How to do the pros do it ?

Noiz2 said:
Well I think it may have to do with his style. You can go to his site and there are a few clips. The part of his comment that doesn't really fit with the OP question is that this is not the way the pro's do it and it isn't getting him the sound the OP was talking about.

Small disclaimer in that this is based on the clips on his site, but he uses very little dialog and uses a lot of music and very little in the way of sound at all. and they were all shot out doors.

So in his case it might be easier. But he's most definitely in the indi sound zone not the "Hollywood" sound zone.

One thing I have discovered over the years is that if you do really good sync on the ADR and do it with a big condenser pretty close you can get a very "vintage Hollywood" sound stage feel. So it is certainly something to be considered if that is what you looking for. But ADR done well is not easier than recording on location. Visa-vie the planes. It's called location scouting. I've spent a fair amount of time in Spokane and the plane issue is not that bad and not an issue at all in many places. There are not that many planes in and out of the airport and it gets shutdown for weather quite a lot. I used to go up around the holidays every year and about 1/2 the time the airport was closed and we had to take a bus from Seattle. If you want to work the way you do go for it but if you have a plane problem then your not picking locations smartly.
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Um not that planes are that big of a problem... But we do have low flying airplanes and loud trains that go through our town. Yah our airport can shut down with a couple feet of snow on the ground but thats maybe a total of a week or two out of the entire year. Take that and couple together we have a millitary base right outside of the city and you get large fueling planes flying over at a couple thousand feet. Also tie into the fact that spokane is a city in which semi's come through on a regular bases from seattle to transport goods to the east coast. So we have the addition of Semi's and their Jake Brakes coming through. This town can be a little noisy but I wouldn't say the reason for doing ADR is that planes are flying over. Just that it works best for us.

As for the sound... I just got to say that's awesome you thought it was Indie sounding because that was just audio from a cheap camera mic that was used to help for matching audio peaks in ADR... He posted those clips to get peoples take on the film and to play around with color filters. Like El Director said these are clips with CAMERA audio not the ADR that he has been talking about.

Hopefully he will post some of the ADR finished clips and you can see the improvment:)
 
Rippie said:
grecostudios, honestly no disrespect but you really need to
learn a bit about sound before you start posting about "how to do it the proper way"
on a public audio forum.
(No need to go into more detail. this simple sentence as you say tells my "spin".)

There is a whole forum here that you can read that will teach you a few things about sound.
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HAHA thanks but I'll stick with what I know and that is how I've seen it done through a lot of pro set ups. I know what I am talking about too and there are different ways to do it and this is how I've experienced on a shoot that wasn't an Indie. And that wasn't a proper way of doing just a few things that can and have been done. Point is I was hoping for a comment like yours because there have been a lot of post that the ADR that has been done on Leap is not the right way to do it. There are a lot of ways of doing audio (Don't believe me? Look up some history and specifics on the progression of audio in the last 30 years) Don't say it can be done until you have heard the end results.
 
grecostudios,

First if you want to do it your way that's fine but the title of the tread is "How do the Pro's do it" and what you describe is NOT how the pro's do it. It's not surprising that your "camera audio" sounds like a lot of no budget indi films, since that is what a lot of low budget indi films use. I will be very interested in the finished clips. I don't think anybody has said you can't do it your way. The reasons not to have to do with quality of sound and quality of performance and just plain time and cost. It's not costing you anything because your not paying anyone but that is not the case with a "pro" shoot. It is a rare actor that can produce in the studio a performance that matches the on screen performance, and lip sync is another issue. It also take a fair amount of work to get ADR to sit believably in the environment of the film.
If you do have a lot of sound experience, or even film experience, it doesn't show. You don't "talk the talk" and you obviously didn't spend a lot of time trying to shoot more conventionally. I have spent time in Spokane and it is not that noisy. You don't have to shoot on truck routes, yes there is train traffic... they have schedules and it's pretty easy to figure out where they run. Spokane is pretty big and sprawling and you are right up against miles and miles of farm land. A 15 min drive and your in rolling hills and small towns.

