Syncing Battleships: Adventures in Sound Post

Into the Deep End

2009-01-04T11:40:00.003-05:00

I just wrapped up an intense sound post schedule for a dramatic TV series' first season. I addition to the stress of having to walk on eggshells with an unknown production company, to get a feel of what they really want and how hard to push for my own opinions, I had to supervise a team that didn't have a lot of experience with a show like this. This is a little story about how people choose to face challenges.

Dramatic TV is essentially a bunch of short films. Each episode is treated as a movie, with all the trimmings that come with it: Foley specifics, cloth and footfall tracks, microscopic-detail dialogue editing, plenty of ADR, and ambience tracks up the wazoo. I've had the opportunity to work on a few features, both as a mixer and sound supervisor, so I know what compromises can be made based on budget limitations, and what is non negotiable. The compromise to work with inexperienced personnel is a tough one to evaluate, as different people react differently to high stress situations. Some rise to the challenge and take the bull by the horns, and others just don't realise that they are blowing it. This particular project had both sides well represented.

I had two sound editors preparing their tracks to be mixed by me. One of them was a sound effects editor, who I had worked with before (let's call him Editor #1). He is a cool, positive guy with a great attitude, but he was put in charge of dialogue editing on this occasion (which he hadn't really done before), a critical and, in my opinion, the hardest task in sound post to get done just right. The other guy (Editor #2) was totally new to the world of sound post and was referred, based on his field recording skills, to handle sound effects editing. This is also a hard area of sound post to pull off convincingly, but it is a bit more forgiving and it relies a lot on common sense.

The first couple of episodes were shaky, to say the least. I was mixing and doing Foley work, as well as recording ADR. The material I was receiving from the two sound editors was all over the place, and I was having to correct and re-edit many things myself at the mix. Both guys had set up shop in the room next door, which was the most efficient way of working, as that would let them ask questions get feedback quickly. Editor #1 was showering me with questions and asking for tips all the time. Editor #2 started to work from home more and more until there were weeks without me hearing from him. He would deliver his work through FTP and not request any feedback. Editor #1 had offered to help supervise Editor #2's work because he had experience with sound effects, but he also had his plate pretty full (by now he was also recording the ADR), and couldn't catch many mistakes because of it.

By about Episode 8 or so, Editor #1 had significantly improved his dialogue editing skills, while Editor #2 was still making the same mistakes, even after having a lengthy sit-down with me to discuss his edits. You're probably thinking, "why hadn't he been fired at that point?" and you would be right to do so. The thing is, the "factory" was going full tilt, and trying to find a replacement would grind things to a halt for at least a couple of days, and that was downtime we couldn't afford. So, I then sent a detailed, long email to Editor #2, describing a calmly as possible all the things he was doing wrong, with screen captures and everything, in the hope that he would react quickly and get his butt up to speed before we all got burned out.

A few days later I received the edit for the next episode, and I started by checking the first 60 seconds of the sound effects tracks. I almost hit the ceiling when I saw that short snippet of the show contained most of the mistakes I had pointed out in my email. I walked outside to cool off for a few minutes and then headed back in to talk to the sound post producer, who had hired all of us, and tell him that I couldn't do another series with this editor. The sound post producer is a great guy and was very understanding and appreciative of the whole mess, thankfully, and I agreed to grin and bear it until the season was done.

In the end, everything came out all right. The show's producers are happy, the network is happy and we are relieved to be done, but at a heavy stress cost. Editor #1 has now a whole season of a dramatic series under his belt as a dialogue editor, and he passed the test with flying colours, going above and beyond the call of duty. I wouldn't hesitate to hand over to him the same responsibilities any time. Editor #2 will not work with me again, even though on a personal level he is an agreeable person, but he just didn't seem to want the job badly enough.

The industry is full of aspiring sound people, and if a person doesn't give their all and really prove that he or she can contribute to a project rather than detract from it, there will always be someone standing in line right behind them ready to replace them at the first chance. And many of them may not be as technically adept or experienced, but some will do whatever it takes to catch up and do a great job.

Semantics

2008-02-02T15:25:00.000-05:00

I keep seeing posts on internet message boards from production companies looking to fill positions for hire, and they list everything from 'Audio Directors' to 'Sound Designers' to 'Sound Specialists' to 'Audio Engineers'. Aside of the more obvious kind of confusion dealing with the actual responsibilities of each position, like expecting a "sound designer" to handle music composing as well, the words 'audio' and 'sound' keep being used as interchangeable terms, when they really are not.

Some dictionaries define 'audio' as 'sound within the acoustic range available to humans'. This is a flawed definition, given that natural hearing range varies from person to person. So, by this definition, what is 'audio' to a 10-year old may just be 'sound' to an 80-year old person. Most people can't hear the full spectrum of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, which was established a long while back as the range of human hearing – way before massive headache-inducing traffic jams, loud club music and noisy home renovations made it into our daily lives, which made most of us a bit deaf by lowering substantially the upper frequency threshold.

Someone once mentioned a very interesting and seemingly valid difference, which makes a lot of sense to me. Sound is the movement of air molecules compressing and expanding as waves that reach your ears. Audio is an electrical, digital and/or graphical representation of sound. Once sound energy reaches a microphone's diaphragm, it gets converted into audio in electrical form, which gets sent over to a converter and turned into audio in digital form, which in turn gets represented in graphical form on your computer screen. And later, it gets reconverted into electricity, and finally, back into sound coming out of speakers.

