How did they get such clean sound?

G

goodgoings

Well-known member
Here is an one take short and with all the actors and camera movements, how do you think they recorded such clean sound? Lavs? Two booms?

My bet is on two booms as I thought I can hear the voice dropping off when slightly off axis.

https://vimeo.com/197586750
 
You are joking, right? I could not understand a word anyone was saying in that. However, it would have worked as a silent film.
 
Definitely lavs on most of the cast, but there's some "room" blended in. As the only sound credit is PSM, and no boom ops, there had to be lavs. The dialog all takes place in very choreographed spaces, most of it static when it happens, so it is possbile that there were other mics rigged overhead in those hot zones. There is a bit of "room" in the mix, which is necessary to create a sense of the space, and that's often achieved with a blend of lav and boom, so rigged mics (plant mics) make sense for that.
 
> only sound credit is PSM

Also a post soundie...

Sounds like some ADR, too...

Good job with a small crew.
 
Actually I was going to go the opposite and say all boomed. Though there are some bits that sound a bit like lav. I have done more than one short with no boom op and no lavs, not that hard if it's set up right. Plus this guy has done a ton of shorts and is listed on a number as mixer and boom op.

I don't however find the dialog particularly "clean". It has a lot of room on it and they did something I personally HATE, which is to just slather the entire track with meaningless music to cover a bad sound edit.

It's not particularly "bad" production sound and I suspect that very little in the way of post was done. My feeling is boomed but either wrong mic choice or boomed too far away, or maybe just a very bouncy set with no treatment. I think it could be more understandable if it had some post work done on it but...

I didn't watch all the way through but I didn't hear any really obvious ADR, though in at least one place I thought sync was soft so?

To OP.

#1 raise your standards. If this seems really clean to you it says more about how bad the tracks have been on films you are used to watching.

You can't always get there but the bar you should be aiming at should be a lot higher than this short.

How to get there? Boom as close as possible. Way closer than most new boom ops are comfortable with. Wireless can also get you there but they have their own issues and are not cheap for good ones. One boom can cover a bunch of actors, one wireless can cover one actor. So a good mic and a decent boom pole will cover a lot more situations for a lot less money than going wireless.
 
Sounds like - harhar - some omnidirectional mics for ambience and a lost of post/ADR.
 
Noiz2 said:
[...]I don't however find the dialog particularly "clean".[...]
To OP.

#1 raise your standards. If this seems really clean to you it says more about how bad the tracks have been on films you are used to watching.

You can't always get there but the bar you should be aiming at should be a lot higher than this short.[...]
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Ha, ha, well, while I would not characterize the sound on this short as particularly clean, and the insistent "room" cacophony annoying, I'd say the sound on a lot of films is even worse. But the worst, by far the very, very worst feature of too many films these days, is the atrocious enunciation by the actors: mumbling, slurring, subvocalizing, makes it very hard to understand, and the director, because s/he knows the script has no idea that the dialogue is unintelligible. You can have top pro sound people, but they can only record what the actor gives them - rarely do I find a problem with the sound people when I don't understand the dialogue, 99% of the time it's the actors. At least in this case that great sin - poor enunciation - was not a problem, which makes it a qualified success in my book. Yes, my standards are low for what I see, because my expectations have been beaten into the ground (although I try to be hyperaware of that issue when I myself am filming).
 
I may have worded it wrongly. I meant to say, considering the conditions of shooting a one take film in multiple confined spaces, the sound is intelligible (not the drunk slurring of course) and works. For what the shoot required, I can imagine so many ways sound could have been really messed up, but these guys made it work and that is what I applaud them for. Seeing that there are several different opinions here, I myself would have a really hard time being confident of getting clean sound if the shoe was on my foot and I was the sound guy. By the way, it's really good to hear other people analyse this type of shoot and give their idea of how they did it. I can definitely learn from others, especially those who are more knowledgeable than myself.

I still say shotgun close to the camera (Sennheiser 8060???) because I can hear proximity effect. Maybe a planted mic here and there.

Any other opinions how to get better sound than this (same shoot) if you thought the sound was just average?
 
In the Vimeo comments:
"Thanks for all the kind words, everyone! The camera we used was an ARRI Amira. And the sound is a mix of lav mics on all the actors, one boom and a little bit of ADR." - from Jeff Chan, one of the creators.
 
Tim Sewell said:
In the Vimeo comments:
"Thanks for all the kind words, everyone! The camera we used was an ARRI Amira. And the sound is a mix of lav mics on all the actors, one boom and a little bit of ADR." - from Jeff Chan, one of the creators.
Click to expand...

Ah...the comment must have been written later. Well I was wrong. They threw everything at it, but some people were not happy with the mix. Was it just bad post-production?
 
