After a meeting the other day with both satsuma and guardian, Satsuma have sent me their latest up to date rough cut, this gives me just over a week to complete the post-production process, the film itself is still in it’s very rough stages, most of the scenes still haven’t been fully drawn, so it’s going to take me a fair bit longer than anticipated the synchronise the sound with the visuals, or the visuals that should be there, but arn’t. For this I’m going to have to use the cue sheet that the team gave me to place all the correct sounds in their respected places. In this stage it’s going to mean more creative control on my end, I can shape and form the environments that you should see fully on screen with sound. This takes the edge off a little bit as there’s not actually that much to make sure in synchronised perfectly at this stage except from the main character and his wife.
Most of the work that I can do on this project is constructing the atmosphere within sound, such as the park and the cafe.
I think at this late a stage in the project as I stated in the contract between myself and Satsuma that the final cut should be no later than the 25th April due to time constraints, but I may have been a bit naive, although with the project in this limited amount doesn’t really allow me much to do that is instantly noticeable and can be graded accordingly.
I will continue to construct the post sound and synchronise it to whats on screen and place other sound effects accordingly to whats stated in the Cue sheet.
The music however has been composed to a different edit that I was given, which is rather annoying as it means the music’s timing needs altering, as the timings have changed within the film. Now that the music is composed, I’m going to edit the music within pro tools so that it fit correctly with the up to date rough cut… this how ever will leave the music sounding rather ‘choppy’ so I”m going to have to mix it within pro tools with the use of automation to blend it in with the SFX so that it flows nicely and sounds clean.
It would have been a lot easier to compose the piece to the rough cut, but this was not possible due to all the cue’s for the changes in music on screen we’re not yet drawn … so knew I was going into run into some timing issues, but I believe I can overcome this issue in the mixing process.
The mixing process is the final element in the post-production process, it’s essential to get the mix right as thats where you bring the the whole film to life sonically. In this post I’m going to look into the processes of mixing, what has to be done, how to do it, gear to use and the levels the final project needs to be mixed to (standard broadcasting levels).
John Eeye is a mixing and recording engineer running a studio known as Beach House Studio’s (referred to in this blog as Beach House). Beach House offers a range of services including Audio Post-Production, Recording, Mixing, Mastering, Voice over and Video Production.
Within this company on their website, John hosts a tutorial section where he offers advice, tips and tricks on working with a variety of different forms of audio and sound. One post that he uploaded was an overview of mixing audio to film. Within this post he covers many essentials that are relevant to my project, such as Broadcast standards, audio restoration, timing and working with picture lock.
Broadcast Standards and Compression Levels
When looking at broadcast standards it’s very important that your mixing to the correct level, there are different broadcast standards, for T.V, Cinema, Film, DVD they all need to mixed to a certain standard by law. These standards for british broadcasting and screening is set via the EBU R128 Loudness Recommendation and through the recommended sound level check finds the average loudness level for broadcasting. The british broadcasting standard is -23 loudness units.
When mixing to adhere to the loudness recommendations it’s important to have a good loudness meter as John mentions.
‘This is more important than you think it is, unless you already know all about broadcast standards, and then it is exactly as important as you suspect. As recording and mixing engineers for albums and singles most of our dealings with mixing and “loudness” is “how loud can you make this track without clipping or squashing it too much”.’ (Eye, J.)
He mentions about monitoring LU’s or Loudness Units as 1LU = 1dB, and speaks about loudness meters from Izotope, Dolby and Waves and their advantages to their use within mixing.
‘The beauty of using a loudness meter like Insight is that it has all the presets with the standards worked out for you. If you are mixing for the USA it has those, if you are mixing for the UK or Japan, it has those. If your market’s standards are not represented you can make your own preset. I’m in the USA so I chose the simple US meter preset. This gives you a max peak of -2db, a program average target of -24LU and a dynamic range target of 14LU.’ (Eye, J.)
Finally on levels, John give us a rough guideline on the levels to mix the audio to your film to.
Max Peak – -2dB
Loud Sound FX – -3dB
Score music that is not competing with dialogue – -5db
When performing your final mixdown its recommended that you use these guidelines, to make sure that your animation or project doesn’t sound too quiet, over compressed or too loud.