So, by that definition, I always picture a 'sound engineer' as someone with a great ear - more of an 'artist', who freely experiments with sound, like a painter does with colour and textures - whereas I think of an 'audio engineer' as someone who knows more about the details of the gear and tools and who has a vast knowledge of engineering, but not necessarily great artistic taste. So, sound would be more 'right-side of the brain' stuff, more intuitive and creative, and audio would be more 'left-side of the brain', more technical and driven by logic and facts. Which is not to say someone has to be professionally either on one or the other side, but a balance of each.

Who knows. That definition may be totally wrong, but I like it because it makes sense to me. Then again, putting cream cheese and raspberry jelly together doesn't make sense, but i like it too, so there you go.

The Toolbox

2008-01-25T11:04:00.000-05:00

Instead of a rant, today I thought I would share some of my favourite free resources and tools for sound post. Most of them are for the Macintosh platform, but there may be some Windows versions.

So, in no particular order, here are five of them:

1. North Pole by Prosoniq
An RTAS pole filter plug-in with all parameters fully automatable. This one allows you to seriously mangle your sounds (if that's what you need). Right now, it only works on PPC Macs, but it will come out as an RTAS/AudioUnit version for Intel Macs in a few months.

2. Timecode Calculator by Netmedia
A small app for, well, making timecode calculations. It supports all common formats, including HD (23.796 fps) and film formats (feet and frames). Especially cool is the widget version.

3. LameBrain
Although this LAME-based MP3 encoder seems to be abandoned by its developer, it still works really well for batch encoding. It's reasonably small and fast, and it allows for Variable Bit Rate encoding.

4. ProTools Prefs & Database Helper by Jean-Charles Deshaies
If ProTools is acting up on you and just being a general PITA, you can use this to trash all the different pref and database files without having to go look for them in each folder. It also allows you to back up your prefs when everything is going great with PT, so you can restore them after you have deleted the corrupted ones.

5. Teleport by Abyssoft
An amazing app that lets you control several Macs with just one keyboard and mouse. Unlike KVM switchers, this lets you work as if you had several displays instead of computers: you just move the cursor across the screens.

So, there you go. Enjoy!

The client is sometimes right

2008-01-17T10:25:00.000-05:00

I apologise for the long hiatus in posting. The whole holiday season/January getting-back-up-to-speed period has taken a heavy toll on my side projects. I will be posting on a weekly basis now, but from time to time, the smelly stuff will hit the fan and I may miss a post or two, so I also apologise in advance for that, too.

I've talked about clients before. How an abrasive and insensitive client can be the bane of our existence for a few hours, or even a few weeks. Well, now I would like to flip to the other side of the coin.

Picture this: you are someone who walks into a very complex recording or mixing session, and you have the most basic technical knowledge. Your job is to make sure everything runs smoothly, but you don't necessarily know how the guy or gal behind the board makes his 'magic' happen. You are trusting one person who has a very different skillset than yours with thousands of your company's dollars to deliver a quality product within a specific budget, on time. If you haven't worked with this person before, you would be absolutely right to feel a bit nervous. After all, if things goes wrong, who gets the blame? Sure, if the engineer screws up, you can take it up with the studio manager, but in the end, you are there to supervise the job – and that's your job. If the whole thing is a fiasco, you get in trouble.

I was recently in a similar position, of having to sit at the producer's desk and supervise a session – so I was the client, this time. The one difference is that I knew what the engineer was doing, and how to do it. On this particular session, I was very lucky to work with a fantastic engineer – a professional, knowledgeable and good-natured individual. But I can certainly see how the session would have been less than positive if the engineer had "marked their territory" and assumed a defensive stance. Granted, my attitude could have been one of seeking absolute control and imposing my own methods, but I felt it was good to simply trust the engineer to do the best work possible. If I had been a pain, I'm sure this particular person would have been just as professional, but at the huge expense of their emotional well-being.

It really is a very symbiotic relationship, the one between client and engineer, but I also compare it to having a guest in my house. Being the host, I'm expected to be gracious and welcoming. The guest is expected to be respectful of my home and my family. But if I'm an ass and then they are rude in return, I'm the only one to blame, mostly because we are in my home. Not that there is any justification for unprovoked rudeness, but that is the aggravating factor here: there is a natural level of even the slightest uneasiness in the client, not being in their own company/office environment (no matter how many sessions they have supervised). It is up to the engineer to make the first move and try to establish a positive vibe from the moment the client sets foot in the room. If the client doesn't want any of it, that's all you can do.

There are many people out there who are positive and good-willed. If you try and assume any new client is one of them before they step into your room, you have a much better chance of having a good session and a happy client at the end.

The darker side of the job

2007-12-10T10:13:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, I had a voiceover recording session for a one-hour long documentary. The director was to do the voiceover himself, and it was my first time working with him. He has acquired a lot of clout in the business, due to the controversial nature of the subject matter in his projects. So he arrived with an entourage of three producers, all of them carrying laptop computers and Blackberries, and they started handing out copies of the script and setting up their stuff.

We sat down to work, and within a few minutes, it became clear this would be a long session. Usually, a voice recording of this nature takes between three and four hours, depending on how well prepared the script and how good the talent are. After seven hours, we hadn't reached the halfway point of the documentary, for several reasons. There was constant talking on the phone by one or more producers, so we had to wait to play back a take for everyone in the room. Then, everyone had a wildly different opinion of the way a line should be read, frequently with one person in disagreement with the rest. And, to make matters worse, the director, not being a professional voiceover actor, had to take frequent breaks to rest his voice. Then he would listen back to his last read lines and he would realise they sounded different to the first ones because his voice was tired and croaky. So we would need to record those again to maintain an uniform sound throughout the documentary.

