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

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For Average Joe, Norman blends interview bites, many of them from the field, with audio from the group activities the female contestant stages for her pool of prospective suitors. Interviews may be stitched together from sound bites uttered during the course of a day or an event, so Norman is challenged to make different ambiances and sentence fragments flow into seamless sentences.

Working on a Pro Tools|HD system and 32-fader Pro Control, Norman begins his dialogue edit with an OMF of an episode from the Avid editors. "In the beginning, when there are a lot of contestants, they often don't get the right mic digitized into the editor's OMF," he notes. "So I have to go back and find it amongst various DA-88, DAT or DV camera sources."

Norman relies heavily on Waves Renaissance plug-ins for dialogue processing but in extreme cases a Urei 565 notch filter and Dolby Cat.43 are used in the analog domain to reduce background noises.

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Norman has extensive reality TV credits, including Anything for Love for Fox, Scare Tactics for the SciFi Channel, Project Greenlight for HBO and the Emmy-winning American High for Fox/PBS. He met with the producers of Average Joe to discuss possible improvements in the audio process for next season. "A lot of dialogue gets unnecessarily clipped, which may be inexperience or improper monitoring," he notes. "The transfer from DV to media also needs to be watched.

"I often get dialogue through scenes in reality television that would easily qualify for ADR in any film," Norman continues. "With that not being an option here, extra precautions should be taken in the field in order to capture the best sound possible. By the time it gets to me, the damage has already been done."

RAPPING ON THE NEXT

Interscope Presents The Next Episode made its debut on Showtime in November. The battle-rapping competition combines an on-the-streets, urban perspective with performance elements. The series follows a pair of up-and-coming rappers in five different cities. Each show ends with one winner emerging from a head-to-head rap battle. The last show will feature the five semi-finalists in a showdown in LA.

The Next Episode poses distinctive challenges for freelance post production supervisor Jared Bushansky whose reality programming credits include MTV's Fraternity Life and Sorority Life, and the first season of HBO's Project Greenlight.

"Being gritty, raw and down-and-dirty is part of the show's appeal," Bushansky concedes. "You never know what you're going to get. They shoot 80 to 100 hours of tape in a week to get a one-hour show, and it's hard to gauge in the field what's going to work or not."

The four audio tracks of Sony's IMX format come in handy for the all-location-based show. "We record the lav on one track, the boom on another, and the camera mic on another just in case we need to use it with filters to get rid of extraneous noise," Bushansky explains. "The camera mic has saved us on a couple of occasions, including one impromptu shot with no lav and no boom."