Anyway it's all sort of Moot. If you ever get around to posting the clips we'll actually have something to talk about till then it's just you claiming it sounds great and experienced people doubting it. The only cases of "pro's" doing it your way that I can think of off hand are Fellini, who dubed everything - but he didn't care about sync and he knew 90% of his audience was going to see a dubbed version anyway and the original StarWars, which was very heavily ADR'd because of the sets. If you get a copy of the original (before it was released on DVD) and give it a close look you will see very rubbery ADR.
 
Noiz2 said:
grecostudios,

First if you want to do it your way that's fine but the title of the tread is "How do the Pro's do it" and what you describe is NOT how the pro's do it. It's not surprising that your "camera audio" sounds like a lot of no budget indi films, since that is what a lot of low budget indi films use. I will be very interested in the finished clips. I don't think anybody has said you can't do it your way. The reasons not to have to do with quality of sound and quality of performance and just plain time and cost. It's not costing you anything because your not paying anyone but that is not the case with a "pro" shoot. It is a rare actor that can produce in the studio a performance that matches the on screen performance, and lip sync is another issue. It also take a fair amount of work to get ADR to sit believably in the environment of the film.
If you do have a lot of sound experience, or even film experience, it doesn't show. You don't "talk the talk" and you obviously didn't spend a lot of time trying to shoot more conventionally. I have spent time in Spokane and it is not that noisy. You don't have to shoot on truck routes, yes there is train traffic... they have schedules and it's pretty easy to figure out where they run. Spokane is pretty big and sprawling and you are right up against miles and miles of farm land. A 15 min drive and your in rolling hills and small towns.

Anyway it's all sort of Moot. If you ever get around to posting the clips we'll actually have something to talk about till then it's just you claiming it sounds great and experienced people doubting it. The only cases of "pro's" doing it your way that I can think of off hand are Fellini, who dubed everything - but he didn't care about sync and he knew 90% of his audience was going to see a dubbed version anyway and the original StarWars, which was very heavily ADR'd because of the sets. If you get a copy of the original (before it was released on DVD) and give it a close look you will see very rubbery ADR.
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Haha what 4 posts and I don't "Talk the Talk"? Anyways there are some pro's that have done audio similar to how we are doing as you mentioned. We will see. Like I said I'm the producer so I'm excited to see the final clip come out and how it sounds on my computer. If it turns out as good as I've heard it (with music ambiance and so forth) then this can be a very effective way of producing a professional quality sound for those who need to pinch the pennies:)
 
Noiz2 said:
Anyway it's all sort of Moot. If you ever get around to posting the clips we'll actually have something to talk about till then it's just you claiming it sounds great and experienced people doubting it. The only cases of "pro's" doing it your way that I can think of off hand are Fellini, who dubed everything - but he didn't care about sync and he knew 90% of his audience was going to see a dubbed version anyway and the original StarWars, which was very heavily ADR'd because of the sets. If you get a copy of the original (before it was released on DVD) and give it a close look you will see very rubbery ADR.
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From the wiki article on "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"(1966):

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As an international cast was employed, actors performed in their native languages. Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach spoke English, and were dubbed into Italian for the debut release in Rome. For the American version, the lead acting voices were used, but supporting cast members were dubbed into English. The result is noticeable in the bad synchronization of voices to lip movements on screen; none of the dialogue is completely in sync because Leone rarely shot his scenes with synchronized sound. Various reasons have been cited for this: Leone often liked to play Morricone's music over a scene and possibly shout things at the actors to get them in the mood. Leone cared more for visuals than dialogue (his English was limited, at best). Given the technical limitations of the time, it would have been difficult to record the sound cleanly in most of the extremely wide shots Leone frequently used. Also, it was standard practice in Italian films at this time to shoot silently and post-dub. Whatever the actual reason, all dialogue in the film was recorded in post-production. The relationship between Eastwood and Leone had remained strained from their previous collaboration and it only worsened during the dubbing sessions for the US version because the actor was presented with a different script than the one they had shot with. He refused to read from this new version, insisting on using the shooting script instead.
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This is way too funny.
with such a low post count, this has to be a troll.
Too funny not to be.
 
