Online courses for editing, mixing, sound designing for film?

M

mcnys

Active member
Hello,

well firstly i would like to say that i'm not a beginner in audio world, i make music, and do sound design for simple video games as my full time job, i also record and collect my own sounds (field recordings, sfx, etc)...so recently i decided that...well i love film audio, so why not to finally do it, so i volunteered to make a sound for a short film (free ofcourse, the film was also a very low budget) for a local filmmaker, and well that was extremely hard, i never thought that making a natural sounding spaces, and sounds in them are such a hard work (the movie is simple, basicly just a lot of walking/running in different spaces)... BUT i loved it, althou the finished soundtrack was quite terrible.

well now there's a problem, i live in Lithuania, and there is no film or audio school, or any similar studies here, so my best bet to learn as much as possible are online courses and..well books hehe.

now the problem with books, too much of them are basicaly stories of how somebody made a movie soundtrack, but not going in to much detail(these type of books are fun to read, but you will not learn much from them)...so if anybody knows a good book on sound postproduction for film, that would be nice to know (like how to make sound fit to a scene, even if it's just a simple cloth movement).

ok now online courses...there aren't too much of them as far as i know, but for the price lightsfilmschool looks kinda good (a least youtube samples look kinda good), so maybe someone has experience with similar "schools", or can recommend me some other courses?

also if there are some dvd's or downloadable material with great "tutorials", please post the links, i will greatly appreciate it :)

right now, probably the best thing to do is just cut some scenes from movies (simple ones for a start), and remake the sounds for them for training purposes.

Thanks,

p.s. sorry for my not so good english, i'm not from english speaking country :)
 
A lot of the stuff linked above is more sound for filmmakers than sound for sound folks. A lot on locations sound and cutting sound in a NLE rather than what I think you are looking for which would be more about the process audio post on a big film goes through. The design, editing concept etc.

I haven't actually seen anything that covers all of it but there are a few resources that cover parts of it.

THE FOLEY GRAIL is a really good book on Foley and comes with a DVD showing some actual Foley work. Most of what you will find on line is staged Foley work. It really conveys some pretty bad information. Foley is a lot more "fun" than watching an editor work, so a lot of these videos imply that a lot more is done in Foley than actually is. The DVD with the book is actually what a real Foley session is like. There is a new edition coming out on the 14th so maybe wait and the older version will be on sale? My only quibble about the book is that it is VERY LA centric and completely fails to mention two of the most respected Foley facilities that happen to be out side the LA core. But the info is still solid.

Dialog Editing for Motion Pictures Is a great book on dialog editing from a big budget film post perspective. It's not an easy or "fun" read but it is loaded with information and best practices.

I have read good things about The Sound Effects Bible: How to Create and Record Hollywood Style Sound Effects

I have my doubts for a couple of reasons. First off the author, though a nice guy, doesn't create sounds for film. He has only worked on a few micro budget films, and didn't really like it. What he does do with a good deal of success is record sound FX for commercial libraries. A lot of these are kind of "pro sumer" libraries aimed at video producers and such and have more of that kind of feel, as opposed to the often kind of boring libraries professionals tend to gravitate to. Professionals don't buy libraries with things like "car crash" or "monster roar" in them because that is the kind of thing they are paid to create. Give them a disk with 1,000 different door open and closes though and they will be happy. So it's probably good for recording techniques and general SFX creation techniques but it is probably weak on the over all sound for film concept workflow etc. All of this is tempered by the fact that I haven't actually read this book. I do know the author a bit and know his work though.

****Update*****

I took a cruse through the book and I'm going to pick up a copy. It does have some of the limitations I mentioned as in it is much more about recording and gathering FX than it is about designing a film. But that is fine because it does have a lot of good info that I haven't seen elsewhere. And Ric is VERY into recording SFX, something more editors ought to have experience with.

Jay Rose's book I have also heard good things about but it falls a bit in the sound for filmmaker category. You might well want to pick one up of that type because it's still useful knowledge but I don't think it has a lot of what you are specifically looking for.

