David Lynch

David Lynch has made a career out of pushing his audience into unexpected places. Experimenting with new techniques and technologies has also been a part of his game plan, and the emergence of webcasting has attracted his attention. Lynch is currently preparing to launch a pair of webcast series. We spoke with John Neff, a musician and engineer who has been working for the last four years at Asymmetrical Studios, Lynch's West Coast production facility, about the new projects, Rabbits, and Axxon N.  Neff's long career as a musician began with session work in Detroit, where he played and tracked with Junior Walker, Steppenwolf, Curtis Mayfield and a host of other major talents. Unable to provide us with details about Axxon N, which is being worked on, Neff was more comfortable discussing Rabbits, the first series to be produced.

"David is also a musician," says Neff, "although a lot of people don't realize it. In fact, the two of us just composed and produced an album, Blue Bob, which is available on David's website, davidlynch.com. He also wrote the music for Rabbits, which I'd describe as an existential, surreal comedy." 

The description seems apt, considering the fact that Rabbits features a cast of live actors dressed in full body rabbit costumes who play scenes without referencing these costumes in any way. The series is being shot entirely at Asymmetrical Studios on Sony DV Cam. "We're still at the point where streaming video and audio together can cause problems. That's one of the reasons that the episodes will be kept short-in the three to five minute range. We want to make the shows available to people who access the Internet with modems as well as those who have high speed access."

The audio for Rabbits is being posted in Pro Tools and edited in Final Cut Pro. Neff tracks stems to a Tascam MX2424 recorder because it's "affordable, reliable and it sounds great. Shooting on either DV, mini-DV or DV Cam and editing in Final Cut Pro is a very cost effective way to go, but there's one problem: none of these video formats has true time code.  The people who write this kind of semi-pro or consumer product expect that you'll be using only the audio capabilities that are within it. But we've got a full blown Pro Tools rig, and we wanted to take advantage of our 400 gigabyte sound effects library."

 So, how do you bring picture into Final Cut Pro, audio into Pro Tools and establish sync?  "We initially pursued using an externally addressable time code DV deck, the Sony DSR-2000.  But it's very expensive. And it still wouldn't solve the problem of getting things back into sync when you wanted to execute a final layback in Final Cut Pro."

Neff and the Asymmetrical staff took the easy, cheap route around the problem. "We have the video editors make Quicktime movies of the scenes with a head and tails sync frame.  I simply import these Quicktime movies into Pro Tools and put the first frame at one hour. That puts the 2 beep sync pop at :58. We're perfectly lined up from that point all the way through the layback process."

Audio is as important to the webcasts as any film David Lynch might work on, according to John Neff. "We record lots of tracks-often up to 30 or even 50, for each of these short films. We're fortunate, because we've got a combination of Pro Tools and a Euphonix CS-2000 console to mix on, since that's what we use on our film work. I like to sub-mix some groups in Pro Tools and use the board for the final mix moves. Next, the stems are dumped back to Pro Tools. We did consider buying one or more DigiDesign Pro Control surfaces, but it's expensive, and didn't seem a good value for us, especially since we track artists as well as post projects in here, and we need lots of mic pre-amps, up to 30 channels of them."

"I then put the final mix onto a hard drive, or if it's small enough, to a ZIP drive, as an AIFF file at high resolution, 48kHz/16 bit. The Final Cut Pro editor imports the audio and lines it up. He doesn't need to think about sync; since we're dealing with a complete digital dub process everything stays locked."

I do find that that mixing on the Euphonix and laying back to Pro Tools induces a slight latency. I compensate for that latency by slipping the leading edge of the sync pop back onto the frame line. You can actually see exactly where you need to line it up! That lets me deliver the tracks to the editor in perfect sync. Eventually we'll network all of our computers. The editors are in another building though, and so it's easier for everyone if I drop the audio tracks to a drive or ZIP at this time."

After Rabbits has concluded its run, Neff says that the episodes will be combined together.  A compilation DVD of the series will be available on the website. "Don't forget to check out Blue Bob. It's a heavy metal/factory music CD composed by Dave and I, and Dave makes his guitar debut on it!”

Appeared in MIX August 2002