what does most the budget go to

[unclebob6958]

2. Sound - Even on the lowest budget projects, do yourself a favor and always, always, always hire a professional sound mixer. DIY sound generally sucks and nothing defeats low budget projects like bad audio.

I'd hire a real location sound guy! 50% of the movie 5% (or less) of the budget sounds like a steal of a deal to me. Nothing worse than see a pretty picture and you can't hear what they're saying or it sounds like they recorded off a camera mic.

I agree that sound, on a short film, should not be messed with, I mean you want to hire an EXPERIENCED sound guy, one who is really good, not someone "looking to try out sound" or your buddy who held a boom once for a student project. Not a good idea at all. I got really good production sound from my last short and it was worth the money. We had a production sound mixer and a boom op each day, which was a good system, and the guy came prepared with excellent sound equipment and was really on task for making sure our sound was good, letting us know when it wasn't so we could retake, etc. That kind of thing is vital. I hear that festival directors complain most commonly about bad sound. I think that sound and music combined, what you hear, is absolutely 50% of the experience. Maybe more, in the sense that if you literally cannot hear the dialogue then you have a pretty much useless film. But certainly if you have a good looking movie with amateurish sound, that's a total joke, and it would be really sad because you were that close to having a good project and you blew it. I can think of things to cheap out on, but it's not sound!

AMEN!​

There is nothing worse for an audio post guy (yours truly) than having to deal with poorly recorded production sound. You're looking to do things on a budget; if you scrimp on the production sound you'll waste a substantial portion of your audio post budget on production sound clean-up and it will only come out passable if you're lucky. This will also cause problems with the rest of the audio post. All that extra noise means that the sound editor/mixer cannot be subtle with the Foley, sound FX, music, etc.

On top of that, you may end up having to ADR large portions of the film. ADR, especially when the talent is inexperienced with the process, will cost you A LOT of time/money. Then you need extensive Foley, ambiences, etc. (more time/money).

A good rule of thumb is that every dollar/minute you spend on production sound will save you ten in audio post, not to mention the cost of a bottle of aspirin.

 

[timbook2]

sound

sound

I am glad SOUND is being given the importance it needs here. Where I grew up, most american films were dubbed in German. When I saw some of them in their original, I was shocked about the bad sound quality of many older famous Hollywood pictures! I later realized how spoiled I was from the re-made sound. I can watch a movie on my laptops 15" screen but with my Genelecs or Dynaudios. If the sound is good, I dont mind the small screen, the other way around wont work ever.

 

[timbook2]

just found a little jewel on greedpain for anyone interested:

item # 120392030020

I dont need one I have a 6 channel Audio Development "pico" customized to work in desert or ice...

 

[puredrifting]

just found a little jewel on greedpain for anyone interested:

item # 120392030020

I dont need one I have a 6 channel Audio Development "pico" customized to work in desert or ice...

Tim,

I have no idea what you are talking about here. Care to elaborate?

Dan

 

[JonathanLB]

AMEN!​

There is nothing worse for an audio post guy (yours truly) than having to deal with poorly recorded production sound. You're looking to do things on a budget; if you scrimp on the production sound you'll waste a substantial portion of your audio post budget on production sound clean-up and it will only come out passable if you're lucky. This will also cause problems with the rest of the audio post. All that extra noise means that the sound editor/mixer cannot be subtle with the Foley, sound FX, music, etc.

On top of that, you may end up having to ADR large portions of the film. ADR, especially when the talent is inexperienced with the process, will cost you A LOT of time/money. Then you need extensive Foley, ambiences, etc. (more time/money).

A good rule of thumb is that every dollar/minute you spend on production sound will save you ten in audio post, not to mention the cost of a bottle of aspirin.

Yeah that's really true. But a lot of things work this way. The mistakes made on my short film were of a minor variety, really more to do with publicity, but we never thought, "We're going to need a poster, so let's get some really good photo shots of what we need, and think about the poster beforehand." So we ended up using a photo that wasn't the best, and having to put a lot more time into Photoshopping it. The poster looks great still, but if we just thought about it more we'd have had an even better shot with very little post work done to it, besides the obvious color correction and all. Instead we had to tinker more.

At least our sound was fantastic, though, and we had a really good production sound guy who did the post sound as well. I don't mind that arrangement at all on indie stuff because if a guy knows he's going to be doing the post work, he's really going to care about making sure he gets what he needs on set. He was very assertive about telling us when the shot was no good for sound, and we redid it. Sometimes it was a great take, as a director, great acting, perfect camera moves, etc. But if the sound is bad, roll again, let's get it all right. That's just part of filmmaking. So our sound turned out fantastic! It's really so important, too.