[PROJECT HAS ENDED] The "Crowds" Library

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axk
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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by axk » August 4th, 2014, 1:55 pm

samueljustice wrote:That sounds great! Echoing what Mr. Niederquell says, any conventions or standardisations would be great to hear and learn about.
I've just started editing some of my recordings, so far I've labelled out the metadata like this -
Location - Broad Definition - Description - Recorder - Recordist Initials - Date

For example -
Marwell Zoo England UK - Crowds Walla Exterior - Top of Penguin Exhibit Looking Down at Crowd Talking, Children Laughing and Playing, Water Fountain Heard - Sony M10 - SMJ - 20140731
EDIT: If anybody else is interested in this stuff, I'd be happy to make a specific thread about metadata tagging and file naming conventions that details out the process for every parameter with more complete explanations.

ORIGINAL POST:

Certainly! Since we're using Soundminer as our database software, we tend to spread the data you listed above into other fields than just the Description. I've also tried to weed out any unnecessary information that won't be used in the quick searches we perform when looking for sounds. The metadata I include is typically:
  • Category - The most basic description of a sound effect (your Broad Definition), ex. Impact, Whoosh, Ambience, Sting, Walla, etc.
  • Subject - A layer of detail further than Category. Usually whatever the sound is made by, ex. Rock, Wood, Crowd, etc.
  • Subject Detail - A one-word descriptor of the subject, ex. Large, Small, Slow, Fast. Sometimes this is not necessary.
  • Description - A long-form description of the details of the sound file, exactly the same as your Description.
  • Source - I use this field for the recordist or the company supplying the sounds I'm tagging.
  • Location - Self-explanatory. I try to limit this to city, state, and/or country. Further specifics, like street names, would fit into the Description. I don't include GPS coordinates or anything like that because no one searches our database using terms that specific.
  • Library - The package of sounds in which an effect belongs. If it's something I recorded for Universal, I typically just but "Universal - [Category]" in this field so that all of Universal's sounds will sort into the right order if I'm searching by Library.
  • Mic - Again, self-explanatory. I put the manufacturer and model(s) in here. Any mic configuration (M/S, ORTF, etc) would go in the Description field.
  • Date - This is a standard parameter of the Broadcast WAV format, so I don't have to change it or anything, but I verify that it's there for every file just in case I need to refer back to it later. Not used for searching.
That's all just for metadata fields. As far as file names are concerned, what seems to work best here is this convention:

[Category]_[Subject]_[Subject Detail]_[Description]_[Location]_[Mic]_[Number].wav

My colleague Steve Estrada (who's somewhere around the forum, perhaps he might have something to add) and I did some recording out in the desert a little while back, so our file names looked like this:

Impact_Rock_Lrg_LightDebris_JshTr_MKH416_1.wav

Parts of the name are abbreviated to save space while still getting the point across (ie Large is changed to Lrg, Joshua Tree is changed to JshTr, etc). The breakdown is as follows:

[Impact]_[Rock]_[Large]_[LightDebris]_[Joshua Tree]_[Sennheiser MKH416]_[1]_.wav

This way, if I were to sort by filename, all of the Impact sounds would sort together. There'd be a Rock section all separated out into Small, Medium, and Large subcategories, and we'd be able to easily pick out which sound sets we recognize. Also, we use multiple mics when we record. Each is recording from a different perspective, so we'd likely have a set of sounds that looked like this:

Impact_Rock_Lrg_LightDebris_JshTr_MKH416_1.wav
Impact_Rock_Lrg_LightDebris_JshTr_RSM191_1.wav
Impact_Rock_Lrg_LightDebris_JshTr_MKH416_2.wav
Impact_Rock_Lrg_LightDebris_JshTr_RSM191_2.wav


This way, every angle of each sound effect sorts together. Also, when an editor spots one of these sounds into a session, they don't have to read through irrelevant information to get to what they need to know (in this case, they're working with an Impact sound made with Large Rocks, and it has Light Debris). The rest of the info is just there to make everything sort properly when editors are searching for sound effects.