This would have been a bearable although very tiresome session, up to this point. At six o'clock, the scheduled cutoff time, and also my time to go home, I politely announced we would need to stop and continue the next day. Immediately, the director went berserk and demanded to know why they were being thrown out, saying they were the clients and would keep going until needed - that's what I was paid for. I bit my lip as one of the more sensible producers tried to explain that they had booked the studio until six, but they had also booked the following day as a precaution. After a lot of complaining and whining, the director and his posse left. I got very little sleep that night, laying in bed thinking I had another session with this bunch the following day.

I ended up getting through the whole thing uneventfully, but I just went through the motions, cold as a block of ice. No love for the work at all, no extra mile run. And it made me sad, because to me, there is nothing like doing a session that is energetic and positive, where the whole room is full of great vibes and a creative atmosphere, where the clients walk out shaking my hand with a big smile on their face and a heartfelt 'thank you'. It sounds very corny, but I think that's a huge reason many of us do what we do – we like to feel that clients are happy they spent their money working with us, and we like to feel we accomplished something special. Those who are in this field for fame and money are kidding themselves. There aren't that many sound people who have palatial mansions and appear on the covers of magazines. The average person doesn't care who the mixer who won the Academy Award for Best Sound this year is - they don't even know what a mixer is.

For many of us, the only choice is to grin and bear it. Unless you are an established freelancer or have a lot of weight within a facility, there is no option but to put on your best foot forward and get through the session. That doesn't mean you have to take everything that an abusive client dishes out at you, though. No studio manager with half a brain will let clients abuse their staff, and they will either ask the client to tone it down, or they will send them away if they don't. If the studio manager decides to hold the client in higher regard than their own engineering team, it's probably best for you to start looking for a job somewhere else, or to go freelance and choose your own clients and projects.

It's no wonder I see so many jaded and surly guys behind the board. They have gone through years of difficult clients and taken truckloads of abuse from them, ranging from rude indifference to foul-mouthed screaming. Hopefully there will come a time when these particular directors, producers and executives will understand that, without us mixers, editors and recordists, their projects don't get finished, sold or shown.

Evolution of an industry

2007-12-07T00:07:00.000-05:00

There has been a very harsh recession in the sound post industry in the past few months, at least in Toronto. All of us freelancers and owners of small companies have felt the shockwave of an industry shedding its skin, transforming into something that, frankly, many of us find scary.

Some say that it is just the local economy shifting, with the value of the Canadian dollar going up and American production companies deciding it's best to stay south of the border. But even many Canadian producers are wary of spending their money on sound post, tax credits or not. I personally feel that, like global warming melting the ice caps, this change is a process that has been happening for a while, but we're starting to feel its effects now.

What I believe is that many medium-sized production houses (our bread and butter) have come to the quite erroneus conclusion that hiring a dedicated sound post facility is an overrated luxury. They have started to set up their own small in-house sound post studios, run by engineers that, for the most part, don't have a lot of experience – meaning that these engineers can't charge a lot of money, which is exactly what these companies like. Or these companies have bypassed that option completely and just assigned the title of 'mixer' to their in-house picture editors, with the results that I have explained in previous posts. So getting a master videotape bounced back from a network because the sound mix has mistakes is just another part of everyday life - they just fix it until it's good enough to broadcast.

In the shallower end of the pool, many starter production companies are putting out movies on a tiny budget that gets blown away before even getting to post. Then they resort to placing ads on Craigslist and Kijiji looking for a 'sound designer with his own rig that can edit dialogue, sound effects, do Foley and a surround mix', all for a screen credit and a copy of the film on DVD. And many kids do respond to these ads because its their way of getting credits and their 'foot in the door'. The sad truth is, even if one of these films got bought by a distributor, the chances that the sound mix were to pass Quality Control when being encoded for printing would be slim to none. This would mean, yes, a remix, and possibly a re-edit of all the sound. So the poor guy who spent countless hours slaving over the sound edit and the mix as best as he could would end up seeing someone else's names on the DVD credits - a team of sound professionals hired by the distributor to fix the sound.

As bleak as this landscape seems for many of us, it is what it is, and it won't change just because we will it to change. The only solution is to adapt. Some sound post facilities have done this by diversifying and offering packages that include everything: shooting the project, doing the picture editing, sound post, visual effects, packaging, the whole nine yards. The problem with this approach is that it opens up a massive can of worms. It becomes exponentially harder to keep track of every part of the process, and hiring supervisors is the only way of doing it, which turns into one more big expense to the company. The other way to tackle it, and this is what I currently do, is the exact opposite - eliminate the overhead as much as possible, and specialise. That way, the company is not bleeding cash, and the effective allocation of every resource is much simpler. Although you can't compete with 'free', you can get closer to something clients can afford, without selling yourself short.

There will always be the undercutters and the undercut. But there will also always be quality and mediocrity. If the sound post industry is to subsist, it will need to do so based on selling high quality, not the size of its tools.

Perception is everything

2007-12-05T09:24:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I was working on the sound design for a television movie. It was the first time I was doing any serious sound effects work, and I was really excited about the whole deal. This film had been a last minute job, and the sound supervisor and myself found ourselves working through New Year's Eve to meet the January 2nd deadline to start mixing at Todd AO in Hollywood. I remember taking a break at 11 p.m. on December 31st, going home, having dinner and a glass of celebratory champagne at midnight, and going back to work at 1 a.m.

