Category: Research

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.

Continuing with my correspondence with sound designer Philip Moroz, he told me about his co-ownership in a Sound Library known as Noisecreations. This works in relation to two of my learning outcomes, both 1 and 5. In my area’s of research I stated that I would outline the use of sound libraries both if and how they are used. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to investigate the use of sound libraries in the industry.

The use of sound libraries is not uncommon in the industry, most professional sound designers will customise and compile their own sound libraries, of course this takes a series to collect enough sound to construct your own ENTIRE sound library. Having use of a sound library allows a sound designer to be able to construct their sonic landscape for their current project on the fly without leaving their desk considering that the sounds already recorded in the library are of sound quality and fit the project.

But can you use them? This all depends on the licensing, of course if they’re all recorded through your own means then of course! but when purchasing sound libraries, it can vary. It’s always imperative that you check the license and copyright on the sample pack you are purchasing. As mentioned earlier in this blog, copyright and intellectual copyright will always stay with the original owner unless they sign it to you in a assignment of copyright. This works in the same process. When you purchase a sample pack of sound effects from a sound library, you are also assigned a limited use of the copyright, generally for the use in commercial and non-commercial work of YOUR OWN. If you copy and pass these sample packs around, you are breaching the terms of the copyright that the original owner has assigned to you, unless you hold an upstanding agreement with the original copyright owner, in which you can distribute these samples to co-workers, this is usually certified under an extra external license which extends to the parties in question.. So in short, yes it is okay to use and purchase and use SFX from a sound library in your own work as long as you have been assigned the correct form of copyright from the original owner to do so, but remember you are not purchasing the samples and sounds themselves, but simply the rights to use them in your work. These rights can be revoked at any time by the copyright owner if they have evidence that you ‘the user’ have violated the terms and conditions of the contract.

The license in question for single use is an End of User License Agreement, this states that, you and only you have the rights to use the software or samples provided within the pack. The contract works as an agreement between the publisher and the user, it’s often referred to as a “software license” as stated on TechTarget [available from: http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/End-User-License-Agreement]

I have written my own form of EULA form in regards to the use of music to demonstrate, you can find it in the category entitled ‘Licenses’.

If you’re working in a company for post-production, you’re more than likely to need more than one license to use these sample packs, but instead of purchasing several licenses from the copyright owner, you can often purchase a Multi User License …. it’s pretty much the same as an End of User License Agreement, except it applies to the use of said sample packs from 2 up to 5 persons. Within this contract you are allowed to duplicate the software/samples on up to 5 hard discs for use, all other terms and conditions still apply.

I constructed a survey to ask fellow sound designers if they use sound libraries in their work (most of the responses were from fellow students on my course working within sound design) and I received some interesting answers.

All of the responses agreed that they do use packs from sound libraries in their work. One response from Barney Oram was particularly interesting and insightful. His answer to the question: Do you think it’s good to use the content in sound libraries instead of recording yourself?

“it’s good to record stuff but recording everything can result in relatively low standards of quality”

I messaged him after this and asked the following question: “ahh I see! why’s that? like ambience bleeding through and stuff?”

to which he responded:

“Yeah depending on what you’re recording it might not be the best mics, might not be the best source, might be noise and stuff in the background.

But some stuff it is really good to record yourself.

Some stuff like guns or explosions it’s best to use libraries.”

He mentioned that he himself used NoiseCreations and is currently working with the co-owner Callum Tennick, on a project at the moment, and that he does enjoy to use their samples when constructing dry sound.

Here is the list of the responses from primary research about the use of sound libraries:

Q1) D0 you you ever use sound libraries?

100% said yes.

Q2) If so why do you use bought sample packs instead of recording?

‘Sometimes its not an option to record. There can be many restrictions that dont allow you to e.g. not enough time, no access to what you need to record, no budget. Therefore some things you have to source.’

‘Ease of access mainly, for example finding a tank from WWII to record would be difficult as would say recording a flamethrower.’

