5.1 vs stereo for documentary and additonal advice

A

arowe214

Member
i am working on a documentary series and im doing the edit in sony vegas ..part 1 is in a skate park and has made it into a film festival with the working print on the early bird round. i have about 5 months till the actual fest to finish. i dont know if i should do a 5.1 mix or stereo. i have been working it as a 5.1 being ambitious on my first doc. the reason is i figured i would pipe in some artifical sounds to get it a bit more depth since you get alot of outside noise . the film is about a skate park and its located under a downtown high way so you can imagine all the noise thats being pickedup. my issue is i dont really know where to sit the dialogue in the mix. everywhere i read says something different.. some say put the dialouge in the center of the mix and some say push it to the center and lt and right speakers .

i tested it with both 5.1 set ups and i get great dimension with the piped in sounds but my dialouge sounds thin and lost in the mix but if i take the same mix and turn it into a stereo mix it sounds great but it has no depth to it.

my concern is how it will sound at the festival. alot of the extra play is to mask the noise thats picked up because of the location. with it being a documentary im thinking people would be forgiving of the noise since its on location..

im coming up on my second production of a barber shop and i know im going to have to deal with the humming of the barber clippers and i was thinking of doing some of the same thing with it by piping in extra foley just to take away the distracting hum... ideally i would like to know how to eq that kinda stuff out or push it back.. so any advice on what any of you guys do to resolve that kind of issue would be great. i use a shotgun rode mic and i have lav mic . but i dont want to mic up the barber because i think that would grab alot of noise because of the proximity to the clippers and because the barber will be moving alot .

if you guys would like to see /hear samples from the two pieces i have excerpts online to check also.
 
I doubt if most festivals will have a decent 5.1 playback system so personally I would concentrate on getting a good mixed stereo track as it will also be more relevant to other distribution formats such as DVD and you tube/vimeo etc.

You should really only be attempting 5.1 mixing if you have the proper dubbing resources to do it and a playback system that does all that extra work justice.

The only doco's I have ever done in 5.1 have been feature length for cinema release as even most TV stations prefer stereo for this format.
 
Docs are almost exclusively stereo. Some because it would not be "authentic" to be in surround since it wasn't recorded that way. The rest because there is little benefit and some serious down sides to going 5.1.

For instance how will you deliver the 5.1 mix to the theatre? DVD is going to give you a big hit on image on a big screen. BlueRay is maybe OK, but has some serious licensing issues. If it's just a one off maybe your OK but you can't sell them with out paying some serious cash in fees.

Second for the big screen you really should mix in a big room. If you have some experience you can get by in a smaller room with a system you know, but you can never be sure till you hear it in a big space. Mono translates pretty well, stereo has a number of gotcha's if your not careful. Reverb for instance "blooms" in a big room so you need to pretty much not hear it in a small room or it will be HUGE in a big room.
Surround is even trickier. What sounds "cool" on a small system often sounds very distracting on a big system. Even big $$$ films often hardly use the surrounds except to add some ambience splash. The sub NEEDS to be mixed on a calibrated system or your asking for trouble on playback.

And many theatres that say they are playing a 5.1 mix don't actually do that most of the time. It's really shocking when you have worked on a film and know where things are to go see it on the big screen and find out that despite their "Dolby Digital" sign they are playing it back in stereo. On a 35mm print you also have the matrixed surround mix so usually you get some surround even if they have a broken DD box.

You should not even be doing a mono mix on an uncalibrated system, let alone a surround one.

There is no reason why your dialog should sound "thin" in the center speaker unless it's the speaker. The center speaker and the L and R and surrounds should be the same speakers, on home systems they usually aren't. Home sound systems are designed to make the system sound "good". That usually means the are boosting the treble and the bass because that sounds "good". Mixing systems are designed to let you hear what it actually sounds like. They are as flat as you can make them and balanced and calibrated daily, actually before every mix session so often twice a day. Actually there is one reason it would sound different is that if your system isn't using pan logic you are boosting the "phantom" center by 3dB if you send it "center" in a stereo mix. The other possibility is the speakers, if your L&R speakers are better than your center then you are getting two good speakers pushing dialog VS one less good speaker.

Dialog, on big screen films is always in the center. Non principal dialog might get spread a little bit and walla is really part of FX not dialog and that will be spread around. There are some sound reasons for this. First what seems like just the right amount of pan when you are in the center seats seems WAY off if you are on the far side, and not quite enough if you are on the far side. The audience "knows" the convention that all dialog is center so it seems fine. Once you start moving it around the audience doesn't have that convention anymore and will need it to me mixed where it looks right and that is imposible to do for the whole audience. If you are mixing exclusively for the small screen it doesn't make much difference if you pan dialog around, but you don't want to play that on the big screen.

