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Communications Media Management Association

Monthly Archives: March 2014

Quality Music is the Key to Captivating an Audience

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by cmmavision in Communications, Leadership, Management, Media, Technology, Uncategorized, Video

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Whether you’re conscious of it or not, we all listen to music most of the day. From the TV shows, films and online videos we watch to where we dine, shop and even work out – music is everywhere.

It is called sensory branding. It appeals to consumer’s senses to connect to them emotionally, or on a more personal level, so they associate certain thoughts/feeling to the brand or product. Marketers use sensory branding because it works. As a matter of fact, research also found that almost all brand communication focuses on sight and sound.

Although we hear music everywhere we go it takes the right tune to really grasp someone’s attention and not just become a part of the noise.

After all we see and hear day-to-day, businesses must put more thought into what will be an “attention-grabber.” Quality sound not only creates the mood, but also makes the production more memorable. It’s all in the details. We must think about what sound will stand out in the world of today to help our production become successful.

It’s important when working on a production to ask yourself: Do the visuals and copy flow with the music? Does it all create the emotion you desire in your production? And finally, is it memorable?

It takes more than a well-written script to captivate an audience. For years, music has been used to enhance an advertisements success. The music in productions can make it easier to be recollected, as well as cause people to feel a certain way about the product or service – which can drive sales.

Music is a powerful tool – especially when it comes to a business’ production. Overlooking the details can greatly impact the success of your production.

Article contributed by Nancy Aguirre at FirstCom Music, CMMA Partner

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Web Distribution- Do We Need Measurement Tools Any Longer?

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by cmmavision in Communications, Management, Media, Technology, Video

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I began my career in TV and special effects. Everything we did was measured both visually and aurally. I prided myself on surviving the transition from analog to digital, knowing color space, black levels, and the transition from 0VU to -20db in audio levels as reference points for any content sent out for air.  My first foray into Internet delivery started with building one of the first Microsoft encoding platforms for MSN. I noticed very quickly that all of my history and pride went out the door when I looked at the results of this content on the web. If you could get past the variable frame rate and low sample rate of the audio, I noticed that the content looked washed out when set up to color bars. It took an intern to show me that his video looked a little richer by adding contrast and increased color values outside of legal limits to make video look good on the web. The interesting thing is the intern had no training in color space, broadcast levels, or any understanding of the use of color bars and reference tone, he just knew it looked better. After a few heated discussions and feedback from our Internet customers, we adopted profiles that were not compliant for broadcast. Recently we have experienced the same transition in audio.

The web, in many ways, is the Wild West. I’ve personally measured hours of various audio content played from the web and the levels are all over the place. With much self-generated content making its way to the web in such places as YouTube, people can output at whatever level and quality they like. This can become a problem for professionals as broadcast levels are typically much lower and delivering a separate, louder mix may not be a possibility.

Recent developments in the audio industry have brought us tools for measuring loudness in a much more accurate way. These tools demonstrate audio loudness in LKFS or LUFS. By and large these terms are interchangeable with LUFS being a more current rendition. Starting in Europe and now being adopted in America, LUFS metering has become what could almost be described as the first universal standard for audio loudness metering with it becoming the law in many regions across the world. In America, we have the CALM Act to keep commercial loudness at bay.

Here at MPS, our audio team has been investigating this situation for the better part of five years. As a result, we have arrived at what we believe is a great solution for delivering content to broadcast legal audio levels while having a louder, more competitive spec for online. Compliance with the CALM Act requires a program loudness of -24LUFS and a peak level of -2dbtp. That’s an additional 8db of headroom or dynamic range compared to previous program levels which peaked at -10dbfs. Some material may benefit from this additional dynamic range such as movies or dramatic TV shows, but by and large, news, reality TV, and music may still choose to peak limit lower than -2 for a less dynamic audio experience. At MPS our audio team has chosen to work at a level spec that is louder to the CALM Acts requirements since the bulk of our deliveries are for web. Our online spec is -2dbtp and -16LUFS. What’s great about this is that content does not require re-mixing if used for broadcast. Simply normalizing the program audio -8db or to -10dbtp and -24LUFS would make the content broadcast legal. You could say that the same mix creates two deliveries. Pretty cool.

From a management perspective I have good and bad news. Bad news is I rarely see the use of scopes or measurement tools. The good news is how much money we saved by not having a suite of measurement tools in every production room.

Article Contributed by Brian Honey, CMMA Board of Directors

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