‘Sometimes its for the ease of use, and if you are after a range of different recordings that you may not necessarily be able to record. For example, if you wanted the sound of a realistic sitar, its very difficult in most cases to get these samples, because you may have to purchase microphones etc and a sitar player to be able to play and record for you, its just easier to get them as sample packs.’

‘Sometimes it’s useful to use when using certain sounds such as gun noises and post FX that don’t have bleeding atmospherics from recording processes in the field.’

‘Samples packs (usually) give the assurance that the quality of records are to a high standard. It also allows people with less time on their hands to get hold of samples quickly. It’s also a good way to organise types of sounds into categories for easier findings when producing.’

Q3) Do you find its easier on Production?

‘It saves time. Im not sure about making it easier, as you still have to pick and find a good quality version of what you are after. Its sometimes very difficult to find certain sounds when what you want is very specific.’

‘It can make it simpler’

‘Yes in some ways, as one shots, you can create productions that are still unique if you apply your own creativity in using them. Some producers will just use the preset recordings so I think its important to use the sounds and make them your own.’

‘Yes, it’s very time effective’

‘Not necessarily easier, just more convenient. Although with high quality sample packs, it saves time on editing and cleaning up the initial sounds.’

Q4) Which Sound Libraries have you used and why?

‘Theres things like freesound, but you have to be careful with things like that becuase of the quality of recordings and licenecing. I have persnaly used a library called the ultimate sound effects library and alot of stock stuff that comes with DAW’s and plugins. Librarys can also be expensive espcially when being a student.’

‘Output Audio, Soundly, Glitched Tones, BBC to name a few. I’ve used them mainly as you can get free sample packs from them.’

‘I use all sorts, music radar has trap kits that are quite useful for grime productions. Also vocal samples in there can be good, its not always the easiest to find a good singer, record them and get good results. I also use native instruments kontakt, especially love using the samples inside west africa, a sample pack on there. Though I do get bored sometimes of it all and decide to just fuck it and make some sounds from scratch.’

‘Noisecreations, they have a wider range of sound libraries available for low costs’

‘I have used Logic’s sound libraries – they have some good sounds and it saves time. If they don’t have the sound I want I will look elsewhere/record my own. Maschine sample packs separate themselves into genres which is really helpful for producing. They have some wonderfully designed sounds that are clean and of a high quality. The range is huge too.’

Q5) Do you regard the use of sound libraries as cheating?

‘This completly depends.. If you are saying you have recorded all the sound effects then yes. But a sound designers job isnt about just recording them, its about finding, selecting and sourcing the right sound for a project and if that sound is from a library and it has a legal licenece and good quality, then no its not cheating at all.’

‘No, though it is less satisfying.’

‘Not at all. Ive seen a picture that says about it, if using sample libraries is cheating then using a DAW to make music is cheating, using electricity to use your computer is cheating and if thats cheating then using a computer made by someone else is cheating, so make your own computer from scratch and your own electricity. The list goes on I guess.’

‘No, when purchasing these sample packs you are purchasing the license to use them in your own work.’

‘No. People create sample packs as a living for others to use for numerous reasons, and I think every individual will use sample packs for different reasons.’

From the looks of these results it would seem that using sample packs within sound design is fairly common, and most of the people who answered this questionnaire seem to use them for the ease of use instead of recording and designing complex sounds by layering them upon on other. There are a few answers which are particularly interesting, such as using samples within sound libraries but being sure to make them your own but editing and altering them creatively. I would agree with this as it makes it seem like your ripping off someones work less.

I recently sent an email to sound designer Philip Moroz after reading his book and writing a post as a literature review on how to become a sound designer.

Philip is not a major player in the sound design industry, but i figured he would be one of the best opinions to get as he stands as a general working sound designer, which is where I aim to be. So therefore I am addressing him as a standard industry professional.