And lastly it's Foley not foley (always capitalized and you are talking about FX not Foley anyway. Foley is a very specific process and has to be recorded to picture, other wise it's FX. Other than the folks who get hung up on "authenticity" (wich I personally think is a wank) most documentaries use some FX, some use a lot.

The break for Doc. makers seems to come down around if they see them selves as story tellers or journalists. The journalists don't want anything that they didn't shoot/ record at the time on screen. This may be "authentic" but often misses the "truth" of the moment. The story tellers are interested in telling the "truth" of the story and don't want "fake" things but are open to helping the truth with added material. Say you shoot an interview in the jungle and your sound guy does a great job and you really only hear the voice. Well the "truth" is you are in the jungle and it will help if you hear that a bit. You don't want it in your dialog track because it will be a nightmare to edit so you can add some appropriate "jungle" back in in the mix. Or adding sounds over stills. The "journalists" will almost never do it unless it's sounds they recorded in that location, but they have no problem with adding music??

So whether it's OK or not really has a lot to do with what kind of filmmaker you are.
 
Wow thanks you guys gave me a good lesson here.. My fx i added is like i said to take away from the distraction of noise(in my opinon its distracting) so its like skateboard sounds nothing major... As for surround sound I originally mixed in 5.1 and like you said it sounded not bad at home but thinking about acoustics i decided to see about screening in a theater and in there is where it sound thin like it lost alot of body. So i came back and down mixed it just as stereo at home sounds like what you expect a stereo mix to sound like other than the music. I have not tested my stereo mix in the theater yet. The 5.1 and surround i think i was being ambitious because us novie associate Dolby and surround and 5.1 as those things that make film film but as I'm learning and reading about spec and such im realizing those things have a certain place. But I was a bit taken because I went back to doc dvds that i own and most of them have the 5.1 mix stamp on them and some are docs remastered from the 70s and such...
 
For DVD releases 5.1 is a big marketing thing. That doc from the 70's was probably in mono. But you can take anything and splash some sound around and create a "5.1" mix. I actually did that for a low budget film that had been mixed in stereo and landed distribution. The distribution deal required a 5.1 "mix". Since all they had was the stereo master a real 5.1 mix was not an option. But there are plugins and boxes that will attempt to expand the stereo to 5.1.

It kind of works. But you also have to realize that most "5.1" films are really 3.1 or 3.0 films. FX and music will be L&R and dialog is center. That is pretty easy to extract from a stereo mix done "properly" with the dialog center. Then you can take all the very low sounds and send them to the sub. A lot of films just splash a bit of the L&R into the surrounds. If you are doing Private Ryan then there were tracks that were designed to be in the surround and subs, but if your doing say In the Bedroom, a chatty almost no FX film then there is really no need to build stuff for the surrounds, it's not that kind of film, so they will toss some of the ambiences into the surrounds and call it a day.

And you have to keep in mind that the surrounds are the first thing to go. Probably half of the theatres in a commercial run are not going to have the surrounds either working or working properly. So you really can't put anything in there that you NEED to hear. The sub (Lfe) is the second thing to go. Pretty much every theatre in the US is going to have the LCR speakers working. They already had the speakers there all they needed to do was wire them up to separate amplifier channels. So many, maybe most, films are mixed for the LCR and then a little time is spent tossing something in the surrounds and a low pass filter is patched in and is sent to the Lfe. If you want to go crazy that send can be routed through a subharmonic synthesizer to add some beef.

DVD's of Woody Allen's films are probably listed as being "5.1" and he mixes everything in mono.


As far as "cleaning up" production by adding sounds... It can help sometimes. Especially when your cuts make the background choppy. Continuing the sound can smooth things out, but it doesn't make them go away. Maybe you can get them to not talk when he's clipping? or do some fake clipping at crucial bits? Being a doc none of that may be possible. A lav probably won't help. Oiling the clippers might? You may also have some serious sight line issues in a barbershop. They usually have a lot of mirrors, so booming may not be a good choice.

You might just have to shoot and then do an interview to get what you want to hear as a separate fairly clean track that you can VO over the footage so you can turn down the production a bit.
 
if i can show you what i have done already with the barber shop and maybe you can give me some feed back.. i had few sightline issues but im pretty aware of my surroundings when under the hood so im good there.. what i did with this shot is set the boom/shotgun near the seat .. the problem there was when ever the put thier back to the mic i was screwed ...as far as sound clarity . i got alot of post work done to the dialog but this whole shoot was really built around having footage that i can play withthe sound mic knowing i was gonna have to work around the clippers and figuring the colorgrade i wanted to use..

https://vimeo.com/61856168
 
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