Audio Restoration
When editing and mixing sound generally you will find that in your audio you will find a lot of undesirable noise, this can be from bleeding atmospherics from the spaces from which you recorded your audio. John mentioned a plugin used to restore audio which I have used throughout this project, which is Izotope RX Advanced. Within this plug in you can extract unwanted noise from your audio as well as reducing the amount of ‘hum’ or feedback that you may have picked up through your microphone in the recording process. RX helps you clear up your audio in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours of EQing, Compression and even cutting.
Timing
John states in his article that for a lot of low budget indie films will range at about 30 minutes long and generally he will put aroung 150 hours into that project and he states that he was rushing it. It all depends on the deadline you have to get the project mixed by, one of the greatest issues with sound design as mentioned by Philip Moroz in his book mentioned throughout this blog, that setting and allocating times for certain jobs is one of the biggest jobs. You need to be realistic.
Going back to Ben Butt who was also referenced a fair amount in this blog for his work in sound design with Star Wars, the post-production mixing for star wars took a whole year to complete, and that’s a high budget film with countless engineers working around the clock to attain the best quality of audio. Which begs the question, how do you judge how long you’re going to need to mix?
The best bet is by looking at what you do and don’t have… how much audio do you need to record and edit?, how much music does the director want scoring, if you’re scoring music as well. Also whats the quality of the audio like that you are going to be mixing. Taking into consideration all these parameters can help you justify how long your going to need to clean up your audio, balance it, compress it and mix it alongside the music. If your audio is mostly pristine and clear, and there are fewer channels, then you can limit your time mixing. But if not and a lot of the audio needs fixing and fine tuning, you’re going to want to leave yourself a bigger gap when constructing the overall soundtrack to the project.
Picture Lock
After speaking to a various amount of industry professionals throughout the course of this project, there were many opinions and subjectivities on certain elements, because some people like to do things differently… simple.
But one of the things that always remained the same. Picture Lock. Always when working in post-production sound make sure that the director of the film has given you the final, final, final edit of the film, where no timings change or anything. This is referred to as picture lock. This is the point where audio post-production begins as stated by Moroz, Burtt and just about any Audio professional you will meet. Reason being is because of timing within the film, if you start working on post audio before picture lock lets say, during the rough cut process, you will sync up all the audio, SFX and music, and send it back to the director or editor and they’ll say it’s great. But then they’ll send you an update of the film, then suddenly all your perfectly synced up music and audio is all over the shop and you have to re-sync everything back together, now this can go on for as many edits as it takes and is incredibly tiring, so it’s a lot easier and simpler to perform all post audio works once the film has gone through all it’s editing stages.
Working and waiting on a picture lock deadline can also be just as annoying, you need to keep an ongoing line of communication with your director and editor to make sure that everything is on track as planned. Philip Moroz stated in a conversation I had with him over email that you need to always have clarity with your video editor as this minimises complications in work. He said:
‘Definitely make sure that you clarify whether the video edit has been picture-locked. Projects can get very complicated and messy if you find out down the line that there’s an updated version of the video edit that you haven’t been working to!’
I have found that in this project getting a picture lock has been a lot harder than anticipated. Many deadlines that the groups I am working for were not met, so therefore has delayed the overall process of production. I also had a problem communicating the term of picture lock to both of them, especially the Satsuma team who no matter how many times I explained the terms of picture lock, didn’t quite seem to understand, which was overly frustrating! As Philip said, agreeing on a picture lock date is essential so that you’re not working to an edit that’s going to be essentially overwritten.
For the purpose of editing all my sound effects and foley, I used Izotope RX advanced editor.
Through this I was able to fine trim all my audio, cleaning it up so that it was perfectly audible.
There have been so many situation when editing recorded audio, where I have been trying to clean it up in the past using all manners of effects, such as EQ, compression, gating etc. It’s always really hard to cut and edit out atmospherics that have bled through in the recording process or even clips and pops of the microphone itself.
Through the use of instant processing, I was able to simply highlight an area on the spectral diagram (the orange waveform) and instantly process the effect I had selected, be this replacing the audio, attenuating it, fading, gaining and de-click ing.
The whole process which would normally take me days to edit all my foley and SFX took me as little as 6 hours to have all my sound files for this project edited and ready for use.