The director and the producer for this movie are fantastic people, very positive, fun and energetic. The only problem is that, at the time, the director was a bit green – this was his first feature. And, again, my first as a sound designer as well. We sat down and did a week's worth of great work together, trying out different ambiences and moods for the emotionally-charged scenes. So, after working until 6 a.m. on January 2nd, we all went home, had a shower, and headed to the re-recording stage at Vine and Hollywood.

After we loaded all the gear into the stage and set it up, the mixer did a pass of the first reel with the faders up to get an idea of what the project was about. At this point, the director went pale and said, "But that's not what I heard in back in the sound effects suite, the levels are all wrong!" It turns out he thought that I was actually mixing the film as I added sound effects during that week before. And, I, being inexperienced, failed to properly explain that what I was doing was a rough premix with the temp dialog track so that he could get a feel for how the sound effects would jell with the rest of the soundtrack.

In the end, everything turned out all right, but I made a mistake that could have been disastrous, had the director been less understanding when we explained what had happened. What I'm trying to convey with this story is that, no matter how seasoned the production team is, it is extremely important to always explain what you're doing as you're doing it. This serves two purposes, as experience has taught me: first, it covers your ass, especially if there is a third person in the room with you – it's your insurance policy should something go wrong later. The second purpose, and just as important, is to make your clients feel that they are dealing with a pro, someone they can trust. If you have a positive and friendly attitude, you can describe what you're doing without the director feeling uncomfortable. He will actually feel grateful that you care enough about his project to be thorough and proactive.

Lack of communication can lead to creating rifts in the perception of what the process is. There aren't many things that make a producer more jittery than this – the feeling that someone on the team doesn't know what they are doing, or that they are mavericks who don't care much about teamwork. So, keep the director and the producers up to speed, and not only your part in the project will be completed succesfully, but you will very possibly get a call for the next one.

On music and sound design

2007-12-03T14:27:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in another post, there is a general misconception about what sound post people do. I always need to explain (cheerfully, if it's someone I like) that, no, I don't write the music for a film, I do the rest of the sound, and I'm always confronted with a smile and a blank stare. Then I explain how a movie is shot and that the only thing that needs to be recorded at that time is the actors' voices, and then we add everything else that isn't music.

It may sound like I'm being smug and belittling the vast majority of the people because they are ignorant of our trade, but I'm really not. After all, as a great teacher of mine used to say, "How would you know if nobody told you?" I don't know the first thing about business acquisitions or how the stock market works, so I understand how a professional broker would need to be patient and explain his livelihood to others. No, the problem I see with these misconceptions is that they happen right in our industry. That is one of the reasons this blog exists, and hopefully it will work as an educational tool for some that are (or plan to be) in the business of audio-visual entertainment.

The point on this post is that, to confuse things even more, composers and sound designers are starting to actually talk to each other and create alliances that benefit the soundtrack of a project. I did the sound design for a small-budget horror film called 'Shallow Ground', whose score was composed by my friend Steve London. We sat down even before the film was shot and made a plan to purposefully 'blur the line' between music and sound effects. He would use sound effects elements in his score and I would use musical elements in my sound design. So the end result was an aural tapestry that made the film sound bigger than what its budget suggested.

This method of working has the additional benefit of making the communication process between the director, the music department and the sound department much smoother, because everyone is talking to each other. It makes any potential "soundtrack crowding" problems come to the surface when there is time to address them, not at the final mix, when the only option is to sacrifice something. The problem is that this kind of open communication takes time out of an already crammed timeline, and it is complicated by the fact that it takes a lot of trust between the director, the supervising sound editor and the composer. To pull this off uneventfully, it takes a director that is very secure and really knows his stuff. I was lucky on 'Shallow Ground' in that the director was not only very technically adept, but also keen on experimenting with sound to make the film bigger and better. Others just like to keep things simple and not have to worry about supervising one more thing on their plate.

Even so, even if this 'blurring the line' between sound design and music is not what the film calls for, it is very important to maintain open communications between departments. I mixed a film with a crazy tight deadline that had a wonderful music score and great sound design action scenes, but I had to throw a lot of stuff overboard because there were too many elements fighting each other, and that could have been avoided by a few quick conversations between the sound team and the music team.

Myths in Post (II)

2007-11-29T13:30:00.000-05:00

Myth: "Dramas don't need a lot of sound work".

While it's true that big action films do require a huge number of hard efects to be cut, a drama can be as demanding (or sometimes more) than a show full of explosions and gunshots. Producers and directors who don't have a lot of experience assume that, because their film is set in a suburban setting and has mostly dialogue, the sound post process is fairly simple (and therefore, inexpensive).

The truth is more complicated than that. When you don't have the dialogue being masked by loud effects, it is totally exposed and has to be really clean and great sounding to avoid distracting the audience. I just saw "Ocean's Thirteen" and, in some of its quiet scenes, I was pulled out from the story because the dialogue sounded muffled when it should have been pristine. This has been said countless times, but it's always worth repeating: if the sound calls attention to itself instead of complementing and enhancing the visuals, the job wasn't done right. The best-sounding movies I've seen have kept me glued to the story and, even though I do notice when some thing sounds particularly great ("Damn, that's good Foley!"), I know the audience won't be distracted.

