Hey everybody. I just picture-locked my first feature doc and now that I'm moving into sound editing and mixing a new concern dawned on me about the final mix: stereo 2.0 or stereo surround 5.1?
We shot the film with only two people, with sound coming from a boom+shotgun and hypercardioid on-camera. The whole film is all dialogue and diagetic sound. No score, no added SFX or anything else that we didn't record live. It's all verité scenes between characters and interview footage with some b-roll. So my question concerns whether to attempt to mix it as anything greater than 2.0?
I looked at the back of the DVD cases on a few docs I own (albeit these are ones that got American theatrical distro, so some money was behind them at least after getting sold), and they all claim 5.1 mixes. In order for me to create a 5.1 mix, I suppose I would have to just go record new backgrounds for the surrounds or alternately just introduced very low-volume fill so as to merely activate the theater's speakers, but this seems like it would add unnecessary noise/distraction to the film. As the audio is all dialogue, I intend to just bus the two tracks out of L and R, both panned center, but I'm concerned that in a theater, for instance, this might make the film feel empty or that the audience would realize that something's sorely different from their "normal" movie-watching experiences.
Any thoughts? What's typical? What have y'all done? Do y'all think the audience would notice/care? I know that content is king, and I'm happy with the story/characters/emotional engagement, but still am just thinking about having a very limited 2.0 mix and concerned about that.
Thanks for your advice!
We shot the film with only two people, with sound coming from a boom+shotgun and hypercardioid on-camera. The whole film is all dialogue and diagetic sound. No score, no added SFX or anything else that we didn't record live. It's all verité scenes between characters and interview footage with some b-roll. So my question concerns whether to attempt to mix it as anything greater than 2.0?
I looked at the back of the DVD cases on a few docs I own (albeit these are ones that got American theatrical distro, so some money was behind them at least after getting sold), and they all claim 5.1 mixes. In order for me to create a 5.1 mix, I suppose I would have to just go record new backgrounds for the surrounds or alternately just introduced very low-volume fill so as to merely activate the theater's speakers, but this seems like it would add unnecessary noise/distraction to the film. As the audio is all dialogue, I intend to just bus the two tracks out of L and R, both panned center, but I'm concerned that in a theater, for instance, this might make the film feel empty or that the audience would realize that something's sorely different from their "normal" movie-watching experiences.
Any thoughts? What's typical? What have y'all done? Do y'all think the audience would notice/care? I know that content is king, and I'm happy with the story/characters/emotional engagement, but still am just thinking about having a very limited 2.0 mix and concerned about that.
Thanks for your advice!
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