Never put mic on camera?

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Noiz2 said:
This kind of goes to one of the first thing new filmmakers get wrong on a narrative film. Your story doesn't take place on a film set, so capturing sound ON your film set is capturing the wrong sounds.

You can shoot a "small room" in the corner of a huge room and the camera won't know, but it will still sound like a huge room.
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Right, and getting it right "in capture" vs. "in post" is always desired when possible. Spectral and physics-based sound tools are getting better and better, such as convolution reverbs and tools like these: https://www.sonible.com/proximityeq/ , https://riddlermike.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/deverb-for-free-removing-reverb-using-free-plugins/ , https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/spl_de-verb_plus.html , https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx/features/de-reverb.html . Once de-verbed, the anechoic sound can then be re-verbeb with convolution etc. for the intended sound location.

Something else I like about old films, such The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly series: all the sounds are done in post! Dialog, Foley, everything! Watching these kinds of films has this ethereal, other-worldly, dream-like effect, and that makes the experience special. Film itself can do this visually as well. Using "in capture" is faster and cheaper, and if the resulting sound fits the story/intended-mood, cool. And there's something to say about "in post" and being able to do literally anything, to create a completely different experience from normal reality.

I haven't used any of the high-end de-verb tools, however if they work well, that's a huge advance which will allow very accurate sounding audio mixes when desired, as well as intentionally 'off'/ethereal sounding mixes like the old Spaghetti Westerns.
 
I've tried a lot of the de-verb tools and they ALL produce artifacts when pushed. They do work, but are far from perfect.
 
jcs said:
Do any work well enough to remove most reverb to allow a 'masking' convolution to be applied with usable results? Might still be better than having to ADR?
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No.

Deverb plugins can save a bit of bounce off of slightly bouncy recordings but that is about it. It can help a pretty good boom track match a lav or take the edge off but pretty useless when there is a lot of reverb. I've seen really impressive demos, till you remember that they are cleaning up something like a flute, which has almost no overtones. The human voice is sonically complicated and hard to mess with and not have it sound like it was messed with.

The films you mentioned probably owe more of there "other worldlyness" to the challenges of ADR before digital editing. Those poor folks were trying to sync with 1/4 frame accuracy.

You can take it for granted that in any film made in the US with even a small Hollywood budget all of the sounds except the dialog were added in post. And that dialog was scrubbed of any thing that is not actual spoken words. Most edited dialog tracks on a big film sound like it was recorded in a sound studio. Every footstep, hand on a door knob, pen scratch, wind in the trees, birds song, and refrigerator hum have been added by the sound editors, sound designers, or Foley artists.
 
Noiz2 said:
No.

Deverb plugins can save a bit of bounce off of slightly bouncy recordings but that is about it. It can help a pretty good boom track match a lav or take the edge off but pretty useless when there is a lot of reverb. I've seen really impressive demos, till you remember that they are cleaning up something like a flute, which has almost no overtones. The human voice is sonically complicated and hard to mess with and not have it sound like it was messed with.

The films you mentioned probably owe more of there "other worldlyness" to the challenges of ADR before digital editing. Those poor folks were trying to sync with 1/4 frame accuracy.

You can take it for granted that in any film made in the US with even a small Hollywood budget all of the sounds except the dialog were added in post. And that dialog was scrubbed of any thing that is not actual spoken words. Most edited dialog tracks on a big film sound like it was recorded in a sound studio. Every footstep, hand on a door knob, pen scratch, wind in the trees, birds song, and refrigerator hum have been added by the sound editors, sound designers, or Foley artists.
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On really wide / far shots, where a boomed mic isn't possible, are they using a high-end lav and local digital recorder / digital wireless (Lectro, Zax etc.), or ADR? Because the sound, as you said, sounds like a sound studio (even a wide, outside, two people walking shot, etc.).

I'm not surprised the current de-verbs aren't there yet. However, the advances I'm seeing (hearing) in AI/machine learning systems leads me to believe in the near future, using a GPU or AI hardware, de-verb can be very, very good. This was 2015: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537101/deep-learning-machine-solves-the-cocktail-party-problem/
 
THey are using wireless, digital if the budget is there. Depending on the situation it might also be ADR, but generally only if the wireless doesn't sound good.