The end result of dialogue sounding great is a combination of a good recording, an appropriate ADR assesment, a precise sync edit and clean-up, and a tasteful mix. Several times I have heard directors say, "We don't need any ADR on this film, the sync sound is perfect", and I always have to fight the urge to laugh. Unless the director is Robert Altman, ADR is an inevitable part of doing films, if they are to sound good. Usually, films that are ruled by the "No ADR" edict, end up feeling like no-budget films. On the other hand, there are many no-budget films that sound like they were done by a studio because the sound was done right. The trick is to know exactly how much ADR is needed, and only experienced sound supervisors and re-recording mixers can evaluate the sync sound properly.

Another point is that quiet scenes are harder to cut than big action scenes. When you have 80 tracks of gunshots, no one will notice if one of your footsteps in the middle of the main gun battle is out of sync by two frames (not that it should be, either). In a quiet conversation, Foley and ambiences play a huge role in selling the scene. In film, as in life, there is no such thing as silence (except in an anechoic chamber), and a scene where there is no room tone, no background ambience, no distant noises, no gentle movements of clothing, no subtle Foley sprinkles, is a shot where sound will stick out like a sore thumb. The audience won't know what is wrong, but they will be pulled out of the story and the illusion will be broken.

This level of precise work takes a lot of craftmanship and experience. If you add too little or too much, the scene won't play seamlessly. In many cases, you can cut a huge action scene with an ax – for a quiet scene, you need a scalpel and steady hands.

ADR for no-budget films (II)

2007-11-26T13:33:00.000-05:00

Once you have all the recordings, it's time to start massaging the lines into place. If the naming of the files was done correctly and you have the marked script in hand, finding the lines should be very quick and easy.

A quick word on monitoring: unless you have a really quiet room to edit in and a decent set of studio-grade speakers, it's best to do this (and any dialogue editing, for that matter) on headphones. High-quality headphones, that is – not those Walkman-style flimsy things. If you can invest a bit over $100 on any piece of additional gear for your system, make it a pair of great headphones, like the Sony MDR-7506. You will always find them handy and they will save your butt many times.

In your master dialogue session, import all the files, including the takes that weren't marked as keepers. You may need to have alternate choices ready in case the director changes his or her mind. Create two sets of mono tracks, one for the chosen takes and one for the alternates (if the director didn't choose 'alts', you will need to choose one take per line that will be your alt take). The number of tracks will depend on how many lines overlap each other in the timeline. Have the same number of tracks for each set and name them ADR 1, ADR 2, ADR 3, ect. and ADR ALT 1, ADR ALT 2, ADR ALT 3, etc. After pulling the corresponding files into these tracks, make sure these new ADR regions are lined up to the original sync dialogue regions as closely as possible by using the waveforms as a visual reference.

Next, you have a few options. You can zoom in, cut the waveforms at zero-crossing points (where the waveform crosses the horizontal line in the middle of the track) and manipulate the pieces using the Time Compression/Expansion tool in ProTools. This requires a great deal of care, as you want to keep the lines from sounding unnatural or choppy. Another option is to get a hold of a trial demo of VocAlign (it's fully-functional and good for a few days – you can download it and the manual here). VocAlign speeds the process significantly by analysing both the original and the ADR lines and matching the waveforms automatically. It takes a bit of adjusting for each line, so be sure to read the manual to get the most out of it. As a side note, VocAlign comes as part of the DV Toolkit 2 package from Digidesign, which is good to get if you plan to stick with ProTools LE (although a bit pricey, in my opinion).

When every ADR line looks perfectly lined up to its sync counterpart, listen closely to all of them. They need to look and sound like the actor is actually saying them, obviously, but sometimes I've found that when shooting, some actors tend to speak without moving their lips much, and a perfectly clean ADR line will look funny, even though it's precisely in sync. The solution is to move the selected ADR take to an alternate track and look for a different take that is a bit less enunciated, more mumbled.

If you have done the rest of the dialogue edit, be sure to not delete any sync dialogue from the timeline. For every line you have replaced with ADR, there should also be an alternate ADR take and the original sync take. I recently worked with a seasoned dialogue editor who has done many films, and on this project he decided to give me just the selected ADR takes, with no alternates or the original sync takes. Of course, at the final mix, the director went ballistic because he wanted to try and use a few of the sync takes and they weren't available. So I had to pull up the uncut OMF to get to the original sync sound, phone the dialogue editor to ask him to bring me a folder with all the ADR alternates, and then edit the sync and alternate takes into my mix session. This was a huge waste of time, which could have been avoided by simply keeping those takes in, in the first place.

Later I will talk about mixing sync dialogue and ADR together to make them sound as similar as possible.

ADR for no-budget films (I)

2007-11-22T09:15:00.000-05:00

I have been recording actors for a while, both for voiceover work and for dialogue replacement. Voiceover sessions are fairly straightforward – I'm looking to capture a good performance that will fit in specific places in the show's timeline. While some producers and actors like to read to picture, it still comes down to wiggling the lines a bit to make them fit, but you have a few extra frames to play with, and sometimes, even a few seconds. So it's not surgical precision, in most cases.

ADR, on the other hand, is a complex beast. You are matching a new recording on the actor's lips, so any discrepancy, no matter how small, will be noticed immediately. So a special degree of care, timing- and performance-wise, is needed. You not only have to be very mindful of "lip flap" (the words not matching the actor's lip movements), but also of performance likeness. For example, if the actor is whispering on screen, you want to record them delivering with the same intensity, or the result will look and sound very weird.

