Mixdown Speech panning - do or don't

[XLR]

hello everyone!

I'm interested how the most Audio Engineers of you work with speech.

Basicly I'm not from Movie Business, but I'm trying to work in and develop some skills.
Usually my way is to give a Scene a touch of panorama.
For example:
One person on the left side, but not at the edge of the Screen gets a pan position middle-left. One person beside gets a position middle right and the third person which is at the screens edge on the right side gets the position hard-right. but not totally a right side pan.

On the other hand i heard stuff, where the speech only came from the center, except the speech came from the off


Whats your way to mix speech in a movie?


Greets
XRL

 

[Will Vincent]

I'd say generally if the character is on screen, their audio should come mostly from the front center channel.. though you could slightly favor one side or the other if they're a bit off center, it should be very slight.

Unless perhaps it's a very wide shot, and the character is way off to one side, in which case you might want to favor that side more, and add some EQ, etc to make them sound further away.

 

[Alcove Audio]

Will is correct; 99.99% of the time the dialog will be in the center. In 5.1 surround it will be in the center speaker, even if the characters are left or right of center. Almost the only times you use a voice anywhere else is when the character is off-screen.

 

[XLR]

Oh so i've done way too much

Thanks for the explantation, that was a typical newby mistake


Greets XLR