Now here is the asterisk (as in full disclosure). I do post and only now and again do production. I do know a number of production mixers and have seen what comes in on shoots with a budget. Nobody on a film with a budget would use an on actor digital recorder with out a hop to the "real" recorder. When there is serious $ on the table you can get fired for just about no reason, you blow a take you weren't monitoring and it's quite likely you won't need to show up tomorrow.


The problem with all noise/ problem fixing tools is that the tool can't tell what you want VS what you want to get rid of. So they work pretty well when you can specify pretty accurately what you don't want. That gets really hard with noises that change and things like reverb. It's just really hard to create the "noise print" that works over any length of time. The second problem is that noise vocal etc are not separate layers. As someone else said but I like to quote "noise reduction is like trying to get the black out of grey". So any extreme noise reduction has really bad artifacts.

Down the line... Yes probably AI will get to the point that it can map the sound you want to keep, providing what you want still has decent quality.

Which is the last catch. Often when you need to do a LOT of NR, there really isn't a quality recording there to recover. There is a reason it sounds bad and generally it's because it was badly recorded, and you can't fix that.
 
Noiz2 said:
THey are using wireless, digital if the budget is there. Depending on the situation it might also be ADR, but generally only if the wireless doesn't sound good.

Now here is the asterisk (as in full disclosure). I do post and only now and again do production. I do know a number of production mixers and have seen what comes in on shoots with a budget. Nobody on a film with a budget would use an on actor digital recorder with out a hop to the "real" recorder. When there is serious $ on the table you can get fired for just about no reason, you blow a take you weren't monitoring and it's quite likely you won't need to show up tomorrow.


The problem with all noise/ problem fixing tools is that the tool can't tell what you want VS what you want to get rid of. So they work pretty well when you can specify pretty accurately what you don't want. That gets really hard with noises that change and things like reverb. It's just really hard to create the "noise print" that works over any length of time. The second problem is that noise vocal etc are not separate layers. As someone else said but I like to quote "noise reduction is like trying to get the black out of grey". So any extreme noise reduction has really bad artifacts.

Down the line... Yes probably AI will get to the point that it can map the sound you want to keep, providing what you want still has decent quality.

Which is the last catch. Often when you need to do a LOT of NR, there really isn't a quality recording there to recover. There is a reason it sounds bad and generally it's because it was badly recorded, and you can't fix that.
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Makes sense re: $$$ budget productions. Do Lectro/Zax allow remote gain control on digital recorders? Seems like local digital copy and remote rewireless to main recorder would be most fault-tolerant solution. I've never used Lectro/Zax, however the SD limiters are pretty amazing, especially if you just kiss the limiter: pretty neural and transparent (Zoom F4/F8- no hardware analog limiter: not usable). I could see remote gain control for wireless being useful for dynamic environments. Just looked it up: both Lectro & Zax have remote gain control, pretty cool.

As for NR in post, agree, once you really get the noise removed, there are artifacts, which tend to be high frequency, "the crinkles", and I feel the noise actually sounds better. In some cases a Dynamics:expander can help nuke noise between speaking and seamlessly transition to speaking sections, which can work OK for vocals, especially if there's a post ambient track such as a shot-specific room tone (office, factory, spaceship etc.) or music/bed/drone (bed & drone examples for those unfamiliar: https://www.musicbed.com/songs?genres=ambient , https://www.soundsnap.com/tags/drone , you can create for free from scratch e.g. in Logic X).
 
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Were getting pretty far OT here but...

90% of dialog editing is editing. You cut out the junk between words and create a "air" fill track so the sound doesn't cut in and out. The tools have gotten better but I seriously doubt that dialog editors are doing much with plugins.

You are also vastly underestimating the amount of sound track work that goes into even a quiet and simple scene. A "typical" scene with no big action or FX will often have 16 or so tracks of background elements, 16 or so of hard FX (door opens, glass downs etc.) and 4-8 tracks of Foley (foot steps, cloth, etc.). Music isn't even considered part of the "sound" department, it's its own department, and the sound team generally doesn't hear any of the music or even know where there will be music/ score till the final mix. So on a film with a budget you could literally play it with out the music and not really notice. Music that is "practical" ie. coming out of a radio is usually considered part of the FX not part of the "music", though it usually comes from the music supervisor because of rights and clearances.

A good example is No Country For Old Men, which had no score.
 
Noiz2 said:
Were getting pretty far OT here but...