JordanBlock said:
Of course the ADR is an improvement over the production sound, you put absolutely no effort into the production sound!
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Right but the point was that it was decided early on by the director that we were going to do ADR for the whole movie.

I have to say it was an experience during our Foley sessions. The subtle sounds that you have to pick out and what you use to make those sounds! It was actually kind of fun to go through and make the different sounds for everything. I hope we can see what you guys think, always helps to have multiple points of view on something like this.
 
Complete ADR/Foley is insanely time-consuming. I did it on a half-hour TV show and IIRC, it took well over a hundred hours. We had excellent talent involved, and I'm a *very* skilled audio engineer, if I may say so myself...

Getting excellent production sound whenever possible, at any budget level, should be a top priority.
 
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grecostudios said:
Haha what 4 posts and I don't "Talk the Talk"?
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OK lets use actual quotes.

"I have had a lot of experience in working cross the platform of Radio, T.V. and some local Indie films. "
That's you on the thread about this film. I don't think "and some local indi films" counts as a bunch of "pro" experience.

This is also the directors second feature which he shot in 12 days. The first one had a $600 budget - total.

So no you do not talk like a pro and you don't have any real pro film experience.
 
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grecostudios said:
I'm excited to see the final clip come out and how it sounds on my computer. If it turns out as good as I've heard it (with music ambiance and so forth) then this can be a very effective way of producing a professional quality sound for those who need to pinch the pennies
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1. "How it sounds on my computer" and "a very effective way of producing a professional quality sound" should never be put this close together... unless your computer just happens to be plugged into a calibrated monitoring system in an acoustically treated mixing stage.
2. "with music ambiance and so forth" it should always be an option for the director to take the music away from a scene during the final mix if he sees fit, and not have the underlying vocal tracks sound like crap as a result. Music is NOT supposed to mask problems with the sound, but should be used when it's right for the moment.
 
For many years, decades, I believe, most if not all Italian movies were shot MOS with dialog dubbed after the fact. It was just their way of doing things. There is even a scene in Truffaut's "Day for Night" in which an actress who can't for the life of her remember her lines finally yells at the director "why can't we just do it the Italian way, la la la la la la..."
 
I thought about doing everything ADR once upon a time because my friend owns a kick ass music studio that he rents out to bands. But I don't see how it's possible to match audio to an (on-screen) performance consistently and favorably. Obviously if the actors back is to the camera, that's fine (it's a trick animators use a lot of the time to cut costs), but if I said "The dog walks across the filthy road," thinking about it from a performer's perspective I'd have to study and then recreate the EXACT rythme and intention of that original performance.

Having the camera's original audio would help the actor, of course, but still -- seems like a lot to go through. Especially since you could probably get an experienced sound person with equipment on set for a thousand bucks for the entire shoot!

Whatever your film (not marketing) budget is, the quality should be pretty consistent across the board. Assuming you're going to edit, write and direct or have one or all of them done at no cost, a budget, IMO, should fall to:

60% technicians, 40% talent.

So if you have a 5K budget, you should delegate 3K to your tech guys (lighting if you need it, sound if you need it -- either using their equipment or renting your own) and 2K to your actors (including the cost of feeding them).

Of course, IMO, your marketing budget should always be 60% of your total budget (so in this case your true budget would be on about 11K), but that's something else entirely. ;)
 
Chamber005 said:
Obviously if the actors back is to the camera, that's fine (it's a trick animators use a lot of the time to cut costs), but if I said "The dog walks across the filthy road," thinking about it from a performer's perspective I'd have to study and then recreate the EXACT rythme and intention of that original performance.
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It has been claimed that Mumbles Brando would intentionally mess up in the 'on set' scene shooting, so he could redo it in ADR and change his vocal presentation... don't know if that's true or not...

Orson Wellws would also 'add' his own rendition via ADR to other people's lines...


