I know some people that avoid going to the cinema because the sound is too loud.
Me too but that's a long and quite complex debate which has been going on for some time in the audio post community. It involves cinema size, calibration techniques, aural perception of volume and half deaf directors, who ultimately dictate the loudness.
A few months ago, I sent the files to a guy to do the mixing (stereo) and improve the general sound quality, but I ended up not using what he did. The files went back and forth 3 times and I gave up. He insisted in doing what you said, Alcove Audio, the sound was much louder, with lots of compression on the voice and also on the piano.
More and more, people who have studied sound/music technology and/or been professional music producers turn to audio post as a way to stay in the sound business, as the earning potential in the music business has died away. There are almost no technical demands in music production/mixing, it's almost entirely down to aesthetics and as music is abstract, the fact that a mix will sound different from playback device to playback device is of no great importance as long as it still sounds "good". Audio post is entirely different, way more technical demands/requirements and getting it to sound the same on different playback systems (translation) is of far more vital importance because sound for film/TV is not abstract like music.
Unfortunately, those coming from university or the music business are almost without exception completely ignorant that differences between music and audio post even exist, let alone have any clue about how to address those differences in practice. Your story is incredibly common, hiring someone who apparently has the equipment and education and professes to have knowledge/experience audio post and end up providing unusable mixes or worse still, mixes which inexperienced directors think are acceptable but which aren't. It's becoming more and more common for directors to be scammed by these "audio pros" even though the scamming is usually due to ignorance rather than deliberate fraud.
I have the feeling that Ed Wood in me (which occupies a lot of the available space) would cry "Perfect!" at much less than what you would consider a half decent mix, AudioPostExpert
You may listen to a mix on your laptop, headphones or even studio monitors in your editing room and think it sounds perfect but play that mix back in a cinema and it will probably sound terrible and the opposite is just as true.
In my experience, your statement is not true. I have never done a mix which a director thought was perfect, there are always changes required! Once a director gets into a purpose built calibrated mix room they hear so much more detail that they automatically become far more critical/demanding and I'm certain this would be just as true for you as for every other director.
I'm just trying "drive the car and get to my destination without hurting anyone on the way", I know I'm not the kind of guy that will know how the engine works. So your tips have been extremely useful... including the one about letting the pro's do their work next time and right from the beginning
If you are trying to create a 5.1 or even a 3.0 mix for a screening in cinema on a prosumer stereo system then your driving analogy would be much more like trying to learn to drive a car when all you have to practise on is a bicycle. In other words, what you are trying to do is not really possible. That's why the best advice I can give is to keep your mix as simple as possible and to take versions with the narration at different levels relative to the music, so at least you should have a version where you can clearly hear the narration without it being deafening or being unintelligible because the music drowns it out.
G