I emailed him about my project and what I hope to achieve out of it, along with a list of questions that we’re not covered within his book due to their nature being entirely subjective. The questions I asked were as follows:

‘What is the most stressful task of the job? – such as, picture lock, dealing with the director, keeping all your clients happy, keeping productive etc.’ – I wanted to know about the struggles in a professional environment when working with a director, waiting on picture lock etc.

His answer was as follows:

‘I think all the aspects you have stated play a part in the stresses of a job/project – some more than others sometimes! It’s often a struggle to understand exactly what the director/client wants in terms of sound design. A client sometimes doesn’t exactly know what they like/dislike until they hear a draft or example. This can often lead to re-designing sections to have a different focus or even just designing from scratch …and with time always being of the essence the project can so easily run out of time before they can clasp onto what they imagined their project to sound like. To get around this I ask the client what they know they DON’T like. By knowing this I can make sure to stay away from elements/references they are not keen of and this ultimately saves time and hassle down the line.

Earlier in this blog I spoke about Philip Moroz and how he said to use sound creatively, I’m going to look at Oscar winning sound designer Ben Burtt, who I also posted about previously with his statement on grabbing opportunity with sound wherever you go, and how he demonstrates how to creatively record sound, constructing the most ingenious sounds, with his own developed recording techniques.

Ben is well known for many of the worlds most groundbreaking films such as the Star Wars saga, WALL-E, The re-instalment of the Star Trek franchise and the Indiana Jones saga. The films I’m going to more specifically look at will be the Star Wars saga and WALL-E.

Ben has by far earned himself the title, the godfather of sound design. How he approaches his work and how he customises his sounds to give them personality and diversity which has made Sound Design such an imperative role in Animation and Film.

Ben’s most notorious work is by far the original star wars trilogy closely followed by the rest of the star wars series, nobody can ever forget the iconic sounds of the blasters or lightsabers that are instantly recognisable, these ARE the sounds that make star wars… well, star wars. I’m going to look at a few techniques Ben has used to create such iconic sounds and outline the importance of as Philip Moroz stated ‘Being Creative’ with sound. Looking at the sounds produced in Star Wars more closely, what are the three most recognisable sound? Darth Vader’s mechanical breathing apparatus, the low frequency hum from the lightsaber, and the electrifying sound of the blaster guns. I’m going to look at a couple of interviews where Ben talks about how he created them, and outline the alternative methods which he used to form these iconic sounds. In the documentary about Ben Burtt’s sound design for WALL-E Building Sound from the World Up he talks about designing the laser gun for Eve’s arm, and references back to his work with Star Wars. He said “I discovered years ago, that if you strike a slinky like spring with any object, you don’t just get a clunk on the pick up mic or a ping, you get a ‘Peeyooo’.” (Ben Burtt, Building Sound from the World Up. Available from:https://youtu.be/NsfbXGDw_aA?t=2m22s)

He progresses on to explain how this works, he states that because the high frequencies travel faster than the low frequencies, and if you listen down the wire, the high frequencies get there first, then the mids and finally the lows, emulating a laser gun. So essentially you stretch out a long wire spring, attach a contact mic to one end of the stretched spring and hit the other end with a solid object, of course the tension of the spring will have to come into play, but it’s up for experimentation on how you want the laser to sound.

Here in an interview about designing the sounds for Star Wars the original trilogy, Ben talks about his first and one of his favourite sounds he ever created… the Lightsaber.

In this interview he speaks about how he constructed the sound for the lightsaber, using alternative techniques to create the sounds that he could hear in his head. Imagination is a key factor when trying to construct new sounds, combining and layering multiple layers to achieve each element of the sound that you’re trying to create.

Starting off with probably one of the greatest animation films of all time has to be WALL-E. Ben spoke in an interview on how he approached the job differently to most other pieces of work. A lot of sound design is done in the post-production phase of the film, but as WALL-E is a feature length film that is mostly based on the sound design itself Ben had to work for over two years “brainstorming, experimenting, crafting, and fine tuning both the image and the sound in order to make them work so well together.” (Randy – Film Sound Video’s – Blogger – Available From:http://filmsoundvideos.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/wall-e.html )

Ben Burtt is by far one of the greatest and notorious animation sound designers and sound editors for animation, with his work appearing on some of the greatest films of our time and the owner of countless awards for best sound design.

