Speaker 1: This week, we're going to do something a little bit different. We are going to take a look at a recent short film mix that I did. So I was a production sound mixer and also did the post mixing, and I want to walk you through the post mix just at a very high level so you can get a sense for what can be involved here. This is a four minute short film. If you have not seen it already, it's called Listen. It's posted over at the Uphill Cinema site. I'll put a link for this in the upper right hand corner. If you have not seen it yet, please go check that out. Give this a pause here. I'll be waiting when you get back. All right, let's take a look at what we have in the mix here. So let me give you a little background first of all on the production itself. This production was shot on a Sony FS5 to a Atomos Shogun Inferno recorder in ProRes RAW. Because it was shot in ProRes RAW, which was the director and DP's choice, they had to edit in Final Cut Pro X, which I believe is still at this point the only non-linear editor that can edit ProRes RAW. So in any case, they did the edit in Final Cut Pro X and then exported an XML file over to me, and then I got the mix over here in Adobe Audition. I actually did the mix here in Adobe Audition. Now, some people might ask, well, why didn't you just do it in Logic, wouldn't that make more sense? Well, I don't own Logic, I'm not familiar with Logic, so I'm using the tools that I can. That did mean that I had to do a little bit more cleanup work, because Final Cut Pro X as a trackless editor kind of throws the audio all over the place. It's kind of chaos when you first bring it into Adobe Audition. So that's really going to be the first step is cleaning everything up. Now, we also used timecode, so we recorded timecode. I recorded the audio to a Sound Devices 633, which has an inbuilt timecode generator that acted as our master clock. I jam synced a Tentacle Sync E to that, and then connected that to the camera and left that connected through the duration of the shoot, so that when we went to go to the edit, the person that directed also edited, his name is Austin Brenny, and he was able to very simply just put everything into Tentacle Sync Studio, everything was synced up and put out on a timeline, and then he was able to export an XML and bring that into Final Cut Pro X and get started on the mix. And he also did a lot of the work in terms of choosing which mic he wanted to use. So during production, we of course recorded with a boom microphone, which is a shotgun microphone, a DPA 4017B inside of a Rycote Cyclone to protect it from the wind. We also had a lavalier microphone on each of the talent, and who you're seeing here is a character whose name is Ty. And then over here, let's see if I can show you the other character, that's Jacoby. So they both had a lavalier microphone hidden underneath their shirts. In the case of Ty, actually in the case of Jacoby, he's wearing a DPA 4160 lavalier microphone, and we use the audio limited A10 wireless system to my sound devices, 633. And then Ty was wearing a Countryman B6. So that's kind of the background in terms of what we did during production. Let me just run through how I have things organized here. The editor and director sent me a very low resolution cut of the overall film, which we put up here on the very first track called the video reference. And Adobe Audition supports that, of course. And then of course, we have all of our dialogue tracks here marked with DX. We have all of our sound effects and effects, variously called FX and SFX. And then we have our music, left and right channels down here. And then we have our kind of working tracks here. This is where I put the stuff that we didn't end up using. So this would be the alternative microphone for that particular line of dialogue. And you can see there's a ton of stuff down here that we didn't use, and a bunch of automation that the editor had originally put in place there. And of course, we have our master bus here. So the process of working through this can take a while, and I'm not going to bore you with all the gory details, but you can see here, for example, I have an alternative clip of audio. This was actually in the car. The car was actually a fairly straightforward scene. That's the very first scene where we have Jacoby in the car getting the call from Ty, Ty asking Jacoby if he could come visit him and just have a chat. And the way this one was actually mic'd was interesting. It was in a car, and I actually just put a lavalier microphone hidden up behind the sun visor, and ran that cable down. It's actually running back across here, and then it goes down the column behind the seat, and the transmitter's back there, and then my sound bag is sitting in the back seat. The car was crammed. I couldn't actually ride in the car during the shooting of this scene, because we had the director, the DP, in the car, and there just wasn't enough room. It's a pretty small car. And so I actually had to kind of cross my fingers and hope for the best here. And in the end, it came out pretty nicely. We did have to apply some effects here to get the overall sound we wanted. You can see here we have Nectar 3, and we did some EQ, just a very simple EQ where we boosted the bass just a tiny bit, and we applied a pretty steep high-pass filter rolling off. And the reason for that, of course, is that the car is going to pick up all that sort of low-frequency rumble as it rolls along the street. And so that's what we did in that one. Pretty simple and pretty straightforward. We also, at the start of the, before the picture actually even comes up on screen, we did have this one sound effect from the phone. And let me just zoom in here a little bit so you can see it a little better. These were actually sound effects that we ended up recording ourselves. The director and editor, Austin, had actually put these into the original edit. He actually used a sample from a sound effects library. He didn't like the sound, though, from the effects library, so I actually went and recorded this myself. And I literally sat in my car and had Austin text me a bunch of times. He wanted the buzzing sound from a phone. And so you can see it was actually three different buzzes that we actually kind of pieced together. So the actual tone that I was getting when I was recording in the car was a single bzzz. But what we did is we actually got a whole bunch of them in a row, and then I kind of pieced them together to make it sound like it was a phone ringing. And we did apply an EQ here