I do not think it was horrible but it could have been mixed with a little more focus on understanding the dialogue. (too much room, EQ seemed a little bottom and top heavy on the voices and the music was kind of high).
 
I really doubt that much/any sound post was done outside of the NLE.

It's generally pretty pointless trying to "assign blame" since we don't know how things went down. From experience these types of films generally only go to a sound person if there is something really bad in the production and then they only want to pay for a day (or less) to "fix" it.

Some shows actually spend time and plan for sound post and you can almost always tell. A usual giveaway that a show spend very little time thinking about post is when you find music used as score slathered over everything. That is usually because they spent no time working on backgrounds and if they didn't take the time/ thought to create the world of the story they usually didn't spend any time/ thought on any of the rest of the sound.

A lot of mics and no real sound edit may be why they have so much room in the track. It takes a fair amount of time to go through a bunch of tracks and pick the ONE you need for each cut. With no cuts in the film that also means picking and mixing. The easy way is to just play it all, but then you get overlap and a lot of room. Which is pretty much how this sounds.

The thing is they may have had a decent post mixer who was given an hour or two to mix the film. On that time line you just do what you can do, which in this case would be pushing the on camera voices and dipping what you can of the others and slathering music to cover the varying BG.
 
Ya, there's a post-production mixer listed in the credits. My guess is along the lines of Scott's: He spent what little time he had getting rid of footsteps, clothing, and other unwanted noises; arranged and recorded ADR; did as much dynamics work as he had time for; and called it a day. Perhaps if production had invested a little more in their post budget, the guy could have made things smoother.

But outside of people like us, most people probably didn't notice on a conscious level.
 
And on the positive side a bit of chaos is important to the film so in this case it kind of works. If this were more of a nuanced drama then it would be more of a problem.
 
Tim Sewell said:
In the Vimeo comments:
"Thanks for all the kind words, everyone! The camera we used was an ARRI Amira. And the sound is a mix of lav mics on all the actors, one boom and a little bit of ADR." - from Jeff Chan, one of the creators.
Click to expand...

In keeping with my New Year resolution to focus more on the positive and less on the negative...I found"Pregame" to be quite the lovely little piece. Very ambitious and on the whole well-executed. Particularly since it was all a single take and any significant screw up by camera or actors would have required starting over again at the beginning. Kudos to the focus puller. I wonder if the AC was pulling from a remote position or working from alongside the camera? ( at one point there is a brief reflection of the camera in the glass cabinet, but not a clear enough reflection to tell if the Steadicam op is alone ). If found the DP's choice to NOT light some areas interesting. For instance- he resisted lighting the washroom area off the kitchen and he resisted lighting anything on the porch. When they open the front door it just falls off into black.

As far as the sound being a cacophony, I thought it suited the nature of the scene. Or at least the chaotic nature of the scene caused me to forgive any hollowness to the sound. It also helped that they were always on a wide lens and never on anything tight. The viewer is often seeing the source of the background noise.

The short is not without flaw but the result is something the producers can be proud of. Nicely done.

I am recommitting myself to being supportive of our brethren in the craft that we all love so much. It is all to easy to slip into being a critical technician and nit-picking what we personally might have done differently were we on that production. Be hard on yourself, generous to others as you would want them to be in regard to your own work. Everyone does the best they can. Well, everyone except the Sound Op who started snoring loudly during a sit-down interview I recently shot, that is. :Drogar-BlackEye(DBG
 
If, indeed there were lavs on all actors, that would be an impressive number of tracks to split out and try to mix and balance, especially in an NLE timeline. I wonder if they might have taken the mics away from the mouth down the body on the guys suits where they would be easy to hide, and almost used them like mobile "plants"? The ladies could have been picked up by the guys lavs as they are mostly coupled up except for the drunk girl. This would explain the additional room sound, especially if they ran on top of each other rather than iso tracks.
The sound design in"the grand inquisition" was pretty damn nice, but a totally different set of circumstances.
 
ric8138 said:
I wonder if they might have taken the mics away from the mouth down the body on the guys suits
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Yeah, when I did weddings I put the lav on the groom at heart level, or even a bit lower, so that it picked up him, the bride, and the minister more evenly.

I recommend heart-level placement of lavs in general, like for interviews. Loudness changes with distance squared. So half the distance is four times as loud, for example. So if the lav is nearly at one of the person's shoulders, then every time they turn their head to the right or the left it will make a noticeable change in volume and tone.
 
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ric8138 said:
The sound design in"the grand inquisition" was pretty damn nice, but a totally different set of circumstances.
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Not a running take and fewer characters but I know it was boomed with a hyper and no lavs.

Biggest production sound issue was the stupid camera which had one of those spinning disk 35mm adapters and a HD recorder that both made a ton of noise.
 
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