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How do you handle your post production sound?

U

Utopia

I'm curious and wanted to do a quick survey:

What programs do you use to do your sound post production?

How do you marry it up with picture later on?

Do you ever mix your films in 5.1?

What's the most money you would be willing (and feasibly able) to spend on a 2 hour film for professional post audio?
 
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I agree with the last post that it is important to check your audio on a small speaker or small speakers. Using quality larger monitors is important for doing your main listening and mixing etc on though. I do all my sound mixes on larger near field monitors, but also have a single mono small speaker hooked up to check things on as well. Not so much is done in mono these days, but it's not a pleasant experience to find out too late that you had phasing issues in a recording that appears and sucks the life out of the sound when played in mono, or to find that you had too much bass that rattles the daylights out of a TV speaker. A small mono speaker can highlight those types of issues so you can correct them.
 
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This thread is a freakin' goldmine. Bookmarked it.

I've been wondering about audio workflows, which have been much harder to research than video. Especially since I'm going to have to start foleying soon for the first time in a few weeks.

So, Knightly, what is hand noise? And what is a bus?

Do you think Final Cut Express has what it takes to make a good mix? What about (and this just occurred to me) Garage Band?
 
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Do you think Final Cut Express has what it takes to make a good mix? What about (and this just occurred to me) Garage Band?
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After you've worked with a good multi-track program like Nuendo, ProTools, or Logic there's no going back. Final Cut Pro's audio tracks seem rudimentary and a pain in the ass to work with. I use WaveLab for mastering.

Do any of you use Waves Multimaximizer (or similar loudness maximizer plug-in) for tracking and/or for mastering for the DVD mix?
 
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Blade_Jones said:
Final Cut Pro's audio tracks seem rudimentary and a pain in the ass to work with.
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Final Cut Studio comes with Soundtrack Pro to do your audio... Final Cut has the tools, but they're mainly meant to do dialog cutting (not processing), and soundfx rough placements to be redone in Soundtrack. Having used Pro Tools extensively for years, I like its power and realtime understrain, but HATE the "I can't move past analog into the digital age" interface -- and I used analog for years before that. Soundtrack does a much better job in the interface, but in larger projects chokes a little under the strain - it wants tons of RAM and processor power.

End of Day, I prefer Soundtrack to Protools due to the interface - but if forced to use Protools, I'll suck it up.
 
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knightly said:
End of Day, I prefer Soundtrack to Protools due to the interface
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Interesting. I haven't personally used ProTools, though I've heard some folks say its the best. I cut the sound for my feature in Soundtrack Pro and it worked great. As you say, some issues with dogging the processor, but closing the program and restarting always took care of it. Biggest peeve: no way (that I could find) to set an autosave. Lost several hours of work more than once when I forgot to save and wound up with the spinning beach ball of doom. :(
 
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Blade_Jones said:
After you've worked with a good multi-track program like Nuendo, ProTools, or Logic there's no going back. Final Cut Pro's audio tracks seem rudimentary and a pain in the ass to work with. I use WaveLab for mastering.

Do any of you use Waves Multimaximizer (or similar loudness maximizer plug-in) for tracking and/or for mastering for the DVD mix?
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I have only used the Waves L3 Multimaximizer once, but I often used the Waves L1 Ultramaximizer in the past, and these days the L2 is my most used limiter plug-in. The thing with using any limiter most effectively (in my opinion) is not to set the threshold too low and to listen out for any distortion as the limiter kicks in. That means monitoring on good speakers to hear clearly what is going on. The L3 is a multi-band limiter, which means you can set it to work differently on different bands of frequencies, but again listen out for distortion and artificially hard sounding squashing. Used right they are great tools.
 
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Blade_Jones said:
Do any of you use Waves Multimaximizer (or similar loudness maximizer plug-in) for tracking and/or for mastering for the DVD mix?
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You don't "master" sound for picture the way that you do music. When mixing narratives and documentaries destined for theatrical release there is usually no master buss effects, except for, perhaps, a 5.1 to stereo fold down on a sub-buss for DVD release. When mixing for TV/Cable you will use some limiting (LM-100 is a standard) in order to conform to station/network audio protocols, and those protocols can vary widely. Games manufacturers each have their own set of rules, although they are starting to become somewhat standardized. There are no rules whatsoever for the internet at this point.

You may want to check this out for more info:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/post...theater-dvd-broadcast-tv-commercials-etc.html
 
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Alcove Audio said:
You don't "master" sound for picture the way that you do music.
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Like I said, you DO NOT apply any effects - EQ, compression, limiting, etc. - to the final mix of a film the way you do to an album.

All effects are applied to the individual sounds. Sometimes it's applied to tracks and even occasionally an entire sub-buss, but not to the entire mix.
 
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All effects are applied to the individual sounds. Sometimes it's applied to tracks and even occasionally an entire sub-buss, but not to the entire mix.
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What might you apply to ADR'ed speaking parts? I replaced dialog for a feature once and the dialog just was not loud enough and distorted when turned up loud through a little TV set. I wound up having to apply manual volume curves, turning down the peaks. Perhaps a limited would have been the better solution?
 
