Let us assume you are going to buy some gear for your creative work. You are trying to get a headphone for audio editing and a camera to capture video. You go to the shop and enquire about the prices.
They have lots of options. Headphones with wonderful extra bass. Cameras with lovely filters and HDR built in. Pumped up, you ask for the best in class. The elite of elite class of gear. They are good enough to let you test their best gear. They bring out the Sony MD7506 over the ear headphones and a Black magic video camera.
You get the headphones in your hands smell it, take all its glorious premium feel inside your body and revel when you hear the click of the 3.5mm jack being connected. Then you scroll through your playlist searching for the bumpiest and bass heavy song. You close your eyes, take a deep breath and prepare your mind body and soul for the best musical experience money can buy ….and hit play
That is not bass.
That is no tweaking of the chords.
That is not shrill treble.
That is not extra accentuated beats.
You take the headphones out. Second guess yourself and then put it back on. Again…that is not the kind of a bass that comes on a headphone priced more than your consumer level extra bass headphones.
You keep it down. You think your hearing is getting worse as you grow old. You decide to skip the headphones and ask for the video camera to test.
At first, you are amazed by its small size. It’s no bigger than a handy cam. It is so small. You then switch it on and take a pan around the shop. You also take some footage of you speaking to the shopkeeper and then request the footage to be played in a bigger monitor. This small beast of a machine costs more than all the electronic appliances you own combined. So naturally you are looking for the best skin tones, truer colours and vivid pictures. The footage is loaded and once again, you prepare yourself for the one of the best experiences ever; this time, for video and hit play.
Its GREY! It’s so damn grey! Even the audio is so unimpressive. There are no vivid colours. The skin tones are bland, and it is just so …. wait for it…G.R.E. Y!
You start suspecting whether you are living in the matrix…. these are not supposed to be like this.
These are the elite of the elite, most widely used gear for music and video editing. They are supposed to give the best output there is and all you got from them is just bland and flat.
Bland and Flat
Flat.
FLAT.
Consider this. You are at a studio of an artist. He paints the most wonderful pictures in the world. He doesn’t use any system or software, he just uses his bare hands and painstakingly does every brush stroke by himself. You see him create his masterpiece. How does he start a masterpiece? He starts it with a blank canvas. He starts creating an outline. He defines the edges and then …Finally he works on the colour.
What do you think is the most important step of this activity?
It is the blank canvas.
As much as you need the editing tools for an art, it is equally important to have something to apply your designs and enhancements on. That is why, every kind of art first starts with a basic outline. And then the artist gets working on developing and enhancing the base incrementally. This concept applies to every single type of art. To make something look wonderful, you first need a blank canvas and the basic outline.
And it’s the toughest job there is, to get this blank canvas when it comes to Audio Visual products.
You see, modern instruments all have their own sensors and their awesome and their wonderful capabilities to record things. Picture, music and video. But when it comes to outputting their work in the rawest format possible, they struggle. Not all cameras apart from DSLR’s have an option to give their pictures in the raw formats. It’s always a JPEG. Not all video cameras allow you to record in log mode. It’s always either H264 or Mpeg.
The difference is like this. You are looking for water. Let’s say that you are looking to get a litter of water, put it under the microscope, remove any unwanted minerals and bacteria’s in it and then drink it. You expect to be taken right to the source of the water like to a spring or a river, so that you can work on it yourself. Instead, you are handed a bottle of Bisleri. It has been processed already. It’s a completely packed and processed unit. All that you can do now is just open it and drink.
That is the difference between a raw output and a processed output.
When you get a raw output where the camera/audio recorder gives you unprocessed raw data, you are at the liberty to add all kinds of effects and edits to that blank canvas. However, when it gives you processed and packaged output, the amount of deep level editing and customizing the output is limited.
This is where these elite and elite of instruments come in. They excel in providing the most basic and flat level output. So, when you listen to the music in those headphones, you do not listen to the over exaggerated and sharpened music but to the flat note. This flat response ensures that when you are editing music, you hear the proper and perfect output instead of an exaggerated one or over sharpened one. You need an equipment that allows you to hear exactly what you are creating instead of doing its own tweaks and adding its own perks to the music.
That is what most consumer look for. Something that makes the hearing experience great. However, in this case, we are the creator. Not the consumer. We are looking for gear that helps me sample my output as I meant it to be experienced.
It is the same case with the black magic camera. It gives you the most basic greyed out footage so that you can then work on colour grading. You can decide on what kind of look you require for the footage based on the content and adjust tweak and edit the product as you like it.
In fact, it has become industry standard among creators to use raw format files for everything. We use raw images for photo editing. Raw log footage for video editing and it goes the same for audio as well. Of course, the final output would be given to the consumer in a widely used JPEG for photos, MP4 for videos and MP3 for audio formats. But those are only the end products. While creating them, we have umpteen number of raw formats each having its own version depending upon the manufacturer of the recording device.
For example, in a DSLR camera, raw format picture means, the camera just collects all the data it recorded in its sensor; pixel by pixel and gives it out in a package. This package differs from manufacturer to manufacturer. The software we use to edit this raw format should be able to a) read the full data presented to it b) understand different types of raw formats and accept them all (CR2 for canon and NEF for Nikon). Since it is not a pre-compressed format like JPEG, each image in raw format would be as big as 25 MB. The software should be powerful enough to handle such large sizes also.
So, you see, it is not an easy task for a machine to let you create and to let you truly experience what you create. It must have enough power to first accept the vast amount of raw unprocessed data presented to it, then convert it into something that it can understand itself and then give you the power to edit and do modifications and enhancements to it. So, the next time you hear about deep bass and vivid colours, remember; it is one thing to see and hear those amazing output but a totally another thing to create it.
That is why the tools used by creators are way different and flat than what you are used to enjoying.
I would strongly advise you to buy one such headphones. Then reach out to the most raw and uncompressed version of your favorite song. (WAV or any other higher quality audio format. Not Mp3) and listen to the song….as the artist/composer meant it to be.
Trust me. It makes a lot of difference.
Now you know. Editing tools may look bland and flat. But it is a necessary thing in the trade of creative editing.