I am putting in sound FX for my friends movie, which I am recording myself. There is a shot of cars driving down the road, but that was summer and now it's winter. The roads have been wet for two weeks. Is it possible that audiences can tell the difference from a car on the wet road, as oppose to dry, as long as I don't record obvious splashes hopefully?
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Can audiences tell the difference between incorrect car sounds like this?
- Thread starter harmonica44
- Start date
... apparently I cannot hear more than 1.5 sounds at a time, which was pointed out. I have to be careful not to put too much sound FX in, and decide which sounds are the most important. With the music added on later, it's even tougher.
I think Randy Thom referred to an audience only being able to process 2.5 sounds at a time. Don't get hung up too much on this though. Many of the sound FX we use in sound design are not intended to be consciously processed by the audience but to manipulate them at the subconscious level! For me, this is one of the most fascinating aspects of sound design.
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If I start to have three going simultaneously, I can't hear the third some in a lot of areas, so I too things out and moved them around so far. Plus there is going to be music later, so I i'll account for that. I guess it's 2.5 sounds then, but maybe not all the time. When it comes to recording sound effects, is it okay if I record them indoors with the shotgun, even though the dialogue was captured with a hypercardioid? Will it sound too different? I notice right away that the shotgun has better quality. So I could put the hyper sounds in, to match the pick up pattern of the dialogue as best I can, or I could put the shotgun sounds in cause the mic is better quality sounding.
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If I start to have three going simultaneously, I can't hear the third some in a lot of areas, so I too things out and moved them around so far.
when you're walking along a busy street down town or at the train station or countless other locations, there are hundreds of sounds going on, you're not concentrating and picking them all out individually but at some level you are aware of them all. In film you're not after reality but the illusion of reality but even so, it's not so unusual to have hundreds of sounds occurring at the same time!
When it comes to recording sound effects, is it okay if I record them indoors with the shotgun, even though the dialogue was captured with a hypercardioid? Will it sound too different?
You usually want to try and get as close as possible to a neutral sound which allows the greatest flexibility during mixing, especially if the dialogue was captured on set, rather than on location. If the dialogue was recorded on location then it maybe OK to try and emulate the colouration of the production sound mic. Whether or not what you record sounds "too different" will depend on the skill/facilities of the re-recording mixer and the precise nature of the difference. In other words, there's no real way to know until the re-recording mixer gets their grubby little hands on it, by which time it's usually too late to do anything about it! This is why talented, experienced and well equipped Sound FX/Foley recordists are in demand and well paid.
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Okay thanks. I have several recordings from both mics though of a lot of the sounds. I guess I should stick in the hyper sounds as a safety then, for the re-recording mixer?
Okay thanks. I have several recordings from both mics though of a lot of the sounds. I guess I should stick in the hyper sounds as a safety then, for the re-recording mixer?
As a general rule, during mixing it's obviously easier to mute or delete what you don't need rather than need what you don't have, so better to have too much choice than not enough. On the other hand, even if all the audio is really well organised, it's considerably more work to have to work your way through more options and if the audio isn't really well organised it can become a nightmare. Especially considering the exceedingly limited amount of time usually budgeted for re-recording/mixing. The best thing to do is have a chat with the re-recording mixer and ask them what they want, both in terms of the options and the organisation of the audio tracks. This should be a golden rule everytime you are handing audio over to a re-recording mixer.
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