Here's a funny note that...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max

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When the film was first released in the United States, all the voices, including that of Mel Gibson's character, were dubbed by U.S. performers at the behest of the distributor, American International Pictures, for fear that audiences would not take warmly to actors speaking entirely with Australian accents. Much of the Australian slang and terminology was also replaced with American usages (examples: "See looks!" became "See what I see?", "windscreen" became "windshield", "very toey" became "super hot", and "proby" -probationary officer- became "rookie"). AIP also altered the operator's duty call on Jim Goose's bike in the beginning of the movie (it ended with "Come on, Goose, where are you?"). The only dubbing exceptions were the voice of the singer in the Sugartown Cabaret (played by Robina Chaffey), the voice of Charlie (played by John Ley) through the mechanical voice box, and Officer Jim Goose (Steve Bisley), singing as he drives a truck before being ambushed.
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My opinion is that if the ADR 'works', and doesn't come off sounding like an Italian Porn movie (also ADR'd to death...), if the talent for the no-budget production wants to work on it, etc. do what needs to be done.


Here's another note that from a Creative Cow article:

http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/adr-hollywood-dialogue-recording-secrets

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But no, ADR is very specific: voices, most often a line at a time. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. There's a whole set of "gotchas" that are a library's worth of articles by themselves, around the problem of making words spoken in the studio sound like they were actually recorded on location.

James G. Stewart, head of post-production at RKO Studios, talks about one such challenge when working with Orson Welles on "The Magnificent Ambersons."

There were six principals involved in the dialogue, and I recorded each one separately to the picture. This was done without Orson being on the stage. I then combined these tracks and rerecorded them with the necessary motor noise of the old-type automobile.

On running the result with Orson, he said "It's all right technically, but it's no good from the standpoint of realism. I don't feel that the people are in the automobile. There's no sense of movement in their voices; they're not responding to the movements of the car. The voices are much too static."

So I went back to the recording stage and redid all of the lines. This time they were done with the actor or actress and myself seated on a twelve inch plank suspended between saw-horses. As we watched the picture I simulated the movement of the car by bouncing the performer and myself up and down on the plank. After a week of bumping, I had a track which I then rerecorded and ran for Welles. His only comment was "That's very good". Orson was not given to exaggerated praise of anyone's efforts.
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The actors really don't have that hard of a time. You'd be surprised. From a syncing standpoint, yes, it can get fun sometimes. Every once in a while, you might have to time-stretch the audio by a few frames. Imperceptible to the ear, but enough of a change that the audio fits.

And I totally agree with Orson Welles' technique. I've used similar tactics on my previous shorts and now features. Another classic example is making the actors do pushups or jumping jacks before recording a scene where they need to be breathless. They used this on Revenge of the Sith, which was also 80% ADR.

So is my method how the pros do it? Probably not. Does it sound like the pros? Yes. I realize the OP was asking about how the pros do it, but I feel that this is one of those things that if you have to ask how to do a certain way, you're probably not ready to do it yet, which is why I mentioned the ADR method. If someone doesn't have money, or crew, or even equipment, it's still possible to have good sound using ths method.

This is also the directors second feature which he shot in 12 days. The first one had a $600 budget - total
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Here's another fact-my first feature had good sound.
And another-I didn't just make this up for that feature. I came up with it doing 40 shorts over six years.

I can see that many people here are too closed minded and set in their ways to consider this a viable solution, so I'll drop of this thread. I will still post the clip as an example later today for anyone that's interested.

Peace.
 
El Director said:
I can see that many people here are too closed minded and set in their ways to consider this a viable solution
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Know why it's not considered a viable solution? In the professional world, things cost money. Do some films have huge amounts of ADR? Sure. They also have huge budgets.

If your system gives you a result you're happy with, that's great.
 
Ok, no offense but that doesn't sound "real" nor does it sound "pro". It's an ok start though.


Honestly, in the end as long as your happy with it, thats all that matters,
but to say over and over what you were doing is not only "easier" but better?!?

*shrug*
 
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I'll add this though..

In all fairness, with the framing you had going on, and the angles of the actors
a boom would have been more than likely just ambience to open up 2 wires.

And because of the extremely tight shirt on the guy, and the extreme type movements
even with a skilled pro doing sound, you might have ended up ADR'ing this scene anyway.

Of course, wild lines on set would have been the best option if the wires
didn't work out so well.
 
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