audio for movie

V

Victor Nhat Nguyen

Well-known member
I'm an amateur filmmaker and I been trying to get my short film to look as good as Hollywood. I though that shallow depth of field, lighting, color grading is going to get me there. I'm editing right now and I realize that the reason that my film don't look like Hollywood is because of the audio. Right now I'm using rode video mic pro plug into zoom h1 on a boom and it doesn't sound as good as I like it to be.

I'm wondering what do you guys do for audio in your short films. How much do you use ADR and Foley and do you do that much post processing on it?
 
A #1 priority is to get it right on the set. "Fixing it in post" is a film-making myth. Getting it right means a good quality recording setup used correctly by someone who knows what they're doing and can devote 100% focus on the set to sound.
 
Steve is right - you start with getting great sound on the set. Once you get this excellent production sound into audio post you strip out all of the sound between lines of dialog, doing ADR or replacing syllables, words or lines with audio from the unused takes if needed; replacing all of the human made sounds with Foley; and doing complete sound effects (which includes ambient backgrounds) either by custom recording them or using sound libraries. All of this is then meticulously mixed together.

Each category - dialog, Foley, sound FX and mix - can take anywhere from one to 20 hours of work per linear minute of film, so a 100 minute film can take anywhere from 400 to 8,000 hours of audio post work (obviously an action film will require more work than a straight drama). This doesn't include the grunt work like imports/exports, archiving/back-ups, cataloging, library maintenance, etc.

The basic concept of audio post is creating a complete and believable sonic world from scratch using only the actors voices.
 
I read somewhere when I was first starting out that 90% of the dialog in major films is recorded in post. I now know that's BS. Get it right on set, as others have said, and to do that find someone who can have audio as their only responsibility on set. You can't learn everything yourself - 'filmmaker' generally means producer and director, the crew still has to do their part.
 
unclebob6958 said:
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Each category - dialog, Foley, sound FX and mix - can take anywhere from one to 20 hours of work per linear minute of film, so a 100 minute film can take anywhere from 400 to 8,000 hours of audio post work (obviously an action film will require more work than a straight drama). ....
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Ye gods man that is a bit high. I had a talk with a fellow sound supervisor Randy Thomm a few years back and we compared large and small films and came out at 10-15 man hours per screen minute Plus say three weeks for premixes and two weeks for final mix.

On the micro level you are usually doing all of the premixing as you go so slice that out and I have found I can generally get down to the 10-7 hour per minute range plus final mix.

At your 80 hr/ screen minute a low budget action film with a one man sound post crew would take over three years to finish.

The average big budget film post schedule was 13 weeks or so in the mid 90's. By 2000 there were a lot of films down in the 6 - 10 week range with fairly small crews. Even a big crew film usually doesn't have a big crew for all of post. It will start with a supervisor and an assistant and maybe a lead FX editor.

The reality is scary enough no need to go overboard.
 
Step 1
Find a partner who is as into audio as you are into video, that reads about it online constantly, that spends every spare dime he has buying audio gear.
 
Film making is like building a house, in order to have a great product you have to have people that specialize and are experts at all the different disciplines, you wouldnt expect the Electrician to be a great roofer? or the plumber to be a great painter? if your thing is to focus on making pretty pictures then get some one who is just as passionate about getting great audio.

As this entire portion of this forum is largely aimed at answering questions and helping people achieve good audio, the most accurate and BEST advice is to team up with people that can give the audio which most here consider and you have just found out is arguably at least 50% if not more as important as the images. If you wish to pursue being a one man band (which is NOT impossible, just extremely hard and requires a lot more skills and better equipment) then all the information you seek is within these forum.

Read the stickies they are a world of information and will answer most of your questions as to how to proceed into your next project. we all have made our first recording and wish it could have been better, but that is how you learn both what to do and most importantly what NOT to do. once you're into editing its too late to fix things that should have been fixed by being recorded well to begin with. however all is not lost, there is a member that just recently did an entire film with most if not all dialog being ADR'd (replaced after the fact with original actors). so all is not lost, but at this point it is going to be extremely hard if not impossible to get the Hollywood sound unless you throw major money at it and then you're almost better off re-shooting the movie with a pro sound guy. or just do the best you can and call it a "lesson learned" .

Good luck.
 
Victor Nhat Nguyen said:
I'm an amateur filmmaker and I been trying to get my short film to look as good as Hollywood. I though that shallow depth of field, lighting, color grading is going to get me there. I'm editing right now and I realize that the reason that my film don't look like Hollywood is because of the audio.
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Congrats that is a realization some take a LONG time to get to.

Right now I'm using rode video mic pro plug into zoom h1 on a boom and it doesn't sound as good as I like it to be.
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You should read the post stickie, but production is just the first step. Your set up is certainly capable of getting good results so it may be how your using it OR in maybe that your comparing apples and oranges. Really good production sound does not sound like what you hear in a "Hollywood" feature.
Really good production is clean and clear. It doesn't have the mic going off access and weird bumps and rumbles. A lot of that is operator skill but some is location and weather and luck.