Many directors hate ADR, because they really want to keep the original performances, so they will try to avoid it at all costs. The problem is that sometimes, the original line is totally unusable (see my post "Some thoughts on production sound (I)"), and the director just won't accept the advice of the Supervising Sound Editor, which will impact very negatively the sound for the film. On the flip side, other directors will try to do as much ADR as possible, as they see it as a second chance at getting a better performance from the actors. This is very expensive and time-consuming, and for a small indie film, it can quickly eat up a large portion of the post budget. A few directors fall right in between, which is the healthiest position to be in – they understand that sometimes things go wrong at the shoot and it is imperative to replace some lines in post, so they try to make the most of it.

For the most part, ADR is recorded using a method of having the actor in a booth or a quiet stage, and playing the scene with the dialog line they are replacing on a screen several times so they can get the inflection and the timing right. They have a visual cue, which is a white vertical stripe (called "wipe") going across the screen (the dialogue line starts when the wipe reaches the right edge of the screen), and a sound cue, three beeps as a countdown (the dialogue line starts where the fourth beep would be). This requires some specialized gear, such as a wipe generator, a video player or a projector and a large screen. It also calls for a control room and a booth, or an acoustically treated soundstage.

Some people call ADR "looping", which is a term from the old days when a loop of fullcoat magnetic film was synced to a loop of optical film with the scene, and the actor would record the line several times to the magnetic film loop. This process was very slow compared to the one we use now, because it required a great deal of preparation for each line that had to be replaced.

A system for recording "poor man's ADR" involves a combination of both old and new, with a twist. You need a laptop computer with ProTools LE, an MBox (any model except the Micro), a headphone splitter or amp with at least three outputs, a few packing blankets, a microphone that is as close as possible to the one used on the actual shoot, four decent mic stands, and three sets of high-quality closed-ear headphones. The microphone, the headphones, the splitter and the mic stands are cheap to rent, so don't worry about buying them.

Find yourself a relatively quiet space (an office will do fine, as long as you turn off the AC or heating for the record). With three of the mic stands and the packing blankets, create a booth in a U shape. Place the fourth mic stand in the booth with the actual microphone. Make sure the back of the mic is facing one of the booth's side "walls". Place a table or desk in front of the booth's opening and set up the laptop with the interface and the headphone splitter. Have two chairs at the table in front of the booth – one for the engineer and one for the director. Everyone will wear a set of headphones.

You will need to create a ProTools session that contains all the lines to be replaced as separate clips on a single track, labeled "Guides". Create another track to record to. This track will reflect the character's name and the line being recorded. You will need a transcript of the film cut with every dialogue line numbered and with its timecode location marked down. So, when naming the track before recording, you'll type something that looks like "SG_ADR025_Jack". "SG" refers to the film's name, "ADR025" refers to the line number to be ADR'd, and "Jack" is the character's name. Set up ProTools to Loop Record. In the Edit window, make a selection on the timeline that spans roughly 2 times and a half the length of the guide region for the line to be ADR'd, starting at the top of that region. This way, when you record in loop mode, the actor will hear the line, and he or she will be able to repeat it right after, with the same intensity, inflection and pacing. Then the loop will repeat, the actor will hear the line again, and he or she will say it again, and so on, until the director is happy with the performance and you are sure the pacing is good. ProTools will number the takes automatically, so when you stop the recording, you will have all of them neatly labeled in the regions bin. Then you can rename the track to reflect the next line number and repeat the process. When the actor is done, rename the track again with the new character and line number.

It is a good idea to keep a copy of the film as a Quicktime movie in your hard drive, to allow the actor to watch the scenes and get a sense of the visual aspect before stepping into the booth to record. Have plenty of water bottles for everyone and keep a close eye on the actors to make sure they are as comfortable as possible. This method of working requires them to be very trustful of you, as it is an unconventional scheme, so you need to make them feel at ease.

In the next post, I will talk about how to best edit the recorded lines so the replacement is seamless.

Myths in Post (I)

2007-11-21T09:35:00.000-05:00

Myth: "The picture editor can edit and mix the sound for a show, because he has similar tools".

I think that the individuals who first made this statement didn't really believe it. My guess is that they were just trying to save money and justify it to the producers. So, unless we're talking about a Walter Murch or a Ben Burtt, this assertion is simply not true.

While it is true that Avid and Final Cut Pro systems have volume and panning automation and effects built-in, the level of control they have over the audio is very limited. When editing sound, very often it is needed to be sample-accurate (which, for standard audio post, would be accuracy to 1/48,000 of a second), to have proper crossfades between separate audio clips. Most video editing systems are only frame-accurate (1/30 or 1/25 a second), which doesn't allow for that level of precision. Furthermore, ProTools, the industry standard for sound editing and mixing, gives the editor the additional capability of redrawing the waveform itself, to eliminate pops and clicks seamlessly without having to cut the audio clip.

As far as "effects", apart from the huge collection of equalizers, compressors, limiters, pitch-shifters, reverbs, delays and noise-reduction processors that ProTools has available from third-party manufacturers, there is the added capability of automating every parameter of every one of them. So, for example, if the mixer wants to equalize a single syllable of a dialogue line differently, he can, with sample-accuracy. So, trying to mix in a video system is a bit like trying to cut a wedding cake with a spoon – you can "do it", but it's definitely not the same.

