temp sound

[smelni]

When people talk about "temp" sound - how polished is that typically?

For example, many festivals allow submissions with temp sound. How tight does temp sound need to be - clearly it must be audible and understandable and not incredibly distracting - but, typically, what does temp sound really mean?

 

[Noiz2]

From a Hollywood perspective it used to be very rough, but in the last 5-10 years it has evolved to essentially a premix. Studios are doing test screenings with the "temp" track so they want a "finished" track. For low budget festival submissions you can probably get away with a rough track. But this is what they are judging the film by so if your not a known entity it could hurt you in that they don't know how close to finished you think it is. You might try to do the first reel or so as polished as poss. so you can say the rest will be up to that standard. Sound especially tends to be SO BAD in low budget films that I think it might help to show them what your aiming for.