What you hear on the big screen has been messaged a LOT.
Dialog editors have taken out any un wanted bits and smoothed transitions and helped clean out whatever odd problems got on the track. They have pulled words or parts of words to repair the track etc. When they are done the production sounds a bit like it was recorded in a VO booth, very clean.

Everything else you hear is added by sound editors. Then mixers blent it all together and add reverbs and such to sit those voices that are generally too clean now into the "space" of the set. They also generally compress and EQ the dialog tracks to make them very intelligible while making them sound "good" and live in the environment of the film.

That dialog often sounds very different from the production sound that was recorded.

You could have fantastic production recordings and they would still sound not great if you compared them to a high budget finished film's dialog.

I'm wondering what do you guys do for audio in your short films. How much do you use ADR and Foley and do you do that much post processing on it?
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I do sound post and have worked on a lot of low/ no budget shorts. What those filmmakers did was hire a professional, or talk one into doing their film for free.

What I did was a variation of the above. Generally nobudget films don't have great production tracks so you can't get them as clean. Also most new filmmakers don't shoot in a way that allows for really clean dialog tracks. They haven't padded everything down so you get a lot of set sounds that are often not removable. So you end up with a dialog track that is a mix of dialog and other sounds. You try to eliminate the "other sounds" you don't want but sometimes you can't.

At that point I build up backgrounds to put the actors in the world that the story takes place in. Usually the filmmaker has done a pretty decent job on visually creating the world so I'm augmenting and filling out.

Next I would go in and do the "hard" FX (door closes, gun shots, etc.). Mixed in with than I'm going to do Foley (and mockFoley). Some things you really have to Foley some you can fake in with samplers and or just cutting by hand.

Durring all this (and possibly during production if I'm on soon enough) I will record new sounds. Backgrounds for locations, specific things I don't have in my library, weird props if they make the right sound, etc. Sometimes I do a lot of recordings sometimes I do hardly any. It all depends on time budget and what I have in the library and how close it fits what I need.

This BTW is a good reason to hire or get someone who has been doing this for awhile, they will have a larger better library and know how to milk it. I love recording but the more that is in the library the less days I need to go out recording. Any day I'm recording is one I'm not editing so... time.

Then the director and I go through the film and they give me notes on what they liked and didn't like. I do fixes and we go again. Someplace in there we are actually mixing. You can't really mix till the big "style" problems are fixed. So at some point I'm not fixing things that are "wrong" and I'm mixing. Sometimes this is a very defined moment and sometimes it's a bit of an evolution. This is true to a certain extent on big films also.

When the mix is done there may be a final pass to taylor the mix to a format, as in adjusting the overall levels to hit a delivery spec, but generally it's just a file hand off that you drop back into your timeline to generate you finished video with sound file.
 
Noiz summed up exactly what I was going to say. I'll just add that for me, the budget will dictate the number of "fixes" the director gets in post production. If it's no/low budget, I would usually give one pass of fixes, and that was it. If it's a big budget major release, then you do what you have to do to get it done. In the end, I think post sound people will tell you that there is something in every single film they've worked on that they didn't like but there just wasn't time or budget to fix.
 
I already read through the link that you guys posted up, and also the stickies. For the past 10 month since I got my first DSLR, I have been spending all my money on video equipment and spending all my times on forums and youtube. I was so obsessed with getting the best video quality possible. I bet there's a lot people like me that only care about video and not audio. Instead of focusing so much on video, I think I'm going to start focusing more on audio. So does anyone know where I can go to learn more about audio?
 
Victor Nhat Nguyen said:
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So does anyone know where I can go to learn more about audio?
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I don't think my route is going to be much help. I had done sound in theatre and recording for many years when I managed to start doing films. Working for and then with many talented folks for another ten years or so doing sound post.

I have taught a schools and can't really recommend that as a learning path for sound. There are books and DVD's, and some of them are actually pretty good, but that is like learning tennis by reading about it. It can help but it's a muscle you have to exercise and the only way to do that is to do it.
So find someone doing post and intern for a couple of years. That would be a start.

Or go Gonzo and get a partner who lives sound and learn from them. Though personally I would do what YOU want to do and others to do the rest. Go for sound if that is what drives you. But if you would rather direct, direct. They get paid better.
 
do you really want to learn audio, or would you just rather have someone who knows it working for you?
 
If the answer to the above is that someone else can take on learning it you need to have someone else take over. Give them a fancy title and an assignment to learn whatever they can. It doesn't have to be an expert, just one of your friends interested in production. It's a good place for them to start, and you can share your knowledge going forward. None of my regular audio people were audio for video experts until I pushed them that way.
 
Noiz2 said:
Also most new filmmakers don't shoot in a way that allows for really clean dialog tracks. They haven't padded everything down so you get a lot of set sounds that are often not removable.
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Good post, Noiz. Can you please elaborate on padding everything down?

Thanks.
 
Have you every been in a real sound stage or recording studio? There are sound treatments all over and in the wall designed to kill echos/reflections and temper the room, and isolate you from the outside world. Now compare that to your standard indie level shoots. No one ever thinks about the hardwood floors, the neighbors AC, being in the flightpath of LAX, being next to a busy street........
 
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