 (Ben Burtt)

Ben Burrt IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0123785/

I want to look at an interview that Ben did back in 2008 with the release of the major Pixar Animation WALL-E, I’m not going to look at how he created the sound… yet. What I’m going to look at is his opinion on one the greatest tools and abilities a sound designer must utilise. The power of opportunity.

Here is a quote from Ben Burtt himself from an interview he did about creating the sound design for WALL-E “You learn that the most important thing that you can do as a sound designer, is to make the right choice, with the right sound, at the right moment in a film.” (Ben Burtt, 2008, Building Sound from the World Up, Available from: https://youtu.be/NsfbXGDw_aA?t=1m19s) with this in mind, there’s an element within this blog that I’ve missed! I’ve talked about working with clients, workload, productivity, finding work, motivation and equipment… but not. Opportunity and timing. In another interview with Ben on the release of WALL-E, he is asked about when he’s not working on any projects or jobs does he still go around recording various sounds and audio… his response was “I’ve learned that the world is a big sound file and if I’m not prepared to just collect things, all the time then I will miss opportunities, because a lot of the best sounds have been found by accident, I just hear something and run over and get it. And yes a week doesn’t go by or a trip doesn’t go by that I haven’t gone out to record something, and even on this press chunk I’ve been recording things, there was this great squeeky door at this catherderal at the Notre Dam in Paris, and I got it! So some day if we need that squeeky door in a movie… I’ll have it.” (Ben Burt, WALL-E, Sound Design Interview, Available From: https://youtu.be/01gj9SqTSJI?t=2m35s) So as demonstrated by one of the godfathers of sound design himself, it’s imperative for a sound designer always to be on the lookout for new sounds, always keeping an ear open if you pardon the pun.

Of course not everyone can have a microphone on them at all times, well not always a high quality microphone. As mentioned in an earlier blog post the Zoom H4N microphone is a handy portable microphone which you can have on you ‘one the go’ but… something that caught my attention recently was this. Now in this day and age, a lot of people have iPhone’s… they seem to be one of the most used modern tools of the 21st century with the capability to do almost anything. But now with the help from Zoom you can now record sound in stereo from your phone, apparently it’s “mid-side stereo made easy”. The product itself is known as the Zoom iQ5 and can work with any iPhone 5th generation and up and any iPad 4th generation and up.

 (Zoom IQ5 – iPhone Recorder)

It simply plugs in the the charging point to your iPhone/iPad and with the handy software that comes with the product, turns your phone into a professional recording device. This is very handy for starting out Sound Designers at only about £50 from Gear4Music … it almost seems like a steal, here is a short conclusive review from the writers at Ask Audio on what they thought of the product.”The iQ5 microphone from Zoom is a compact and great sounding alternative to using the built-in microphone on your lightning-capable iOS device. I used it for 2 weeks in a variety of different ways and was pleasantly surprised at how capable it was. It’s no surprise that the iQ5 has found its way into my camera bag as a piece of kit I want to always have with me.” (Ask Audio review on the new Zoom IQ5 recorder. Available from: https://ask.audio/articles/review-zoom-iq5-mini-mic-for-iphone)

Now back onto the main point, opportunity. Ben talks about the relations he has with his family & friends with his work, he describes how generally whenever there is a family member that is sick, like has a cough, he will generally record it! He spoke about how his friend had a busted fan, so he recorded it! One of the key elements here obviously then as also stated by Moroz … is to just … Record Everything! if you have a sound library as large as you can get … you’re always less likely to ever run out of sounds. It is also vital for a sound designer to always update his library, due to copyright some of the sounds that you use in a project may end up being exclusive to that project itself, and plus nobody wants to hear the same sound effect over and over again, it’s just boring and lacking in creativity! How does one ever expect to succeed and progress by constantly using the same tools.