You might take a look in the stickies above since there is one on post sound that has a lot on the nuts and bolts of post.

The basics though are mostly simple.
Never use a single sound, always layer up the sounds you want to hear.
Breakdown the world of the film and figure out the "rules" because they will guide you in making coherent choices.
Break down sounds to the components that are important, and then layer those elements to create "the sound" you are looking for.
Humans LOVE melody and rhythm. If a guy is getting punched a bunch, making a drum pattern like sequence will sound more "right" than the right sounds in tight sync but not in a rhythm. You kind of need to force the hits to land on the beat. Even better is to edit/layer the hits so that there is also a bit of a musical nature to the progression.

Of course if you over do either you are getting into comedy zone so keep it subtle.

With the sound break down, you don't have to do it for everything but there are important sounds and toss aways. Some stranger opening a door to a house as we head down the street is probably a door open close you pull and use with out much modification. But the door that opens to let the lead into a tense situation probably wants to say something about the situation. If it's scary then probably the door is a bit scarry. Or it's solider and heavier than the audience expects (that could be scary - is it thicker because it's a trap...). Maybe the floor squeaks a bit, or the radiators pound or?

The point is know the world and fill it with the sounds OF that world. It's the world of the film NOT the world of the set. Room tone is usefull for filling holes in the production track BUT IT HAS NOTHING to do with the WORLD of the film. You need to create that world. Picture and lighting and visual FX can do some but your brain doesn't filter what you see in the same way it filters what you hear.

And this is the last BIG point.

The human brain filters how you hear things and what you hear. It does this actively and in the background and you never really know it's happening.

The result of this is that in the real world we hear what our brains have decided is important or dangerous and we don't hear what our brains decide is unimportant or safe.
Any unexpected sound gets a moment of notice, till the brain figures it out and decides it's not a threat.

In a film the audiences brains can't do this for the world of the film because it knows it's all on the screen and "safe". So you have to do this in sound post. You get to create the variable focus of the audience. IF you do that the world "feels" real. If we know one bad guy is sitting in the back of the room but the shot is of the hero and the other bad guy, we should hear the first bad guy shift in his seat or something every once in awhile because in the real world our brain would be very focused on noticing any change in the danger status from the unseen bad guy.

So that is all there is to it. That and a ton of time ;~)

BTW the rule of thumb for a Hollywood style sound track is 10 - 15 man hours per finished screen minute. Not counting the mix and any ADR. That is a lot of time for a feature with a one man crew. It can be done in less but it's very hard to really create the world in less time. Basically dialog takes X amount of time and what's left you have to create the world. If they stick you on a short schedule you don't have many options to speed up dialog so the important work of world creating is what gets cut.
 
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You might want to check out EditStock http://editstock.com/

Earlier this week I watched one of those free while it's happening webinars at Moviola. It was by one of the people behind this site on being a VFX editor. He plugged the site during the webinar, I hadn't heard about it before (I think it's new). Anyway I was pretty impressed with what they are offering for learning materials and I bought a couple of their projects (the Bully commercial and the Mixed Fighting commercial). I'm pretty impressed with what I got, It's hard to get real footage to practice editing with. They also have a selection of projects for sound editing/sound post work that might be right up your alley.
 
Nice link. They don't really have much in the way of sound they seem to think "sound" is composing. There was only one item that presented "dialog" problems that might work. The best would be to team up with someone who wanted to do visual editing and have them cut the thing and then you do the sound post work.

This is a really nice resource though for practicing visual editing. Stuff seems to be shot well enough. There are one or two of these kind of packages that have floated around before but usually as part of a film school project. So getting a variety of styles of decently shot material to work with is great.

It's funny though. I looked at the "edited trailer" for the fight trailer project and wow that was not a good trailer. The sound especially was just weak. Looking at the dailies demo I was a bit concerned from a sound stand point since the fighting appeared to be MOS.

Out of curiosity do most of the clips have sound? If not in some ways it's more typical of the kind of oops you get in low budget films. I would be layering up the hits and such but on a low budget I would try to steal as much other movement as I could from the footage.

