Day: May 2, 2018

LO2: Create audio material for film makers through professional collaboration.

LO3: Apply professional Pro-Tools editing and mixing techniques in a Audio Post Production situation for a film project.

 

The post production for A Christmas Proposal proved to be quite a long winded edit. Although a lot of the recordings were very crisp and clear, there were multiple issues with the kitchen scene. This was due to the fact we were running short on time and the director insisted we did it in one take just so we had it. We did make it clear with the director that there was a lawn mower that was audible no matter where we positioned our boom microphones and he was fine with it due to the fact he wanted to get something recorded, no matter how bad the quality.

 

Due to research, I was able to know what file to ask the editor to export in, an OMF. After receiving the project, the first call of action was to separate all the dialogue into character specific tracks, this allowed me to edit aspects of the characters voices accordingly such as making Angus’s voice less boomy/basey. This was done as the direction mentioned it when we initially handed over the project. We also did this, so that we could layer in our own atmos tracks. This all together created an edit where we able to control all independent aspects. This was bought up as a positive step within 344audio’s comprehensive guide to audio post production in which they argued that the most individual aspects that are separate, the more control you will have over the final mix.

 

Once everything was separated and ready, I would refer back to SoundTracks 12 step guide for my work flow. A scene we specifically had issues with was the kitchen scene. The first initial idea I had to separate the dialogue and label it under track  titles such as “Angus: Kitchen Dialogue”. The idea would be to work on all the dialogue tracks separately, going through each and attempting to remove the lawn mower sound. The idea was then to place our own kitchen dialogue in to fill the gaps. A massive issue we discovered early on though is that the room sound was incredibly inconsistent. Taking into consideration research from Bobby Owinski’s Mixing Engineers Handbook, I gauged that a better approach would be to apply the same EQ, de-essers and d-verb plug in settings to the whole scene, this immediately resulted in a more consistent room sound whilst also allowing us to control individual elements such as dialogue volume for each character.

 

In general we had quite clean takes, however I still decided it would be a positive step to attempt to clean up dialogue in the sense of removing unwanted hums and fuzz. To do this, the vast majority of dialogue tracks feature a 7 band EQ that sweeps the low end frequencies. This was done due to a recommendation within Jay Rose’s text within a chapter entitled “Dialogue editing”.

 

The final step taken was mixing every element in, for this; I following Bobby Owinski’s advise into a final mix. Following the order of; dialogue, atmospheres, sound effects and finally music.

 

 

 

 

LO2: Create audio material for film makers through professional collaboration.

LO3: Apply professional Pro-Tools editing and mixing techniques in a Audio Post Production situation for a film project.

 

For this particular film, we were not involved within a field recording sense. Due to this, we were working with audio files that were not recorded by us. This raised some issues in regards to sound quality as a lot of the interviews were done over Skype and recorded by just sticking a microphone in front of a laptop speaker. An immediate issue with is Skype hasn’t got the best overall quality as it relies on wifi. This meant that a lot of interview recordings were quite muffled in places.

 

The first call of action in regards to this was using some of the advise put forward by Jay Rose and applying some form of EQ to the track in an attempt to remove the fuzz that was audible throughout the recording. The involves bringing up a 7 band EQ and first, trying to find where the hum was most prominent. This turned out to be at around 60Hz, it was clear though that there was still an obvious hum so I proceeded to find another frequency where the hum was prominent and put the gain way down. It was however still slightly prominent so I rolled off the low end frequencies and that just about sorted it out to an audible level. Editing interviews so they were clear and consistent proved to be where most of the post production time on this film was spent;

 

 

As seen within this screenshot here, a lot went into editing the dialogue so that it was both consistent with other pieces of the film and also, to remove various unwanted sounds such as knocks, plosives and hums. The reason why we focused so heavily within the dialogue tracks is there various industry professionals who I have researched such as Jay Rose and Bobby Owinski often state the importance of dialogue in comparison with the rest of the film.

 

Towards the back end of the overall edit, I would discover that a lot of the recorded narration was incredibly plosive. Upon hearing this I initially set out to remove these or at-least attempt to reduce. Firstly, I singled out the specific letters in which the plosive could be heard, turned it down and cross-faded it with the rest of the track. Whilst this worked to a degree; it was evidently still quite noticeable. After then spending time working with de-esser and high pass filters, I thought it’d be beneficial to re-recording the narration as the director(who narrated the film), was in later that day. The reason behind doing this was that I felt that I was going around in circles in attempt to salvage something that would never be 100% perfect and according to Jay Rose, it is important to know when to settle with an edit.

 

This was a simple session but we were able to quickly get it done due to efficient planning such as setting up the microphone at a 5 degree axis and getting the line of dialogue printed for the director.