Reference Theatrical Mix from DVDs?

Q

qwerty123

Well-known member
I posted a similar question over at Social Sound Design, but I thought I'd see what the good sound people at dvx think as well...

So I'm at the mixing stage for a short film that is going to be sent out to some festivals. I'm mixing in stereo at a decent studio setup at my college campus (the best one we have there) with very good monitors and pro tools 10 HD. (Yes, my monitor levels are calibrated!)

I would love to be able to have a reference film (or films) against which I can compare my own work. Obviously, no two films will be mixed the same and no two styles will be the same. Even so, it wouldbe nice to have examples of how various types of scenes are handled. I know that most DVD releases of theatrical films apply significant compression and are often remixed.

So ----> can people provide recommendations of good reference films that are virtually untouched from the original theatrical mix to use as reference / learning tool?

The compression issue will be tough, I know. I just want something that gets close to the dynamics and levels of the theatrical mix. It would also be ideal to some how extract some sample scenes via handbrake (compression!!) to bring directly into pro tools for comparison. I know that handbrake or other programs introduce another layer of compression: I'm fine with the image being compressed to hell, but I'd like to get the audio as uncompressed as possible.
 
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DVD releases are routinely reworked for home release - they have to be because home sound systems vary so much. I don't think any I've got sound remarkable at all. I don't know where you can lay your hands on examples before being squashed for DVD release, sorry?
 
Actually most recent release films are not too mangled for video. With DVD and HD-DVD (RIP) and BueRay, the days of needing to highly compress the sound so that it would work on VHS are gone. It will be a bit more compressed but shouldn't be hugely so.

I would go for films that fit the genre you are working in and with a plus to films you liked the sound of. About all you can get about the mix these days from the film is the balance of music to dialog to FX. A lot of what used to be all the mixers job is now done by editors, because you can be so much more surgical with a DAW than a mix console.

With out knowing what kind of film scenes your looking for it's pretty impossible to give you example films.

A good place to start is the nominees for the Golden Reel (sound editing but that tends also to be the better mixed films) and the nominees for CAS (mixing). Those tend to be more focused on sound and are only voted on by sound professionals.
 
I'm looking for character driven dramas, like Michael Clayton... It's funny: I was monitoring some it in pro tools and the dialogue seems pretty quiet. The peaks for normal dialogue seem to barely get to -14db (maybe -12?). There's a good bit of range in their though, as some scenes get kind of loud.
 
Noiz2 said:
Actually most recent release films are not too mangled for video. With DVD and HD-DVD (RIP) and BueRay, the days of needing to highly compress the sound so that it would work on VHS are gone. It will be a bit more compressed but shouldn't be hugely so.
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So, with that in mind, would it be adviseable to look for Blu-rays with LPCM audio tracks? Most of these are found in older Blu-rays.
 
Personally I would listen to DVD's on a decent system. If you are going to be mixing a 5.1 DD full theatrical mix you can go see some films in screening rooms. But realistically if you are asking the question here you are not aiming at major theatrical distribution and you can't afford DD (Dolby Digital). Honestly the DVD mixes are not far from the original theatrical mix and If you didn't see that theatrical mix in an Academy screening or similar it is very unlikely that you heard what the mixers heard.

All you are going to get is a feel for the balance anyway.

And no I wouldn't get early release anything. The first films into new formats are often ones that were released in another format and just repressed. early DVD's (of older films) were often just the old video master authored for DVD.

The OP though is mixing in stereo. A choice I hardily endorse. You might try some Woody Allen films since he loves mono and all of his films that I know of were mixed in mono.

Just for slaps and giggles I will toss out some films that I think have great sound tracks. It's near impossible to separate out what is the "mix" from what is the "edit" except the balance between elements, that is all mixers.

Once Upon a Time in America - original un cut version.
Saving Private Ryan
There Will be Blood
No Country for Old Men
The Godfather
Great Expectations
Hellboy
Se7en

and at the risk of bias
Titanic
Directors that tend to have really good sound tracks.

Carroll Ballard
David Lynch
Jim Cameron
Steven Spielberg

There are a lot more
 
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Good feedback Noiz2 (and the gang)!

Yes, in referring to the "mix" I'm mainly referring to the relative levels and panning of various dialogue (i know main characters are 99% of the time mono, panned center), foley, ambience, hard FX, music, etc. And also how reverb is handled. And, if my ear is good enough, something about the EQing (although I know it's gonna be hard to decipher some things).
 
You know what's interesting... is that I've looked at least two films now--the Wonder Boys and Michael Clayton--and both of them have "normal" (non-shouting, non-whispering) dialogue peaking at just -16db.... It's interesting because one of my teachers said something about how normal dialogue should probably peak around -10db and I always thought that was a little hot. Granted, I'm not using the best metering: I simply used an individual track fader in pro tools. But I'd think that would be pretty accurate. And I know that really I should be trusting my ears and not the meters. But it's still enlightening to see normal dialogue around there.... (although I obviously can't listen only to the dialogue stem in these films).

