Audio post for TV series: ever-tighter schedules and budgets challenge top TV pros

Post, April, 2004 by David John Farinella

the audio-post-for-television marketplace has quickly become one of the most competitive for both facilities and professionals faced with servicing creative shows with constricting budgets. It's a struggle that's sure to live on as the HD drums beat louder while networks look for ways to trim costs. Even with that said, facilities from coast to coast clamor for the steady work a network series provides and they are embracing the challenges of HD.

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Whether it's a sitcom or a one-hour drama, and regardless of where on the dial it airs, opportunities and challenges abound. What do pros working in this market sector see in terms of challenges and trends? And what about this month's NAB show? Is it on their radar screen? Read on ...

GOING BACK IN TIME FOR COLD CASE

Re-recording mixers Joe Barnett and Mathew Waters and supervising sound editor Cindy Rabideau make up the Ascent Media (www.ascentmedia.com) audio team at Todd-AO responsible for the CBS drama Cold Case. The rapid schedule and aggressive picture editing challenge Barnett, who mixes dialogue and music. "They are creating performances out of piecing together tapes of the audio to get more emotional performances from the characters and incorporating that very manipulative style in with the theme of the show, which is to go back and forth in time," he explains. "We usually incorporate the time-change convention with music and also with sound effects to make it seem like there's two different parts of the show--the present day where the main characters are trying to solve this crime and back when the crime occurred."

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Rabideau adds, "They do a lot of on-location recording in Philadelphia and there are a lot of exterior shots that are really difficult to do. We do some things where we match the present and the old together. For example, we had a character that we completely re-voiced the younger character of him with the older character. So, you have different aspects like that that will creep up every episode that gives it a unique quality."

The team relies heavily on Digidesign Pro Tools to pre-mix sections of the show before they hit Stage 3 at Todd-AO West, which contains a Focusrite Control 24 console and Pro Tools|HD. "We can loop certain sections of the show over and over again until we match each angle's EQ, reverb and noise suppression individually to each piece of audio that makes up the cue," Barnett says. "That's the best way to do it, because in the time where in a traditional stage you could roll over a particular section of the show maybe five times I could loop it maybe a hundred times, just dialing in on it and having very precise manipulation of each particular piece of audio."

The DAW approach has been key for this team as they work on four shows--Tru Calling, King of the Hill, Angel and The District--in compressed timeframes. Typically, Barnett reports, they'll do a quick pass through one day, replacing music and recording loop sessions the next. Often, he adds, "we won't get the loops for the main character until an hour before we're ready to mix, so that kind of thing really lends itself well to the Pro Tools environment."

That type of schedule is one of the predominant trends these three are seeing. "We basically have a day and a half to get the shows ready for playback for the producers," Rabideau says. "The schedules are much shorter and the budgets aren't as big and they're not so happy to go into overtime anymore like they used to be. We used to have an easy seven-day turnaround; now it's five days and some of them are even four days. Digital editing and mixing helps tremendously because the producers don't expect less."

Technology has helped immensely, Waters' says. "One thing the digital environment lends itself to is keeping the detail up on these short budgets and time constraints. As an effects mixer I'm still able to get the detail because I can do a lot of the mixing offline. So, that's the way the quality stays up and that's what our main focus is: the quality, not the speed."

Tips from the Ascent staff range from the technical--Waters suggests the use of a pre-fader send on the music with an extremely long reverb to get the time travel feel on the audio--to the personal. It's done within Pro Tools. "For me, editorially, I think the biggest thing is to have a very good working relationship with the mixers and the editorial staff," Rabideau says. "It used to be two separate entities and now it's kind of a gray area, so you have to work close together. Our sessions pretty much become the mix sessions, so you've got to work well together and you've got to have a good relationship."

CUEING ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

Talk about high demand with short turnarounds, for a late March episode of Arrested Development, composer David Schwartz of David Schwartz Studios (www.davidschwartzmusic.com) was asked to come up with 32 cues in a variety of genres. "Unlike a lot of half-hour comedies where the shortened cues are little transition cues that are very short and thematic and use the same palette of instruments, Arrested Development is full music, including songs and vocals included in the 32 songs and all different styles," he reports.