Another big difference is the listening environment. I've been to enough picture editing suites to know that sound is not a huge concern there – most rooms are noisy with computer fans running and humming outboard gear, and for the most part they are not acoustically treated. Many of them have cheap computer speakers. I've lost count of how many times a client comes to the final sound mix (in a proper sound mixing studio) and goes, "but I didn't hear that when we were editing picture!". Well, that's why. Sound editing and mixing studios have been acoustically analysed and treated, are quiet and have high-quality speakers.

And last, but certainly not least, there is the sound editor or mixer themselves. I know a few picture editors who have great ears, but they just don't know sound tools the way we do, or have done it for a very long time, as we have. Unless someone has devoted their life to learning both crafts (like Murch and Burtt), they only really know what they know. I wouldn't attempt to cut a show without first learning how to use the proper tools and having acquired the knowledge and experience necessary.

Luckily for the sound post community, the advent of HD and 5.1 is forcing more producers to employ a proper sound post team. The stringent specs of surround deliverables and the enforcement of items like dialog normalization call for special attention to detail regarding the sound of the final product. Hopefully this will soon start permeating to even the lowest budget shows.

A little perspective

2007-11-20T15:58:00.000-05:00

I receive a few e-mails every week from people who have just graduated from audio schools, asking me if I take interns for my company. So far, I have replied that I currently don't need an intern, but ask them to send me their résumes and so I can keep them handy in case I do need someone to help out. Almost all of them don't send it, or don't even respond at all. So I ask myself, why are graduates contacting every possible company for a job lead, and yet they don't follow through?

It's not enough to crash out of the gate shooting at everything you see. Persistence is what ultimately gets you a job and lets you keep it. Thousands of people apply for the same positions in this industry, but most companies don't care too much about your grades or where you went to school. If you are persistent in trying to get a job with them, they figure you really want it and will work hard to keep it.

For example – I met with a Toronto studio owner in 2002. He said they didn't need anyone at the time, but encouraged me to keep in touch. I started sending him e-mails every couple of months, just saying hello, telling him of news, what I was doing. At the end of 2004, many e-mails later, the position I wanted became available, and they called me in. I kept that job for more than two years, and after setting up my own company, I have continued doing a lot of work for them.

I went to audio school myself, so I know how graduates feel – the stress of not having an income and being forced to start at the very bottom. I vividly remember mopping the garage at a recording studio in Los Angeles because it flooded with rainwater, taking out the trash at a sound design shop in Santa Monica, and cleaning the basement at another one in Venice (California, not Italy). After a while of doing that sort of stuff, you start to get a different perspective on things.

When you are starting out, good employers don't make you "pay your dues" because they want you to feel insignificant – they want to make sure you can handle responsibility before giving it to you. If someone can't do storage backups efficiently, what is the chance that they will be able to run their own session and make the company look good?

So, that is my advice – be persistent and follow through. That's about the only way you stand a good chance of making it.

Cleaning dialogue for fun and profit

2007-11-17T11:25:00.000-05:00

As a segue from my previous post, this one is about dealing with the results from a bad location recording. The damage is done and the sound post team has to address it.

Most of the time, a spotting session is done to assess all the problems in the recordings. This session is attended by the director, the dialogue editor(s) and the supervising sound editor, or the re-recording mixer, if he is supervising the sound for the project. It is at this point that the dialogue lines that need to be replaced with ADR are flagged and logged. The reasons for doing ADR are either extreme noise on the line or a performance issue that the director feels can be improved.

The projects for which ADR is not done are documentaries and studio shows taped in front of a live audience. In these cases, we're stuck with the sync sound and it is up to us to make it presentable. The problems and methods to deal with them include:

• Incidental noises: these include stuff like audience coughs, cell phones, crew footsteps, lavalier microphones rubbing against clothes, very loud lip smacks, etc.

They need to be removed or minimised as much as possible, as they are very distracting to the viewer. In many cases, they happen between words so they can easily be edited out in ProTools and filling the gap with ambient noise from the same microphone. Many times, though, they will occur in the middle of words. The only options are to either try to EQ the noise out by pulling down its main frequency range, or finding a word or syllable from the same person in the same scene to replace the unusable one.

• Broadband noise: this is constant noise over the whole line. It can be an electric generator, distant traffic, open ocean ambience, tape hiss, steady wind, etc.

The best way to deal with this kind of noise is by using multiband expanders (Waves' C4, WaveArts Multidynamics 5), noise reduction plug-ins (Waves' X-Noise, WaveArts MR Noise) and parametric EQs to find and cut the most offending frequency range.

Multiband expanders work by taking anything below a certain level in a certain frequency range and making it quieter. So, for example, if you have noise that lives in the low frequencies, you would set your processor's threshold and expansion ratio fairly high for that range, and it would only lower the level for those frequencies whenever the signal goes below the set threshold.

Noise reduction processors work by analysing a sample of the noise and substracting that noise "signature" from the rest of the signal, leaving anything that isn't noise largely untouched. The problem is, if you go overboard with it, the dialogue itself will be affected and you'll get "artifacts", digital imperfections on the signal that will make it sound unnatural and boxy.

Parametric EQs are the most straightforward but less effective processors for dealing with this kind of noise. Basically, find the most offending frequency range by selecting a frequency with a medium bandwidth, boost it way up and sweep the entire frequency spectrum until you find a spot where the noise is at its worst sounding. Then turn down that frequency range until the noise is minimised without affecting the dialogue too adversely.