Does this square with other people's experience of hollywood films?
 
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Films are mixed by ear in a calibrated room, nobody looks at meters except in a fun blinky light kind of way.

DVD's (and al the other video formats) are mastered for the medium. With out some calibration tones you have no way to know how loud the dialog is because you don't have a reference. The DVD mastering could have raised or lowered the level based on some requirement or policy.

BTW it's Foley not foley, always capitalized.
If your not careful the Foley Police will get you.

Foley Police.gif



And it would not surprise me if dialog was not super hot. They have a dedicated set of speakers that don't really do anything but dialog in the theatre, in a stereo mix you wont.

And dialog is always mono, though you might find in some very rare cases that it's panned a bit.

There are two reasons why it's always center, with pretty much no exceptions. The first is simply levels. A big screen is BIG and having an actor say a line in the far left will make it way too loud for someone near them or too quiet for someone on the far side. There is also the delay factor. From the front of the house to the last row of a large theatre is about three frames of sync. Films are mixed from about two thirds back in the house, so most people get the sound a little early and it's not too noticeable and the ones in the back have less sync so it is also OK. And the offset is the same for all the actors so your brain just compensates and you don't notice.

BUT if you have dialog coming from the sides the sync offset will be different for actors on one side VS the other side (depending on where you are in the house) so your brain can't compensate and "forget" the offset and it will be noticeable.

So if you are getting any dialog in the L/R it is probably either some reverb splash or your getting some decoding errors (more likely with ProLogic) or the device playing the DVD is doing something screwy.

If it's walla and such it's going to be all over. Really you should probably be getting nothing but dialog in the center. Mixers don't generally send anything there but dialog and some Foley (since a lot of Foley typically is actor related, footsteps, cloth, etc. and so naturally follows the actor and so you want it to be in relative sync with the dialog.
 
Yup... that's why I said 99% of dialogue is panned center in mono (it's probably closer to 99.9%). Yup, gotta watch out for the foley, I mean, Foley police.... :)

Anyway, yeah, what I'm simply curious about is the rough volume level of dialogue... I know you rely on ear via calibration... but it seems that doing that actually gets "normal" dialogue peaking within a particular range. And it's that range that I'm interested in, even if it is lowered or raised by some DVD authoring requirement. Even if you are in a room with calibrated monitors, there's still a question of how loud the dialogue should be, no?

Yeah there's no hard rules about this (and it would be bad if there were). But it would be nice to know if, say, 95% of hollywood theatrical mixes have normal dialogue peaking at -10db rather than, say, -16db... that makes a difference I would think since everything is often situated relative to dialogue rather than the reverse.
 
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OK what I am saying is you can NOT make that determination from DVD's. You are looking for an absolute number and that number is dependent on a reference you do not have.

The -16 you are seeing might well be -12 OR -20 on a mix stage, there is no way to tell from a DVD.

But you are also missing the point. Films are NOT mixed to numbers. There is no rule. If you calibrate your room and the dialog is a good level for you that is it's level. If you had access to the actual stems you would find that the dialog level varied by mixer and probably also be director. But the mixers don't care they mix by ear, they don't pay attention to the meters.

You can't "figure it out" anymore than you can predict the stock market. I know, and I have been there. You will think you can "figure out the formula" till one day you realize there isn't a formula. A mix is a living thing and it changes as it happens. If you are really interested read up on early writings on sound theory. Folks like Stockhousen. What level dialog needs to be at depends on what is goin on around it AND what preceded it. It's Very dynamic and Very context sensitive.
 
I gotcha.

I also realize that dia levels fluctuate across a mix depending on whether the mixer wants to emphasize or deemphasize certain words or backgrounds etc. So I wasn't looking for an absolute number, but rather a rough ball park. I've read some books and they essential say the same thing about their being no absolute number, that taste enters into it, etc, but they also usually give a ball park figure for average and peaking of normal dia (non-whispering , non-screaming dia). And I was just surprised that the dia levels I was listening to fell away from that level.

What I actually discovered when I listened to the original DVDs and not the copy I made via handbrake was that the dialogue (and everything else) was actually a good deal louder than what I had via quicktime. I think handbrake is lowering the volume on ripping to Mv4! And I think other people have reported this problem.
 
Mixers are ... Well to put it better FILM is a TEAM sport, and the director is the head coach. The mixers are not doing a lot of "I choose this word to be heard" stuff. Mostly they are making ALL of the dialog heard and then adding other stuff (the stuff I do) into the mix. Directors can radically change that mix. There is a lot of Editor, Sound designer, Mixer, as artist stuff that gets printed up. They ARE artists but they are working for the producer and then director (the importance of those roles can be reversed in some films) and that is a MAJOR component of what ends up,o the screen. Don't blame the mixers for Public Enemies, That's a director failure. I know the dialog mixer and could go off on him but it was NOT his fault. If you work on a big film you work for the director. There is only so much you can do, It's not your film. The mixers do not have control of the mix unless the director lets them have control.
 