90% of dialog editing is editing. You cut out the junk between words and create a "air" fill track so the sound doesn't cut in and out. The tools have gotten better but I seriously doubt that dialog editors are doing much with plugins.

You are also vastly underestimating the amount of sound track work that goes into even a quiet and simple scene. A "typical" scene with no big action or FX will often have 16 or so tracks of background elements, 16 or so of hard FX (door opens, glass downs etc.) and 4-8 tracks of Foley (foot steps, cloth, etc.). Music isn't even considered part of the "sound" department, it's its own department, and the sound team generally doesn't hear any of the music or even know where there will be music/ score till the final mix. So on a film with a budget you could literally play it with out the music and not really notice. Music that is "practical" ie. coming out of a radio is usually considered part of the FX not part of the "music", though it usually comes from the music supervisor because of rights and clearances.

A good example is No Country For Old Men, which had no score.
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I definitely respect the amount of work that goes into a high-end production. A good friend of mine in Burbank does audio post full-time, and he's shared some Pro Tools screens on FB showing 70+ tracks and hundreds of samples. I don't do anything that complex and sold my Pro Tools gear years ago. Audition, Logic-X, Reaper and a fast computer are more than sufficient. My background is software, including computational physics, machine learning/AI and digital signal processing, so I probably look at problem solving for real-world audio production differently. In production, I strive to keep things simple, as that's actually harder than making things complicated. For our simple productions, after getting the 'best' mics generally available, and using decent preamps (e.g. FocusRite (really good value!) and Sound Devices (sure, you can spend more, but quite good for the cost)), I don't really worry about hardware/self noise so much anymore. I have chopped up dialog to remove environment noisy sections, however for me it's faster to use volume curves, etc., to manually 'duck' as I have fine control of audio transitions.

Getting back on topic, mic on camera is going to have a lot of extraneous noise/sound, and an expander (effect/plugin: part of Dynamics in Premiere and Audition), especially if you can edit the lines/curves, can work really well to quickly cut out that noise and not sound too shabby for simple YouTube videos. This can be done in seconds vs. minutes or hours doing it manually. For our little productions, I "get" to do everything: lighting, sound, shooting, recording, editing, coloring, 2D/3D vfx, compositing, sound/fx, music (sometimes composing simple stuff), etc. A lot of indie folks are in the same boat, so simple, fast solutions, which may not always be perfect, are good enough for YouTube. I've realized most people don't care about a little noise/room tone, and thus found it best to just leave it since no one seems to care :) When we did self-help videos for sale, then I took the extra time to make the sound as good as possible. Goes back to 'what is the intended purpose/use' of the recording...

No Country for Old Men is a great story and production. Thanks for sharing your insights.
 
Completely true. You asked and I was talking about big budget films. I don't do anything close to that level of dialog editing on low/ no budget films. I don't use a lot gates or expanders, I do that almost entirely with automation, but an expander targeting low level sounds can help with RT/ noise and reduce the perceived bounce in a room.

For a low budget film the typical Hollywood fork flow is very wasteful and doesn't get you much for the effort. Even on $$ budget films you could probably get away with not having super cleaned dialog tracks if you didn't have to do foreign versions and the director had a chance to hear the dialog raw. But neither is the case so a super clean track is needed.

The track count I gave was for a pretty low budget full film. Even before PT went to higher track counts Titanic had almost 300 tracks of FX coming to the final mix. These days ??? We were doing over 100 on 30 second spots10 years ago.

I should add for non post people that tracks multiply quickly these days because we keep things more separate than when everything was on magnetic film. So a 200 track film today is not necessarily a more complicated composition than a much smaller track count film from the 80's - 90's.
 
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I learned that a reason a boomed mic sounds better isn't simply because it is closer but because it is vertical. A boomed mic three feet above the actor's head will usually sound better than a horizontal mic even two feet from the actor's face. (This applies only to a directional mic, like a shotgun. If you for some reason mounted an omni on a boom, then this benefit is gone.) When vertical, it is rejecting everything around it, everything around the actor. It's vulnerable to noise coming from the floor or ceiling, which is a hundred times less common (though if you find yourself in an apartment with a noisy neighbor above or below you, a horizontal mic might be best). So, again, a mic pointed almost straight up or straight down at the actor's mouth should sound much better than a camera mic, even if the camera was just as close. I'm sorry, but for this reason, to me the video still sounded cheap. It wasn't because the subject was too quiet or because there was too much amp noise. It is simply because of the reverb coming from the walls.

