Audio for films: film mixers are using creative solutions to battle time constraints, smaller budgets and dirty production audio, all in an effort to get big sound onto the big screen

Post, Sept, 2002 by David John Farinella

Technology, which was supposed to make our lives easier, has now put audio post professionals into a bit of a pinch. Sure things are a bit easier for all concerned, but now the demands are higher than ever. Once upon a time supervising re-recording mixer Jeffrey Perkins, now of International Recording Corporation, had a whopping 14 weeks to mix the feature Dances With Wolves. His most recent projects have been due in just five to eight weeks. And it's not like the numbers of tracks have diminished, nor the number of effects, the quality of the dialogue or anything else having to do with audio for films.

That said, not many of the folks involved in the film market are complaining. After all, working on the silver screen offers some of the most exciting challenges that are out there these days. From balancing music and effects, dialogue and backgrounds, the collection of post pros interviewed this month by Post are continually excited by their jobs.

There are some obvious connections between these seven professionals, yet each takes a bit of a different track when approaching an upcoming project. Some take care to read scripts before they see a minute of film. Others avoid it as much as possible. Paramount's sound supervisor John Leveque explains, "Sometimes I have to read the script to do the project, because these days they are wanting budgets before they even start shooting. But if I can avoid reading a script, I will do that, because when you're sitting there with the printed page, you are imagining and when you're imagining you are putting words to pictures. That's what the directors do, and my pictures are never anything like the director's pictures. So, it usually throws me in a wrong direction."

These assorted professionals also differ when it comes to sonic approaches and styles of projects. From the high action XXX to the horror film House of 1000 Corpses to the futuristic Equilibrium, sometimes half the fun is finding creative solutions while facing challenges such as tight deadlines, lowered budgets and dirty production audio.

DUART FILM AND VIDEO, NEW YORK

Project: Thirteenth Child

Challenge: "The single challenge is how do we clean up particularly wretched audio, because we do get a lot of stuff that's shot on mini DV or on a DVCAM," DuArt's head of audio services, Carmen Borgia explains. "People have cut it on Final Cut and then they decide to do a tape to film, and then the nightmare begins." As an example, Borgia points to Thirteenth Child, which was shot in PAL on Digi Beta. "We wanted to figure out how to destroy the audio the least, knowing that there was going to be a 24-frame film out and that we were going to have to slow down all the sound" he explains. While Borgia points out there are a lot of ways to fix that, this time the team performed a sample rate conversion for all of the raw Pro Tools sessions. So, we post-conformed in Pro Tools and then we sample rate converted all of the raw audio with Digi Translators," he says. "Then we got NTSC finals of the film out and we cut all of the rest and added the rest of our audio -- effects and music -- in NTSC. That meant that the dialogue got shifted, but nothing else did. It was a neat trick."

Tools: Pro Tools was the tool of choice when they performed the shift, and DuArt is wildly dependent on the Waves plug-ins, Borgia says. For cleaning up production dialogue DuArt uses Dolby CAT 43. If they are doing a full-blown mix, they'll move to the large mix room that features an Euphonix CS3000. Thirteenth Child was done in Pro Tools along with Akai's digital dubbers and TASCAM DA-88s.

Tip: "A really good tip is when exporting an OMF out of Pro Tools for some online device, like a Symphony, you have to consolidate the media in Digi Translator to the frame, because if you don't, it goes into the Symphony and the Symphony only sees frames," says Borgia. "If it goes in and it's not quantized and consolidated to the frame, then the Symphony thinks it's the wrong sample rate."

(www.duart.com)

SKYWALKER SOUND

Project: Blood Work

Challenge: While working on Blood Work, a classic police story that has long dialogue scenes, re-recording mixer Christopher Boyes had to enhance the scenes without drawing attention away from the dialogue. "The hardest thing was to keep those alive without them feeling redundant, knowing that there wasn't anything else happening other than dialogue on screen," he says. "We knew going into it that there wasn't going to be a whole lot of music and what music there was, Clint [Eastwood] may decide to leave in or take out. Obviously, the dialogue keeps you engaged, but you want to create this world around it. That was probably the toughest thing from the mixing standpoint.

"The other side of that is it requires a tremendous amount of mixing, both in the pre-mix and the final to keep it from coming too thick, because you have a lot of material and you want to pick the appropriate material rather than all of the material."

Tools: Blood Work was mixed in Skywalker Sound's Mix A, which boasts an AMS Neve DFC console. "In terms of reverb, I still use the Lexicon 480 and I use the TC 6000 quite a bit," he states. The TC 6000 came in handy because Boyes likes to build custom paths when working on an exterior scene and he could build the whole thing within the TC 6000 because it has four engines.