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Noiz2 said:
Mixers are ... Well tom put it better FILM is a TEAM sport, and the director is the head coach. The mixers are not doing a lot of "I choose this word to be heard" stuff. Mostly they are making ALL of the dialog heard and then adding other stuff (the stuff I do) into the mix. Directors can radically change that mix. There is a lot of Editor, Sound designer, Mixer, as artist stuff that gets printed up. They ARE artists but they are working for the producer and then director (the importance of those roles can be reversed in some films) and that is a MAJOR component of what ends up,o the screen. Don't blame the mixers for Public Enemies, That's a director failure. I know the dialog mixer and could go off on him but it was NOT his fault. If you work on a big film you work for the director. There is only so much you can do, It's not your film. The mixers do not have control of the mix unless the director lets them have control.
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+1000000 Well put.
 
Don't forget that the notion of 'stereo' really only applies to home listening in general, not on just Cinema and DVD. Theatre (the kind with live people), live music and even musicals don't do stereo in the usual way. With the loudspeaker sources so far apart, it's frequent to have central clusters and all sorts of fill in speakers, that make the concept of real stereo pretty tricky. It's neat to pan the drum kit for effect so when the drummer goes bum-bum-bum-bum-bum across the tom toms, it sounds across the soundstage but it isn't stereo. Most is panned dead central, with the few stereo sources like keyboards panned left and right. In musical theatre, it's quite different in the professional shows. With a busy stage, the audience need to know where the key people are, so they can pick them out, and they employ proper sound designers, who select equipment that has the ability to help the audience localise the sound sources, so they know somebody is further away and left, or right and nearer - so it's common to find complex control systems that can automate pan, and reverb settings to make this happen. It's not perfect, and the cheap seats are never going to get the full effect, but it's better. This of course means that a stereo recording needs a completely separate mix, because the concept of lweft and right is confused by the third channel - centre. In many ways it can be like cinema - with a central channel but it's used in a different way. Mixing desks used for live music are now quite different from studio mixers, and different again for mixers designed for multichannel. Modern software systems seem the best way as they can be configured with multiple outputs so can handle lots of different sound formats.

It's so complex now, that a recording made for one format would sound very strange on any system other than the one it was designed for - so any concept of some kind of standard is flawed.

We have multiple channels, different delays, different encoding systems and most critically different sound rooms to listen in.

A cinema near me have not had their multichannel system even working for quite a few years, so no surround or multichannel, just L,R and Centre. I guess people just didn't know what it should have sounded like!
 
You are talking about concerts. "Theatre" as in plays, are a bit different. Sound designers in theatre generally don't have a lot to say about equipment, they are there to design the sound experience. This often uses a bunch of speakers in very specific locations and as a rule not a central cluster. There is usually a "stereo" set up but that is mostly for pre-show music and maybe if there is some general music thing that happens. more generally speakers will be placed for the locations you want sound to be coming from on the set. It doesn't work well to have that off left door bell come from central overhead speakers, so we will place a speaker back where the door should be and route the sound there.

paulears said:
Don't forget that the notion of 'stereo' really only applies to home listening in general, not on just Cinema and DVD. Theatre (the kind with live people), live music and even musicals don't do stereo in the usual way. With the loudspeaker sources so far apart, it's frequent to have central clusters and all sorts of fill in speakers, that make the concept of real stereo pretty tricky. It's neat to pan the drum kit for effect so when the drummer goes bum-bum-bum-bum-bum across the tom toms, it sounds across the soundstage but it isn't stereo. Most is panned dead central, with the few stereo sources like keyboards panned left and right. In musical theatre, it's quite different in the professional shows. With a busy stage, the audience need to know where the key people are, so they can pick them out, and they employ proper sound designers, who select equipment that has the ability to help the audience localise the sound sources, so they know somebody is further away and left, or right and nearer - so it's common to find complex control systems that can automate pan, and reverb settings to make this happen. It's not perfect, and the cheap seats are never going to get the full effect, but it's better. This of course means that a stereo recording needs a completely separate mix, because the concept of lweft and right is confused by the third channel - centre. In many ways it can be like cinema - with a central channel but it's used in a different way. Mixing desks used for live music are now quite different from studio mixers, and different again for mixers designed for multichannel. Modern software systems seem the best way as they can be configured with multiple outputs so can handle lots of different sound formats.

It's so complex now, that a recording made for one format would sound very strange on any system other than the one it was designed for - so any concept of some kind of standard is flawed.

We have multiple channels, different delays, different encoding systems and most critically different sound rooms to listen in.

A cinema near me have not had their multichannel system even working for quite a few years, so no surround or multichannel, just L,R and Centre. I guess people just didn't know what it should have sounded like!
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