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Audio is an odd thing as you can't "Show" what the difference look like in real time as you would with video/images. Much of learning to process audio comes from playing with the tools. Visualizing the effects on sound is a difficult thing, for me it's exactly like looking at a frequency graph, time flows left to right, frequency top to bottom, and amplitude (volume) of each frequency is the brightness of the beast.

When a specific sound is the loudest in a specific frequency, it overwhelms all of the other sounds at that specific frequency. Sculpting a soundscape is like drawing a mountain range within this visualization. You choose where to put the mountains in the landscape.

The effects can sculpt the individual sounds by altering the volumes, frequencies and shifting their times. Playing with the effects and pushing them to their extremes to see what specifically they do will help you get more of a handle on the individual options.

Using an EQ to trim sounds that will clutter the soundscape

Using a Low/High cut/pass filter pair will allow you to define the limits of a sound to remove the clutter above and below and help isolate it.

Using a limiter to "softly" keep sounds from "clipping" will allow you to push sounds slightly louder after applying the filter to bring it the quiter bits of it closer to the top than otherwise would be possible.

A compressor will do the opposite of the limiter by bringing up the quiet parts in a controllable way.

Most of the work, however, includes understanding how sound itself and the mechanics of capturing the sound works as a principal of physics (stay with me)... Sounds that start hard can be cut very close to the initial sound to edit it together with another sound. Thinking about sounds as isolated clips, not full dialogs allows you to put sounds on a timeline and create whole new sonic expressions.

Dialog, in the same manner can be altered if looked at as unvoiced, soft voiced and hard voiced. Any "Unvoiced" sound is a sound that doesn't engage the vocal chords when produced - many of the hard consonants work this way and can be replaced from one clip to another willy nilly. Vowels tend to be voiced and will change over time based on the specific sound they are coming from and going to, so they can only be stolen from words that are phonetically similar...

Consonants and vowels are not quite enough to look at though as these can be further broken down into individual "Phonemes" which can be replaced from other clips if necessary. It's time consuming, but possible to fix sound capture problems (clicks, pops, clipping, bad digital capture, etc. ).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription uses these concepts to write specific sounds rather than just words. Editing dialog can be viewed the same way.

http://www.dplay.com/book/ has a list of great resources... the first book on the list has sections on all of these concepts and is a great resource.
 
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What percentage of the movies you mix are 5.1 and what percentage are strictly Stereo, Alcove?

and

What do you do (if anything) to the track to fold it down to Stereo once you've mixed it in 5.1?
 
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I cut all my dialog and most ADR in FCP. I'll balance the audio as best as I can there. Too lazy to separate each actor's dialog into it's own track (but that is an excellent idea). Then export that to Soundtrack Pro, where I'll add all the sound FX and music. I'll then send my music, dialog, and FX tracks to separate busses, where I'll do the final mix.

All my audio is mixed to Dolby Digital 5.1 (using an M-Audio Firewire 610 box and a Harmon/Kardon AVR with 6-channel analog inputs). I love Soundtrack's interface for mixing surround. I had about 32 tracks of 5.1 audio in my last project, and yes, Soundtrack did choke a bit with only 4GB of RAM. I finally bumped it up to 16GB, and that let it play nice.
 
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Alcove Audio said:
A little paraphrased, but...

"Talking about sound is like dancing about architecture."
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Elvis Costello isn't creative enough to do it? ;) (I know the quote is older than that, but he definitely appended the "It's a stupid thing to want to do". I first heard it attributed to John Cage, and if you know anything about him, he wouldn't consider that a stupid thing to do at all. Also, insert lame Einsturzende Neubauten joke here).

Anyway, chiming in with the "mastering differently than music", that particularly goes for pop music. Another reason orchestral music sounds so big is the use of dynamics...when the average level of your music is -12db, when you hit those -1 to 0db swells, they have IMPACT. When limiters are abused, everything is emotionally flat.

Put in terms of film sounds, if your dialogue is always at max volume, when someone shouts it doesn't have NEARLY the impact. Movie theaters are loud, and a quieter overall mix leaves lots of headroom for music, dialogue AND foley.
 
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Alcove Audio said:
You have a Dolby certified room? I'm impressed. Are you Cinema, 3D or Surround DX? And who designed your room?
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Haha, I wish. While I do have the speakers arranged properly and use acoustic treatment in my editing room, it is no where near Dolby-certified.

I should have said "I mix in surround and encode to a Dolby Digital 5.1 bitstream and hope it sounds good." I have a calibrated home theater setup that I use to test my mixes, which involves burning a DVD copy and trying to give it a critical listen. I have also been able to test my mixes in a real theater several times, and that has helped me learn things to avoid in general.

Obviously, this is not the way to do this, but it's about all I can do for now until I start getting paid to do this.
 
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