as well. In this case, we wanted a little bit more high frequency. So again, this is where, in mixing, you actually have to put all the sounds in context. And so the buzzing actually came through as a very, very low frequency kind of sound. It was kind of hard to hear. And he didn't want it to be overwhelming, but he did want it to be a little bit more present. And that's why we added this high shelf here and boosted it by a little over eight decibels. And we actually ran that all the way back down to just over one kilohertz. So we really were trying to boost up those high frequencies as much as we could there. We also had the sound effect of Jacoby picking up his phone. Again, that was me recording that same thing in my car. And in that case, we use a sound device, a 633, and a Schepps CMC 641. So that's a super cardioid microphone. And that turned out pretty decently as well. All right, let's move down the mix here a little bit. All this is dialogue again, all recorded with the lavalier hidden in the sun visor, which is just out of frame of the shot here. But again, worked pretty nicely in terms of picking up the overall sound. As the car drives into the park, we actually did record the sound of the car with a boom mic. So I'm standing right behind the camera operator, the DP, and sort of tracking the car with my shotgun microphone. So it's a very simple mono recording, nothing special there. We were keeping this one pretty simple. The turnaround time needed to be pretty quick. And so we didn't do any sort of stereo ambiances or anything like that in terms of recording. Then you can always add stereo effects in the mix here if you chose to do that. And again, this mix is pretty simple, pretty straightforward. All right, as we get to this point here, there are a couple of things here. We added some squeaking brakes. The director wanted some squeaking brakes to kind of sell the effect of these being an older car. These are college students, and they're supposed to be driving, you know, cars that aren't super awesome because they don't have a ton of money. And the idea here is he wanted to kind of sell that effect a little bit more by adding a brake squeak. This one we actually used from a sound library, and it was actually open, I don't remember where it came from exactly. It was a free sound effect, and that one worked pretty well without a lot of problem. You can see here on almost every single clip that I have, we have these fade-ins and fade-outs. And you'll notice too that I do it in a very specific way. So when I apply the fade, if you just pull it to the right, it goes like that. And I like to actually pull it down a little bit as well. It generally makes it sound pretty smooth and clean that way. So it doesn't kind of jar into the scene, that particular sound effect, it kind of gently rolls it in. You'll have to use your ears and play through it several times to kind of fine-tune it, but you'll notice I have all those. And then here are some cross-fades as well when I put, this was the car exterior sound. So this was, again, shotgun microphone recording each of those. All right, now this particular line of dialogue here, this is where Jacoby's in his car and says over to Ty, you're still driving that thing? And one of the things, of course, we wanted to do was make it sound a little bit farther away. And so you can see here I applied a very extreme EQ here to it, and I wanted to make it really kind of mid-range focus. So I rolled off some of the low frequencies and the high frequencies and kept it very middle, because I wanted it to sound like it's a little bit far away, and he's inside of his car. So our perspective, we're hearing just sort of this very kind of mid-rangey response. And so you can apply these effects both at the clip level and at the track level, and this one I applied just to this individual clip right here. Now here's where we have our first few lines of dialogue. They do their hug, their bro hug, and then they start talking. Now Jacoby's audio came out pretty nicely here. In a lot of cases, I think with Jacoby's here, we ended up using the boom mic. On Ty, we actually ended up using the lav mic, and part of that was because it ended up cutting better with the boom on Jacoby for those particular shots. So that's sometimes a factor in deciding which microphone to use. And the problem I ran into here and really struggled with, and I'm still not totally satisfied with the way it came out, but at the start of Ty's lines here, he sounds a little muffled, and I think that's because he's sort of looking down, and so we're getting a whole bunch of bass, and I tried to EQ that a little bit to kind of clean it up and make it a little bit more present, and that helped some, but if I could go back, I'd probably spend a little bit more time on that particular line. That's the one line that I think is a little bit muffled and a little bit difficult to hear. But again, Jacoby's lines came out beautifully with the shotgun mic. Now you'll notice here I also have this ambiance track here. One of the things that the director told me, Austin, was, hey, I don't want this to sound like it was recorded in a studio, and a lot of times what will happen is that relatively new directors or editors will be a little bit astonished when they first get the production audio. They'll be like, oh, wow, it sounds really clean. And obviously that's kind of our goal, is we want to capture clean production audio, but they were a little distressed, like, oh my gosh, it sounds too clean, like it almost doesn't sound like they're at the park. And so one of the things I had done is I showed up early for production before we started shooting and captured a whole bunch of audio clips of the ambiance of the park so that once we got rolling, I would already have all that work done and I could add that back in in post as necessary. And you can see here, in that case, we definitely wanted to add some of that ambiance back once we got to the park scene. More of Ty's dialogue. At this point, he's looking up a little bit more and so it sounded pretty good and I didn't have to do nearly as much work there. You can see I did apply an overall parametric equalizer, again, really kind of trying to pull down that muffled sound from his lavalier microphone. He's wearing the Countryman B6 and that one can sound a little bassy sometimes, but we really kind of rolled that off pretty extremely and really kind of used a high shelf here to kind of bring a little bit of more sparkle to his voice and make it cut through in the