we have the station b and we have two turning points and also a place for a distant microphone placement so if we have a look on the station a this is me and a dodge challenger and we use the the holophone which is a actually an eight channel microphone but we use four channels for it and record it in quad left right and left surround writes around it's this one here we also use a very wide stereo pair uh in this case sennheiser mkh 8060. you can see the the right hand microphone here and it's a quite a very wide stereo pair actually the the left one is before this picture so you couldn't see it and also we use a shotgun a handheld of course a

neumann rsm 191 it's the one laying down here on the on the ground so this is station a in station b is this one handheld sankin s css5 and we have an or ortf set up with sennheiser mkh 8040 in this package down here and for the turning points we have an ooo rtf set up for the first turning point with shops microphones and turning point two in this case a a little simpler recorder and also on the distant microphones we have a simpler recorder this is the basic uh thing we do for car recording and of course it's very different with every vehicle so if we go to this picture this is um [Music] a spitfire recorded at the ducks four in

england in north london this is for the movie dunkirk and richard king who was the supervising sound editor for the movie asked us absolutely to put mics inside the engine compartment and that was not something they really like but during flight during flight yeah actually so you can see me here trying to put in an or an electro voice re-50 in the compartment and we had them to of course take off all the hoods from the plane but we managed to do that and if we go to next picture we have this is our colleague nicholas recording this cigarette top gun boat and he used the same setup as we did on the car so this is a dpa 4062 taped on the on the boat and here is actually an re50 in a plastic cone to get rid of wind i think you did 100 knots or something

it's super fast coming over here we have a recording of a military apc vehicle this is the exhausts again a 4062 here electro voice re-50 and also we use in this case we use the dv moon mic also to get up some extra low frequencies next picture is the tracks on the tank which which in this case has an re50 microphone attached no cable yet but here we have a motorcycle motorcycles are very difficult they there is always a lot of wind issues and it's difficult to to fasten the microphones and it's also no place to put a recorder so what we do we use a backpack on the driver and you can see here is an electric voice or a 50s tail or

striped to the back of the car of the motorcycle and this is at station a so you can see the white pair and the holophone and this is what it looks like in the backpack it's in this case a sex confusion and a sony no i assume f8 of course while recording planes there's different ways we record them we record them standing still on ground with all the rpms we can we can drive at on ground and it's very difficult to know what microphone will sound good so we have microphones everywhere as you can see there are microphones here there there there there in front in the back on the sides and also very different distant distances and it's impossible to know which of the microphone that sounds good until we are at the studio actually so that's

something we we learn more and more but also there's so much wind so it's impossible to find out before what mics are sounding good okay then we come to this little thing uh this is about the recording schedule uh it's actually a long list of maneuvers that we do by uh driving and reversing and going around the turning points at different speeds we we do if you are interested on the actual uh checklist for this we can talk about it a bit later but it's a bit too long to take in this speech and the the thing is we do everything actually often in three speeds we call it the granny driving the medium driving and the bank robber driving so that's three of the different things

and and we try to get all the manoeuvres you can do with the car actually recorded and we also of course record fully on foley on the cars or vehicles or all vehicles as much as you can and we also record ir sweeps on the interior so you can use the acoustics for later if there is a dialogue inside the car or whatever like that okay and there here's a very important rule for recording three times you can forget it anyway it's it's always a problem but we have to slate all recorders very good to know when you come back to the studio when you're recording you always know what you're doing but but like two days later you have forgot everything so slating or recordings are very important

let's see what we have here yes as i saw told you a bit before of course recording vehicles different vehicles uh require different metals of course but if we look at planes we record them standing still on ground and as i told you different rpms as much as we can do on ground and then of course we we record flybys on tanks and heavy vehicles it's for instance very difficult to record ramps because they have so such a short rpm range so there we concentrate a bit on steady rpms and try to get it with as much load as possible of course and also the same with both here we have some difficult tests that can occur with the