I will say that one time I was shocked how good an on-camera mic sounded: outside on a quiet day. Even ten feet away, it sounded like I was speaking right into it. Because it was outdoors, there was no reverb. And I was in a quiet neighborhood. It also helped that I set the camera on a tripod, filming myself, so there was no handling noise --- another threat to on-camera miking.

Anyway, I understand you seeking to make the most of it. Even though the best-sounding place for a mic is on a boom a foot-and-a-half above the talent's head, the most convenient is mounted on the camera. It's like a hundred times easier, especially for a one-person crew and if the subject is moving. Often it's the only way you're going to capture the sound at all.
 
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combatentropy said:
I'm sorry, but for this reason, to me the video still sounded cheap. It wasn't because the subject was too quiet or because there was too much amp noise. It is simply because of the reverb coming from the walls.

I will say that one time I was shocked how good an on-camera mic sounded: outside on a quiet day. Even ten feet away, it sounded like I was speaking right into it. Because it was outdoors, there was no reverb. And I was in a quiet neighborhood. It also helped that I set the camera on a tripod, filming myself, so there was no handling noise --- another threat to on-camera miking.

Anyway, I understand you seeking to make the most of it. Even though the best-sounding place for a mic is on a boom a foot-and-a-half above the talent's head, the most convenient is mounted on the camera. It's like a hundred times easier, especially for a one-person crew and if the subject is moving. Often it's the only way you're going to capture the sound at all.
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It's a silly video, maybe cheap is the right sound :) In a non-reverberant room, mic-on-camera won't have reverb, right? Sometimes even with perfect mic placement, you're gonna need sound blankets or other treatment to deal with reflections/reverb. Here's a wireless lav outside by a reverberant tree (we didn't have any sound-absorbing shrubbery's available! (Monty Python had them all)):

Here's two mics boomed from above, pointing down in a relatively non-reverberant studio (Schoeps CMC641 on one channel and an Audix SCX-1 HC on the other (can you hear the difference?)):
Goal was high quality sound (zero audio post, recorded directly into a C300 II)- sound OK?

Your experience with outdoors and mic far away sounds similar to the conjecture that in an anechoic room, you can place the mic far away and not have any issues beyond system self-noise (discussed earlier in this thread).

As long as you get the sound you are looking for, or it's good enough (when there is no crew or time to set up a boom, no lav, etc.), mic-on-camera can work OK!
 
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Mic placement is important no mater what the space is like. Most mics change character when you get them closer to the sound. Also you want the sound of the dialog to sound like it is in the space you are looking at. If you record in too dead a space then you will have to add life to it in post.

The "tree" is not reverberant, you must be in courtyard or something. So if you didn't add any reverb to that it's pretty impressive that you got a lav to sound like a mic about ten feet away in an echo chamber.

#2 sounds fine. I would probably try some EQ to soften it a bit but it's clean.

But as I said a few posts back this is the kind of situation where you might well get away with a camera mounted mic. It's a minimal post "reality"/ ENG kind of genre where that "sound" works. A narrative film that had that sound would scream no-budget. Different audience expectations.
 
I didn't read every word of this thread, but just take this from looking at the title: Always, always, always record nat sound. That is a rule that should never be broken unless it is forbidden to record audio. Sending b-roll to a client without nat sound is breaking a rule of the business. Don't talk while shooting b-roll is another thing folks forget unless you are doing it for the editors benefit in slating the shots.
 
jcs said:
Your experience with outdoors and mic far away sounds similar to the conjecture that in an anechoic room, you can place the mic far away and not have any issues beyond system self-noise (discussed earlier in this thread).
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Yes, it sounds logical to me, although I would let a pro here confirm.

As long as you get the sound you are looking for, or it's good enough (when there is no crew or time to set up a boom, no lav, etc.), mic-on-camera can work OK!
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Sure, it can work, especially on Youtube. However, those Youtubers are getting more and more sophisticated. If they start considering it their job or main hobby, they get into cameras, lights, and mics just like we do.

I would rank sound problems like so:

1. Background noises
2. Reverb
3. EQ
4. Hiss from levels too high
5. Noise difference between old gear like the Shure FP33 and the latest mixer

So I would try to eliminate #1 and #2 whenever I can. The effect from #3 and #4 are probably subconscious but still worthy of your attention. #5 is probably bikeshedding.