Another handy element within RX was the De-Verb function, with a lot of my recordings they caught a lot of reverb on them especially the recording of the letter box, so this function within RX was like a god send. It wasn’t able to remove the reverb as a whole but took out the big ‘boomy’ elements of the reverb.
Letter Box with De-Verb applied
The De-Noise function I found incredibly tricky to use, through most instances where I tried to use it, I also ended up removing many of the fundamental frequencies of the audio I had recorded initially… so I tended not to use it too much and instead applied EQ to attenuate specific frequencies within certain recordings.
A lot of my use with RX was tightening up audio, such as my SFX and One shots, I cut out all the bleeding background sound between takes, hits or movements. This left my audio nice and clean, and it allows you to export your files as 24bit .wav files so they’re of high quality. This in total takes all the pain and stress out of editing audio and works as an all in one tool for mastering sound.
The last post I did on recording sound focused more on the recording of atmospherics and textures within the sounds required for both films.
This time I went out and recorded more of the specific sounds for both animations, such as Bicycles, Cutlery, and smashing.
I wanted to experiment a bit more with this style of recording than I did previously, so as well as booking an extra Rode NGT-2 (for stereo) I also booked out two radio mics for contact use, these recording methods were used to broaden my knowledge on sound design and recording targeting learning outcomes 3 & 6
My initial idea for this was inspired but Ben Burtt’s use of contact mics within Star Wars and how he got the laser gun sounds, in fact I passed some Pylons, whilst out recording but unfortunately didn’t get any recordings of my own…
I was wondering how to best the the recording of the bike, as I needed the sound of the chain and the bike being rode. So my idea was to attach a mic to the frame of the bike as the rim of the wheel …. and then soon realising that this would damage the microphones I opted out of possibly damaging any property. Instead we help up the bike and recorded the peddling and chain individually, they came out a bit like this.
I found recording the more specific sounds to be more of a challenge, as I was trying to get the best quality in audio possible, it was annoying when recording creaking footsteps in my friends house and a motorbike blazing past, it took a lot of time and patience, a lot more than recording Textures and atmospheres.
In this instance I can understand why some may choose to use sound libraries as an alternative, to be able to have clear precise recordings without the worry of interference from any third party sounds.
For my next project, I will definitely book out the use of the sound theatre, to use their foley room to record all of my specific sounds, sfx and one shots in the future, I’ll take this as a learning curve.
I tried tirelessly to get a decent recording of smashing glass and smashing porcelain for Guardian, but I could never quite get it right I tried several methods of placing mics and smashing smaller crockery near them, after setting the gain on the mics in an old abandoned camp not too far from morrisons.
But this proved both fairly dangerous and pointless as from the gain setting on the microphone so much ambience would bleed through that the desired recording was not audible. I think I might have to use a recording from a sound library for these.
Other audio like all the sounds that will construct the Cafe scene in Satsuma we’re fairly simple, I merely recorded a collection of kitchen appliances such as cutlery shaking, chairs scraping so on and so forth. All of these will be layered together to form the sonic ambience of a busy cafe.
One final recording that I was also particularly proud of are the wings for the crow in Guardian. I remember reading and researching about recording techniques in Sound on Sound magazine, and I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an article on foley, and it was mentioned that garden gloves make great bird flapping sounds. So naturally I gave it a try, and it worked perfectly.
I’ve covered the End of User License Agreement contract several times within this blog, whether it be to using sample packs from sound libraries or to purchasing the license to use a piece of software, I have constructed my own contract in the use of selling the rights to my music, for the purposes of being used within various forms of media. Within the contract it states that, through the transfer of money the buyer is not purchasing the music, but the license to use it.
This works to my 2nd and 4th learning outcomes, which state that I am to learn enough about copyright law to be able to properly describe how to distribute my music legally, professionally and to be paid for my services in the process. They also that I must be able to write up my own documents and contracts for sound design and music.
They are entitled to a non-exclusive worldwide license for the full period of copyright by myself for the use of synchronisation, the use online and non-theatrical where no charge is made to the public and Duplication. Failure to accept the terms and conditions result in a refund from myself to the buyer and no license is granted to use my music.
The terms and conditions can be found below the picture.
End of User License Agreement
“End User License Agreement – STANDING LICENSE
IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY
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