recordings and first one i have wind as a wind is always a problem when you record vehicles so i will show you fast here's a little trick that we use a lot this is a mcdonald's cup and also as you saw on the boat picture before you use it as a windshield put the microphone inside to get rid of wind highly professional highly professional yes we always have to go to mcdonald's first to pick up some yes and that was the first two years okay yeah and uh unwanted unwanted noise like nearby traffic humans on location we have had dogs catching microphones running off um herd of sheep coming out on fields right next to the to the track which is of course dangerous and yeah stuff like that yes

we have had of course a lot of failure on equipment during the years and uh yeah it's the same picture here you can see this is a burnt shore beta m58 while recording cars and old vehicles something is always really hot and that is a problem so cables they melt and microphones burn up and also in the beginning we we recorded almost everything to try to record to hard disk but that didn't work good at on race cars because it sounded great the recordings worked fine in the pit and going out in the pit lane but then when the g-forces went too high the hard disk stopped so there was nothing when the when we the car came in so nowadays we record everything to these small cards sd cards yeah and okay it's yours yes i think um this is recording tanks

in the uk so far we have only rolled the tank out on the field and you can already see what the field is starting to look like so you can imagine after the bankrupt driving what it looks like and then you might have this [Music] so it was obviously someone's feet sorry we had been given permission of course to go there but uh some mistake must have occurred somehow yeah they didn't uh understand that a tank makes some issues and uh yeah the next one is yours yeah then the the next one is uh yeah

bad driving uh due to drivers not understanding why we are doing different maneuvers which of course can be difficult if you're not into sound recording and also there can be as much mention before communication program problems with the driver or the pilot so we try to for cars and motorcycles and and that types of vehicles we try to drive ourselves and a few of us are driving different things and but when we come to a plane of course i have no plane education or pilot education so then we have to trust the pilot but we usually use someone that we can speak to us and what you call it like a specialist yeah that can transfer what we want so the pilot understands and we will write these long lists with maneuvers to do

and about communication problems i went to japan to record cars and there was this one car that we could not drive ourselves it was a japanese driver he didn't know any english i didn't know any japanese and it was very difficult to to get what we needed so the only japanese word i actually know is muay kai which means one more time okay so next this is also a rule back up pacquiao backup which is very important of course so you know that you have something with you when you come come back home let's see where are we next okay a little bit about editing and asset creation today in the studio we use mainly pro tools for doing assets and we use fmod and rev for testing sounds when we

are doing loops for instance or or ramps but pro tools is our main tool and you can see a list there are of plugins but we are like four or five people doing assets and all of us have have our own personal choice to what tools to work with and okay the first thing we do when we come back to this recording studio is to line up everything in time all our recordings are done [Music] and we try to sync everything in at hundred percent and it will look like uh if we look on the protos project you can see here i will go briefly through this is a car recording down here in use actually and a camaro i think the first two are like a stereo pair on the interior and then you have five microphones on the exhaust

and you have four microphones in the engine compartment and then these channels here are the station a which is the holophone in quad the the wide stereo pair and and the handheld handheld rsm 191 and this is two stereo tracks from the station b and then you have the turning points to stereo pairs also so this is what it looks like when you you buy a sound from us maybe it's uh cleaned up a bit of course but everything is in time all the time so it's very easy to to for instance edit to a picture if you have an interior thing and listen for an exploration for instance and then you go over to an exterior picture when the car is passing by you can just cut between here and everything is in sync

so yeah and back one i think yes when creating assets of course it's very in uh important that the customer come with with the requirement they have for their game and that can yeah i mean that's uh depending on what engine they are using and if it's a loop-based loop-based system or a ramp-based granular playback system or or maybe a combination of both also of course the sound perspective they want in the assets are very important and if it's a mono stereo surround or surround asset they want and we i have a little bit more here to show you and here is uh what we do often for ramps for instance is it's very difficult to record ramps

on some vehicles because you want to load all from the idle all and and the full load all the way up to the top of rpm and if it's a powerful sports car it's easier to get the load on a higher uh gear but in the end then the car will go very very fast in the ends and that's not good because you get more wind and so often you have to stitch the the ramps together from different gear drive drivings so and i have a little acceleration here this is a what you will hear is this combined here is the engine and the exhaust on the car and it's stitched so it's uh that the end of the ramp is from another take it sounds like this this is the same camaro as you saw before the picture

