Audio for reality TV: getting real often means poor quality audio, and quick turnarounds don't make audio pros jobs any easier

Post, Jan, 2004 by Christine Bunish

Cavanaugh provides a stereo mix as split stems--narration, dialogue, music, sound effects--which go back into the Avid for various segment outputs.

CHALLENGE: INTELLIGIBLE AUDIO

Lending his talents to the more extreme side of reality programming is Terrance Dwyer, a re-recording mixer working at LA's Wild Woods (www.wwoods.com). Dwyer has mixed every episode of the Survivor franchise, netting an Emmy for the second season. He has also mixed all but the first six episodes of the Fear Factor series, which is in the middle of its fourth season.

"We approached Survivor differently from the reality shows that had come before by doing a film-style dialogue and effects edit with full M&E," Dwyer explains.

While he is continually challenged to make the audio for Survivor beautiful, "it's a constant battle just to make it intelligible." While care is taken with the location sound, the locales are often fraught with noise: guess why the insects in Borneo were called "car-alarm bugs?"

Central to the dialogue-driven Survivor is the desire to make the audio flow. "Much of it is dialogue intercut with interviews recorded in different locales and at different times of the day," says Dwyer. "It has a dramatic feel and is mixed like a traditional drama." He spends his time ensuring that the location dialogue recorded by camera and boom mics "is as pristine and evenly mixed as possible."

Fear Factor, with its high-intensity, high-tech competitions, is action-adventure to the core. "There are speeding cars, trucks, helicopter and speed boat stunts, extreme point-of-view effects and people taunting and rooting," Dwyer points out.

Fear Factor is now using the Fostex PD6 DVD-RAM recorder for field acquisition. "There can be as many as 28 contestants so that's a lot of lavs," Dwyer notes. Supervising dialogue editor Ryan Owens performs the dialogue edit and converts the OMF to a Pro Tools session for Dwyer.

"The OMF is transformed into six-plus channels of dialogue and more for production, host and voiceover," says Dwyer. He also receives another 30 to 40 channels of effects, eight channels of Foley, plus three or more music pairs. "The show really maxes out the Pro Tools system. It's usually at the maximum 64 channels for a Pro Tools 5.1.3 system with additional tracks unvoiced. I'm flipping back and forth to get things I can't have online at all times."

Dwyer mixes partially in Pro Tools but mixes all the dialogue through a Sony DMX-R100 digital console. Mixdown is to a TASCAM MX2424 in "a traditional-style mix pass." He uses Digidesign's Control 24 control surface for automated effects, music and other stems, and performs clean up with Cedar's DNS-1000 and Dolby's Cat.43.

TODD-AO MEETS AVERAGE JOE

NBC's new Average Joe is no average audio post project. At Todd-AO Burbank, an Ascent Media Company (www.ascentmedia.com), Emmy Award-winning sound designer and re-recording mixer Rick Norman cuts the dialogue and music and mixes an episode in two and a half days--sometimes less. On typical one-hour primetime dramas, dialogue and effects editors will toil for a week before an episode arrives at the mixing stage. Reality programming's smaller budgets call for scaled-down approaches, which find Norman doing the work of several people in a very short time.