Sometimes I wonder if we would please general audiences more if we approached our work thinking that we're doing a radio show that happened to have a camera as an added bonus, rather than as a motion picture that happened to have sound as an added bonus (Audio Quality vs. Video Quality).
 
i hadn't seen this mentioned regarding on cam mics:

When doing an interview with only one cam, I try to work out some camera movement so the interview isn't BORING. A two minute interview with zero cam movement is just painful to watch. If you are using an on cam mic, and move the cam, the audio can change enough to become inconsistent. You're moving the cam to either a different angle or distance, not to mention the possibility of handling noise.
 
Noiz2 said:
Mic placement is important no mater what the space is like. Most mics change character when you get them closer to the sound. Also you want the sound of the dialog to sound like it is in the space you are looking at. If you record in too dead a space then you will have to add life to it in post.

The "tree" is not reverberant, you must be in courtyard or something. So if you didn't add any reverb to that it's pretty impressive that you got a lav to sound like a mic about ten feet away in an echo chamber.

#2 sounds fine. I would probably try some EQ to soften it a bit but it's clean.

But as I said a few posts back this is the kind of situation where you might well get away with a camera mounted mic. It's a minimal post "reality"/ ENG kind of genre where that "sound" works. A narrative film that had that sound would scream no-budget. Different audience expectations.
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True regarding mic placement and recorded sound matching the intended space / mood / story. As we've discussed earlier, when directional mics are very close, we get the proximity bass-boost effect. Have you ever been in a large-ish, anechoic room, where you could get 10, 20, 30 ft away with the mic to source? Walking around in a large, anechoic room is a very odd experience, feels like something is wrong with your ears, like they are kind of plugged. Knowing that the main reason sound changes when we move the mic away from the source is due to reflections/reverb, and remembering the large anechoic room experiences, I'm curious how the spherical wavefront of sound actually changes as it propagates from the source. Clearly the energy spreads out as a 2D surface on a sphere as distance increases, resulting in the 1/r^2 inverse square law. However I haven't found any literature which shows predicted and measurable changes in harmonics / spectral distribution of energy with distance which would measurably change the sound.

Thinking in terms of particle physics, I don't see anything special with air molecules that would change the wave spectrally over time with distance (again, anechoic room). Combatentropy's report of a quiet outdoor space with only the ground as a reflector seems to verify this prediction.

Thus, source to mic sound does not appear to change with distance (other than amplitude), beyond the proximity effect. Instead, it appears that what changes is the relative signal to noise ratio of the source and reflected/reverberant/harmonics of the environment. Perhaps capturing an impulse as when used with convolution for post-reverb can be useful in removing room tone / reverb. Ah, folks have done this already: http://www.zynaptiq.com/unveil/ . Discussion and more plugins/tools: https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5783583

The reverberant tree was a joke, as was the shrubbery (Monty Python and the Holy Grail is required viewing haha). The lav recording was pretty clean, and we can simulate, apparently convincingly, an off camera mic in post with reverb.

The two hypercardioid mic example shows the sound we can get 'doing everything "right"' in a non-reverberant space. To be a fair comparison, we would need to record again with mic on camera at the same time as boomed close to compare results. The other point with the two HC example was a $500 mic sounds pretty much the same as a $1700 mic. Sure, if recorded into a SD or better micpre and good headphones someone might be able to hear the difference, but for YT it probably doesn't matter (I suspect the Schoeps might sound better in challenging spaces, and thus for full-time audio folks, the cost difference could be worth it). I kept the Schoeps for the same reason I purchased Stax electrostatic earspeakers: final quality is important to me, even though for online production that level of quality isn't needed most of the time, especially where content consumption is now frequently on mobile devices (highly compressed) and with really low-quality headphones (compared to Stax!).
 
combatentropy said:
Yes, it sounds logical to me, although I would let a pro here confirm.



Sure, it can work, especially on Youtube. However, those Youtubers are getting more and more sophisticated. If they start considering it their job or main hobby, they get into cameras, lights, and mics just like we do.

I would rank sound problems like so:

1. Background noises
2. Reverb
3. EQ
4. Hiss from levels too high
5. Noise difference between old gear like the Shure FP33 and the latest mixer

So I would try to eliminate #1 and #2 whenever I can. The effect from #3 and #4 are probably subconscious but still worthy of your attention. #5 is probably bikeshedding.