Does that make sense so far? At least to some extent? If you have any other questions about how or why I do things one way vs. another, please don't hesitate to ask!

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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by stevexavier » August 4th, 2014, 3:58 pm

I'm in, but stereo is so lame. I'm going surround...


Alex is dead on with adding metadata. I will add some non-technical advice though: your metadata is like keywords to a website. If they're not done well, no one will find your website through google. If your metadata doesn't make sense to the sound editor BEFORE he/she even looks for it, it will never be found or used.

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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by MikeQuell » August 4th, 2014, 7:59 pm

Great stuff, Alex! One request I might have is to not use abbreviations for these libraries.

I'm taking a guess here and assuming a decent amount of contributors wont have a file searching database equivalent to Soundminer's capabilities. Without the abbreviations in the file names, people can do simple searches in a finder/explorer window for things like "joshua" and get results for "_joshua_tree_".

I really like the structure you have there. Having the impact category is nice. I typically would have done Metal_Impact, Rock_Impact, etc. Having the impact category first would potentially make me stumble upon a sound that could work better, even though it's not the right material. Which is exciting.

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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by samueljustice » August 5th, 2014, 12:25 am

Thanks Alex, that is some valuable information you have provided!
MikeQuell wrote:I'm taking a guess here and assuming a decent amount of contributors wont have a file searching database equivalent to Soundminer's capabilities. Without the abbreviations in the file names, people can do simple searches in a finder/explorer window for things like "joshua" and get results for "_joshua_tree_".
I agree with Mike here, I don't think we should add abbreviations. Unfortunately the games industry is a bit more inconsistent in terms of programs used for library management.

It sounds like a great move to me that submission to the library requires a text file containing at least some basic information about the recordings, within the categories Alex has listed.

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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by axk » August 5th, 2014, 10:29 am

MikeQuell wrote:Great stuff, Alex! One request I might have is to not use abbreviations for these libraries.

I'm taking a guess here and assuming a decent amount of contributors wont have a file searching database equivalent to Soundminer's capabilities. Without the abbreviations in the file names, people can do simple searches in a finder/explorer window for things like "joshua" and get results for "_joshua_tree_".

I really like the structure you have there. Having the impact category is nice. I typically would have done Metal_Impact, Rock_Impact, etc. Having the impact category first would potentially make me stumble upon a sound that could work better, even though it's not the right material. Which is exciting.
samueljustice wrote:It sounds like a great move to me that submission to the library requires a text file containing at least some basic information about the recordings, within the categories Alex has listed.
You're right, having abbreviations in this context is probably not the best approach since everyone is going to be using different methods of searching for the sounds they'd like. I think it would also be useful to perhaps include all metadata about the library in a comma-delimited or tab-delimited file (which I'd be happy to do if everyone is on board with this whole standardized metadata thing).

Also, for anyone interested, I've gone through the metadata of the Ambient World library and re-tagged everything according to what we do at Universal (while keeping all the filenames the same). Would anybody be interested in grabbing it if I put the text file up?

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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by imgoinmad » August 5th, 2014, 10:53 am

axk wrote:
Also, for anyone interested, I've gone through the metadata of the Ambient World library and re-tagged everything according to what we do at Universal (while keeping all the filenames the same). Would anybody be interested in grabbing it if I put the text file up?
Absolutely!

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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by samueljustice » August 5th, 2014, 4:05 pm

imgoinmad wrote:
axk wrote:
Also, for anyone interested, I've gone through the metadata of the Ambient World library and re-tagged everything according to what we do at Universal (while keeping all the filenames the same). Would anybody be interested in grabbing it if I put the text file up?
Absolutely!
+1

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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by MikeQuell » August 5th, 2014, 8:06 pm

+4! Thanks, Alex!

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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by axk » August 5th, 2014, 10:39 pm

Awesome! I'll post the file up in a new thread tomorrow morning. Mike, any chance you wouldn't mind making it a sticky thread so people will know that they should grab it?

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Re: The "Crowds" Library

Post by MikeQuell » August 6th, 2014, 12:47 am

Sure thing. Thanks, Alex!

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