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] as you could hear there is a super charger engine also so the winding comes from the engine compartment and we have the acceleration this one this is not this is just the basic recording [Music] so

okay way back to you today yep uh so finally implementing a few words on that will be quite quick um there's a few considerations when you make your assets you need to look at what frequencies the vehicles are in uh and make room for your vehicles in the rest of the game so if many vehicles have quite a broad range of of frequencies you need the low end to make it feel powerful and you need some of the mid to make it sound cool and so on and it's important that you get this through in the game you have to be careful not making sounds too repetitive in a film for instance you if you have a car chase or something you can always change the camera so you can change alternate the sound a bit from inside outside and all that but in many driving games you have the camera

fixed a couple of meters behind the cars for hours and that can become quite annoying to listen to if it's too raw sound or so so you need to be careful how you tackle that with the music an example of that is i worked on the mad max game and when when there's like vehicle combat in that game there's can be like five six seven v8 engines roaring so it's already quite messy and on top of that you want combat music so i specifically asked matt's from paul who did the music for that game to make music with less bass information in it and tried to make the music a bit wider so that we could fit the vehicles in in between that we also add a lot of add-ons of course the engine is just as i see the small part of the vehicle all the add-ons are super important it can be suspension sounds classy transmission

turbos superchargers as we heard in here the wheels on the ground different surfaces and all that and i'm going to show you just very quick in f mode what that can look like just today when trying this we had a bit of an issue going between the software so please bear me with me if you get static on the screen here no it worked fine that way anyway so here we have a few different add-ons it's the speed wind here rolling tarmac tarmac skids i think it is on this one uh juaxi rattle and suspension sounds all of this is looping sounds except for the suspension sounds which are triggered one shots so i'm going to go through this very quick we don't have much time left speed wind of course speed driven maybe it doesn't sound much like this but

adding it on the vehicle makes the vehicle sit in the world immediately in a very nice way and then we have tarmac rolling also speed driven of course the dirty tournament is i think for some dirty it adds a lot to the sense of speed um then we can add skids and spins on this

next up we have the chassis rattle sounds like this also speed driven this might be an old vehicle quite squeaky can add speed with one light as well [Music] then we have the suspension it's driven by pyramid holy ground roughness here and this of course has to be fed from the physics of the game to work properly but it gives a nice package so now i'm going to try to go back to fingers crossed it's going to work here yep so last year we have some other considerations with the implementing

which is more of a game design issues that you can get into game directors is one of them they make the decisions they decide whether the vehicle should be easy to drive difficult to drive if there should be like a learning curve and they also have a saying about what's good and bad often [Music] and and the decisions they make especially whether it's going to be hard or easy to drive that affects physics and vehicle behavior and that indirectly affects audio of course um so that's something you need to try to sort out quite early on on a project you have level design if you have v8 cars powerful muscle cars physics driven going around in a desert that would mean you wouldn't have any grip you would be spinning and skidding around most of the time but you still

need a proper gameplay and a drivable car so that gives you quite a contradiction to work with another problem with the level design can be if it's a huge area nothing that really affects the driving so you can go full throttle all the time uh you will eventually either gear out and get quite annoying sound by just like be staying on a straight rpm for a very long time or you might want to try infinite gears and then you will have a vehicle just gearing up gearing up gearing up gearing up and that will sound ridiculous after a while on the other hand if the level design is done in a different way you might need to break some time you need to turn and all that can make the sound much more alive so it's also something you need to look at game pacing very important if you have an action game where you enter a vehicle and should be up at full speed in three seconds and get through seven gears in that time it will sound very weird

you're gonna need some kind of filter in between to make it sound okay uh also with the physics um the friction on the ground and all that will affect so you might have done the coolest skidding sounds with a huge difference between low skill high speed and all that but if if the friction is set up so you just get one value totally full skid all the time uh then you need to have like a smoother or something in between that as well to make it work properly i often say that that audio is often the symptom on something else being the cause because you get it like a sound bag reported okay there's something wrong with audio but when you start scratching on the surface you realize that this is not actually the audio the audio is doing exactly what it's told but it's the physics driving audio that's not set up correctly and then we have the mix you need to make the audio interesting over time