Sometimes I wonder if we would please general audiences more if we approached our work thinking that we're doing a radio show that happened to have a camera as an added bonus, rather than as a motion picture that happened to have sound as an added bonus (Audio Quality vs. Video Quality).
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You can simplify further:

1. How does the final mix sound to you (more important if you doing recordings for yourself / your team)
2. How does the final mix sound to others (more important if working as a sound guy for others, or are creating products for sale to customers)

I started with audio writing videogames, including re-creating 3D positional sound in real-time, computing Doppler, etc. My first "pro" ish recorder was a Sony MZ-1 minidisk. Still have it, still works (museum piece now haha). When getting into video (starting with 5D Mark II), I bought the Zoom H4n based on the online ravs. Terribly noisy. Then later a Tascam DR 100 MkII: noisy but not terrible. Then a Sound Devices: awesome! (USDPre2, as a camera preamp, computer recorder). The Sony FS700 had decent mic preamps, and so does the C300 II (SD is better, but don't want the extra complexity). Also have a Zoom F4 for ambisonic 3D recording (it's OK, pretty quiet, SD has better sound and has an awesome analog limiter). So once you get good mic preamps combined with good mics (even the $500 Audix is good enough), you stop worrying about self-noise. Sure, analog mixers can add more noise (I use an older Mackie 1202VLZ into decent Tannoy monitors on my desk), which doesn't affect any recordings. If you are using a mixer while recording, I'm sure you're aware of gain stages, and how to minimize accumulated noise, right? (i.e. minimize gain on the noisy components, boost on the clean components). I used to use a Cloud Lifter CL-2 with ribbon/dynamic mics (like the SM7B) before getting Sound Devices hardware. Also used to use a crazy-complicated RME Fireface 800, however after finding the relatively cheap FocusRite Scarlett 2i2 had better sounding mic preamps, the RME was quickly sold (ultimately didn't need that many channels/complexity anyway); held its value pretty well which was cool!

@gkantziper- good point on nat sound!
 
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ggrantly said:
i hadn't seen this mentioned regarding on cam mics:

When doing an interview with only one cam, I try to work out some camera movement so the interview isn't BORING. A two minute interview with zero cam movement is just painful to watch. If you are using an on cam mic, and move the cam, the audio can change enough to become inconsistent. You're moving the cam to either a different angle or distance, not to mention the possibility of handling noise.
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Good point! Which brings up the thought of an ultralight, camera-mounted, carbon-fiber/bendable-element rod with a hyper/super/cardioid element on the end, pointing down, to provide close-micing and moving laterally, in an arc, etc. while not having the sound change much. Something like this, only super light weight and longer, camera mountable base element: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...4018f_30_supercardioid_podium_microphone.html . This is probably too long, but you get the idea: https://www.sweetwater.com/store/de...-dJ0s18vG0U6iJzGCRJ52nj_D86DuxrMaAhuyEALw_wcB . This will provide a 'moving boom': allowing you to walk with the subject (when no boom operator).

For first-person-view types of shots, mid-side stereo can sound really "3D" "you are right there" and with headphones you will literally turn around sometimes, thinking what you are hearing is coming from behind you! The same effect on steroids can be done with 4 channel ambisonic recording + HRTF downmixing which also provides even better front/rear perception while also adding up/down perception (full 3D sphere).
 
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Wow feel like I'm back in college...

OK so yes I have been in a VERY dead space and no having a mic a long way from something does not sound like it's close miced. Particle physics have nothing really to do with this, but a fascinating topic none the less (I was a physics major for a bit). Sound is at the molecular level. You could jump down the string theory rabbit hole and all matter being "sound" but that is so far OT....

As a practical mater, even back in the dark ages when I was in college was this dream of being able to create from scratch a "real" sounding X. And we have gotten to the point where it is actually possible to fake most things. BUT it is kerq and easier in almost all cases to just go out and record it.

I hear kids talking about how to synthesise "rain" and I'm like it's 100 times easier to just record it, and it sounds better!

Think about the sound you want.ink about what you need to end up with. Do your best to get there with out needing a lot of post.

If you are not a narrative film that may be all you need.

If you are a narrative film and you want to not sound like a no budget film, hire a post sound person who knows what they are doing.
 
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