I may get one to play around with. I have played with some editing before but I was always stuck with footage I shot and ... well as a director I'm a great sound person ;~)
 
All the clips have sound though the quality varies. The Bully stuff is much better than the fighting trailer soundwise (the boom mic appears after the cut on some shots). I wish they had more sound bits to be honest (it doesn't have camera sound and the recorded sound separate, all the scenes appear to have been synced up already or perhaps the camera was used as the recorder). The fight scenes all have sound but it's not clear how exactly it was recorded. Some of it is just a mic on the camera. Some of the interview shots they are holding a palm recorder up in the shot and the audio sounds like it came from the recorder (or maybe a boom) but there are no separate wav files. There are a few quicktimes without video of the little kid making car sounds in the Bully package, but not exactly an extensive amount of audio. Most of the audio seems pretty typical of lower budget films, but not horrible. There is no room tone on any of the clips I've looked at but most of the clips have enough air around them I'm sure you could grab some.

The site seems to have a smaller section focusing on sound editing but I didn't really spend much time looking at it: an animation that needs a score and some sort of thing about a soccer team. I recommend getting the free comedy scene. What you get with it is pretty much like what was included with the two packages I bought (the two packages were quite a bit larger though). It did seem like there was enough material to practice editing and dialog editing. I am planning to experiment with doing Foley effects on some of the fight scenes, I picked up Hiss & Roar's vegetable violence sounds last year and I think it will make a nice combination. Maybe even try recording some of my own to picture.
 
Mat,

Thanks for the run down. Minor correction on terminology, Foley is recorded to picture. If your adding FX that were recorded not in sync to the picture you are working on then you are FX editing. So if you use the library (a nice one BTW) that is FX editing, if you record your own it's FX recording, if you record sounds in sync to picture while it's playing that is Foley.

It gets kind of confusing since you can buy libraries of "Foley FX". What those are actually though are libraries of FX that would normally be done in Foley.

It's probably a question for them but I suspect that the scenes for scoring are edited sequences. So if they don't give you a bunch of sound files, or an OMF of the sequence then you are pretty limited in what you can do sound wise. Even the "dialog" one would be problematic if they didn't give you an OMF with handles. But since I doubt that most of their clients can deal with an OMF? If they at least gave you all the clips used in the sequence you could strip out the sound and sync so you could get handles and some dead air to use for RT.
 
The book list is pretty good; to summarize...

Dialog Editing - John Purcell
The Foley Grail - Vanessa Ament
The Sound Effects Bible - Ric Viers

Sound Design - Davis Sonnenschien
Audio Post Production - Jay Rose
The Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound - David Yewdall
Audio Vision - Michael Chion

I would also suggest that you spend some time at FilmSound.org; lot's of great articles, interviews, glossaries, etc. There are quite a number of LinkedIn groups as well.

I've read all of those books (and a lot more), devoured FilmSound.org, watched every sound related YouTube video and DVD BTS extras I could find, participated in every forum that I could, etc., etc., etc. But it's all useless until you put it into practice. I did every freebee I could get my hands on, and kept rereading, re-watching, re-listening, etc., as I went. It's especially great when doing a feature - I read Dialog Editing while I'm dialog editing, Foley Grail while doing Foley work, and The Sound Effects Bible while doing sound effects. When I was freelancing I would show up hours early or stay hours late to watch those with much more experience in action. Then I would start all over again - and still follow the same regimen. When I have down time I am always experimenting with mic techniques, Foley props, and going extreme with EQ, compression, effects, 'verbs, etc.; my "failures" are often more fun and more instructional than my "successes."


I cannot stress enough the importance of quality speakers and a quiet, balanced listening environment. Make sure that you spend a lot of time listening in that environment.

That's where you start. Once you have a solid comprehension of what is involved and have practiced a bit of audio post that is the time to decide if you need to receive some "formal" instruction, whether that is school, seminars, or finding a mentor somewhere.
 
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