Room Tone

S

SDub

Well-known member
Hey guys,

Sorry if this is the wrong subforum, but out of the two audio-related subforums this seems like the right one! If I'm shooting a short video in a room with a computer, in real life one often hears a whirring fan noise (especially if the PC is working hard). So, when recording dialogue in the room you'd want the cleanest audio possible which means turning the PC off, closing windows, etc. When capturing room tone is your methodology to recreate the noise commonly found in the room (turn the PC back on, open the window), or is the intent to add a layer of non-edited noise to break the complete silence you might have with a totally clean dialogue track (the former makes more sense to me)?

TL;DR What's the cinematographic purpose of room tone other than to fill the gaps of complete silence between dialogue and sfx?
 
SDub said:
TL;DR What's the cinematographic purpose of room tone other than to fill the gaps of complete silence between dialogue and sfx?
Click to expand...

That's really not even the purpose.

Room tone is a recording of the natural, ambient noise floor of the set or location recorded at the same time as, and with the same mics as, dialog. The purpose of room tone is to assist in dialog editing so that the nose floor doesn't disappear as the dialog is edited together; it fills in the gaps between lines of dialog.

Yes, you need to capture both your dialog and room tone with the computer off (or at least noise-isolated if you need to see the operational screen). The sounds of the computer fan and the spinning hard drive are recorded separately, are added in post, and are classified as sound effects (FX).
 
Room Tone as used in films with budgets and crews is only used by the dialog editor and as Alex said just to fill holes in the dialog track.

On a film with a crew it's especially important because you do submixes. So when they do the dialog mix there isn't anything else playing and if you don't fill the holes it sound awful and choppy. However much of that may get mixed out in the final mix because it is essentially noise. You can get away with doing a lot less filling with Room Tone IF you never let the director etc. hear the dialog naked.

On micro budget films I'm doing the backgrounds and all of the FX so I'm not really doing a "dialog mix" and it doesn't live with out the "world" of the film around it. You will still need to fill some holes and ease in and out of dialog and if it's really noisey production you may have to use more than you want so it's not popping in and out. But it's a lot less than you would have to use (to keep your job) if you were working on a big budget film. Essentially you are only putting in what the final mix would leave in.

This assumes however that you are actually going to do a "proper" sound post.

Proper = you are doing a dialog edit and will add the "world" of the film with non production sounds. That can range from a pretty light pass to hundreds of tracks depending on the film and how detailed you want to be in building the world your characters inhabit. More isn't always the right answer but "nothing" rarely is.
 
Thanks for your responses, guys. While I'm most likely not doing anything as serious as you guys (I'm just a single dude havin' fun w/a camera), I still like to produce the highest quality content I can muster, and you guys shed some light onto the process of post-audio work. Thanks!
 
Could of sworn I read through all the stickies, but apparently missed a MASSIVE one. Thank you for the post, Noiz2.
 
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