one way to do that with vehicles can be to actually highlight when the player does something it can be what he turns he or she by the way breaks um accelerates bump into something and then you can bring up the engine or certain parts during the gameplay if you just have the engine up front in your face all the time it would be very very boring i think so other sounds to bring up can also be the the rattles and the wheels and all that and also the music of course if you're driving for a long term period of time finally i will show you just a very short example from in-game clips it's some footage from battlefield v i had an honor to work in-house creating vehicles along dice amazing audio team for battlefield 5 and there's also some footage from the older mad max that i worked on a long time ago which i still thinks holds up pretty well actually with

a great work from avalanche's audio team this clip starts out with a v1 rocket coming in the sky and that sound comes from a crazy policy at snowmobile recording that we did [Music] oh [Music] great power for us [Music]

keep yep that's it for us so qa hey max it's mike from uh gran turismo how's it going hey good thank you good to see you too uh what do you guys use for syncing all the field recorders on site do you guys just jam sync things and then sort of split the recorders up or uh we actually do it very very manually we first of all we set the clocks in all the recorders to be at the same time right then when we start recording one vehicle we stop with the onboard recorders at the first position do a hand clap go up to the next position do another hand clap up to the next position hand clap and to the last position and hand clap gotcha okay thanks

how you guys doing thank you for the talk it was great um quick question with uh older cars you have a manual transmission so when you let off the gas the engine naturally decelerates you get that nice natural deceleration sound but if you're recording more of a modern passenger car that's not necessarily like a mclaren and you have an automatic transmission when you let off the gas the engine just goes down to idle how do how would you in a like normal automatic car get that nice deceleration sound like from a higher speed on most automatic cars you have the possibility to lock the the gears in first and second that's why i do all the time okay thank you very much thank you sorry that's right hi thanks for the talking great but uh my question is uh you know you know like what all these sounds have in common like whether you're doing vehicles or like uh firearms tanks or all like they're all like really really loud so like when you guys are on location uh

like what's generally like um uh like a rule of thumb like where you set dbs like uh when you're recording stuff like that um like -20 or like does it depend on whether you're doing it like interior exterior that's that's a topic of its own really uh depends on what vehicle or what the recorders you have and how the preamps work some preamps works better if you drive them pretty hot some don't have to be that hot depends on if you use limiters or not we have been going a bit back and forth on that on the new recorders we have which are the stones axis there are no limiters that solves the question for us easy but not too loud of course that's not good but i wouldn't do it too too low either yeah because like i've recorded like like um access to some firearms too for first-person shooter stuff and doing vehicles but i've noticed that uh at least the gears that i have like sound gear 702 and uh and the zooms and such i had to run them

really really cold just so they didn't clip yeah yeah so on the other hand when you do firearms you need the transient to clip because you need to set your levels on the tails i would say yeah and also there's also when we record vehicles we almost always have the same combination this recorder with this mic and and you get like an experience you know this is a quite loud car let's put it on seven for instance or whatever yeah so you you learn like uh a bit what the different recorders just really depends on the gear that you have yeah together with the great yeah thank you very much thank you thank you that was an awesome talk so my question specifically about how you schedule your recordings um do you usually go into a recording session with all of the possible maneuvers you would want to record scheduled freehand or do you have like just the things you want to record for the specific needs of the project and also is this different for

film versus games where films are more scripted versus games where you could have a whole uh array of things that you possibly need the vehicle to do we have a very structured driving schedule we always try to do that on on every vehicle no matter what kind of to future proof and many game developers think they only need on boards but then they start doing like trailers promos and all that kind of things and then the exterior stuff comes in quite handy as well often so we always try to cover that okay so you'll cover every possible maneuver that the vehicle yes yeah everything we can find i think we are out on time here so we need to keep taking the questions outside but just grab us outside we're happy to answer any questions you have yeah thanks for coming