It is best to use a combination of these judiciously to clean up broadband noise – you'll get much better results than by picking just one and overusing it.

Some lines with some broadband noise may not be flagged for ADR in live action shows because the noise is determined by the supervising sound editor to be not too severe and it is decided that it can be cleaned up in the mix.

Some thoughts on production sound

2007-11-13T09:09:00.000-05:00

The single biggest challenge a re-recording mixer faces every day (apart from what to get for lunch) is fixing bad-sounding production sound, or 'sync' sound. In layman's terms, when a film or a TV show is shot, the goal, as far as the sound guys are concerned, is to capture the dialogue between the actors. The rest of the sound is added later, from footsteps (which are performed to picture by the Foley artist) to gunshots and explosions (added in by the sound fx editors).

Many times, thorough inexperience, or just lack of care from the production crew, the sync sound isn't good. Some examples of this are:

1. You can clearly hear loud noises in the recordings, like electricity generators, overhead airplanes, people hammering nearby, or even conversations between crew members.

A director I work with, Sheldon Wilson, is so sound-conscious that he continuosly checks the entire set himself to make sure there isn't anything making any noise. In the end, his films have very little ADR because the recordings are very clean. So the producer is happy because they don't have to spend so much on ADR, Sheldon is happy because we get to use most of the performances on film, and I'm happy because I get nice, clean dialogue that integrates nicely with the music and sound effects.

On a certain film I worked on for another director, there was a scene with a party – many people chatting, glasses clinking and two of the lead actors having a conversation in the foreground. No one told the director that, when shooting those kind of scenes, the extras are supposed to just pretend they are actually talking and making noise. But these people were just blabbing away at full volume, laughing and having a blast. Needless to say, the whole scene had to be ADR'd.

2. The boom guy is inexperienced or doesn't care, and the boom microphone is not pointing toward the actors when they are saying their lines. Sometimes in the recordings you hear their dialogue bouncing off the walls of the room instead of the sound coming directly from their mouths.

A good location sound mixer/boom operator team is invaluable. If you can find them, hold on to them for dear life – they will save you a lot of time and grief later on. They are quite comfortable pointing out problems to the director and the producer in a very diplomatic and persuasive way. They will advise for the actors to wear slippers when shooting close ups and medium shots, because footsteps on film set floors for the most part don't sound like they're supposed to. They will learn the scene from the script to make accurate boom moves from one actor to the next. And most importantly, they will not be afraid to ask for another take or for thirty seconds of silence to record the room tone.

3. The wireless lavalier microphones that are attached to the actors are badly concealed in their clothes, so the sound is muffled and every time they move you can hear the fabric rustling against the mic's surface.

A good location sound team will work with the costume supervisor to use fabrics that don't scratch the mic surface and create noise, and that are acoustically more friendly. They will also make the actors feel comfortable when putting on and taking off lav mics and transmitter packs.

4. The sound is distorted because the location sound mixer wasn't monitoring and adjusting his recording levels to accomodate louder lines of dialogue, or because the batteries in the transmitter packs for the wireless mics haven't been changed frequently, and radio transmitters really hate old batteries.

Again, a good location sound mixer is very thorough and organised, has a good knowledge of the script, – and has been to the rehearsals – which allows him to know the dynamics of the scene to avoid level overloads, and keeps his rig well mantained at all times, including fresh batteries, daily tested cables and mics, and a clean recorder with lots of spare media.

5. The sound crew notices any of these problems and asks the novice director for another take, but their pleas fall on deaf ears. The common response with certain directors and producers is "We'll ADR it, let's move on" or, even worse, "It's OK, they can fix it in the mix".

Usually, directors and producers who are financing the whole film out of their own pockets learn very quickly the importance of avoiding this. "Fixing it in post" is very expensive and can potentially make a project both go over budget and miss its deadlines. On the other hand, directors whose first film was a multi-million-dollar action fest tend to underestimate the importance of this problem.

More to come...

An introduction...

2007-11-12T10:50:00.000-05:00

Whenever I'm at a party and someone asks me, "And what do you do?", my automatic response is "That is a really good question!". Not because I don't know, but because, as every other sound designer or re-recording mixer knows, it's just a hard question to answer satisfactorily, without getting a blank stare in return.

Sound post-production for film and television has always been an obscure occupation for the average person. We sound post guys get frustrated that everyone thinks that when a movie is shot, everything happens right there. So, obviously, it's hard for them to understand why someone other than maybe the guy who writes the music is needed later on.

Even within the professional audio-visual community, there are many people who confuse the title "sound designer" with the title "composer". Many others call re-recording mixing "audio sweetening". There are a multitude of misconceptions that have been passed over from one person to the next in a viral way, and nowadays sometimes it's really hard to know what some clients are expecting for their money. "But I thought you were doing the sound design!", says the client. "I did," says the sound designer,"but you need a mixer to mix what I did". So we find ourselves in a position of having to educate our clients more often than not, to avoid potential disasters later on.

Hopefully this blog will fill in some of the blanks for those of you who specialize in other areas of filmmaking, or those of you who are taking their first steps in the sound post world, or even those of you who just like to know how we do what we do out of curiosity. I will not pretend to know everything or the best way of doing things, so everyone is more than welcome to debate my points of view here. That is, by the way, a great way for me to learn new things. What I'll post here is stuff that have worked for me over the years and a few humorous anecdotes depicting the sometimes crazy people and situations that we often run into.

So, welcome. Here we go...