mix a little better. All right, you can see here now our music has come in here and the first thing I did is as the music came in, we were still in the midst of dialogue. In some cases, this is where the music's really, really low, so we automated it. You can see it's really low and we just barely start to bring it up there. But as we bring it up, let's see here. We'll get back to that a little bit later, but the idea here is that you may want to change the effects that you apply to that same clip differently throughout the course of the film, and we'll get to that in a little bit here. We do have the soccer effects again. We did show up early and capture a lot of those kind of ball kicks and the ball hitting the ground, the ball hitting, you know, an arm or a chest and all those different things. But what was interesting is I ended up using mostly the lavalier microphones that the actors were wearing while they were kicking the ball back and forth, and it actually ended up sounding, I think, more convincing because you also have the park ambiance in there, and it just sounded much better than I had expected. So we didn't end up using a lot of the effects that I had recorded prior to production that day. So we have all the kicks and there's some talking in there as well. It kind of sits down below the music a little bit, but it kind of sells this feeling of, hey, here's a friend listening to another friend who's kind of in a tough spot in his life, and it worked out pretty well on that front. Now you can see here I had to judiciously decide when the park ambiance should be there and when it shouldn't. And in some cases it was getting to be too much based on the other clips I had going at the same time. So you can see here's a portion where I actually cut the ambiance out altogether. And then we go back into some more dialogue here. And you can see once we go into the dialogue here, here's the music, you're going to see that during this part we applied a pretty aggressive EQ filter here to the music so that the dialogue wouldn't be competing with the music too much. And so I don't have to pull down the volume of the music quite as much when I do something like this, because effectively I'm pulling down the volume of the music, but basically only in the middle of the overall frequency spectrum where there's going to be most of the dialogue. So this is a good way to make sure that the music is not competing with the dialogue. Now I actually did this on a film earlier in my career, and I was working with a director and a first-time composer, and the first-time composer kind of freaked out because I think they were thinking, what in the world are you doing, you're destroying my music track. But in the end it comes down to the director and what they're trying to accomplish with the film. Yes, music can move people emotionally, and it should do that. But I think this first-time composer didn't realize that sometimes that meant that music, during dialogue at least, had to kind of take a backseat a little bit. It's still there selling the effect and kind of conveying the right feel, but it's not the full frequency spectrum, and that's okay. By the way, the track that we used here was a track from Musicbed, so it was a licensed track from Musicbed that worked out pretty nicely for our particular purposes. You can see here we automated the sound down quite a lot when it's a wide shot, obviously because they're farther away, and we didn't want them to sound like they were close. Pretty obvious stuff here. Then we have some more dialogue here, and here's their kind of park bench scene where they're talking. And now as we move back into the scene back at the parking lot when they're done talking and they're getting ready to go, you can see here that I applied that EQ again to the music again because they're going to start talking some more. You can see here actually on this part of the music clip where they're not talking, we did not apply that EQ, and then when they start talking again we applied that EQ. So there's some things there. We have a sound effect here. We have the car. Oh yes, so there was an interesting little part here. Right in the middle of the dialogue, we did obviously multiple takes over each shoulder during the production, and then what happened was during the take that the director liked the most, the performance of Ty, there was this car that drove by the park. We didn't have any sort of special permits, we're just working in a public space, and this really, really loud car goes by, and I had to find a way to deal with that. And of course I did some cleanup in iZotope RX. In fact you might be able to see it here. Not as easy to see here, but in any case I did do some cleanup in iZotope RX, but again the car was so loud and so broad spectrum in terms of the overall frequencies that it was affecting that there wasn't a great way to completely remove it. And that would have resulted in too many artifacts and a really strange sound. And so what we did instead is we actually added, when we made this cut it became very obvious. So when Ty's talking there's that revving car, as soon as you cut to Jacoby, that revving car is suddenly gone. Because again this was a separate take. And so we had to find some way to make that work. And here's a case where actually adding a somewhat potentially undesirable sound can actually help. And so what I did is I added this revving car sound and quickly faded it out. So what happens is you can hear the car, but it sounds like it just drives off into the distance. And so that's a trick that you can sometimes use to help manage uncontrolled sounds, especially if it's one of those cases. And we knew right on the spot, the director said, that was my favorite take, Curtis are we going to be able to use that? And I was like, well, there was a really loud car there. You heard it as well as I did. And I'll do my best to clean it up, but we probably will not be able to remove that. And he said, okay, well, let's see what we can do in post. So we made a calculated decision, it turns out it worked okay. And the way we did that was maybe counterintuitively by adding some, some sound that we didn't necessarily want. So I did the cleanup first, and then just added this little bit of revving car and faded it out very quickly as we moved into the other cut. So that was kind of an interesting lesson learned there. Here at the end, we needed to add a little bit of ambience to again, to help smooth out those cuts a little bit. So this is where recording room tone or recording ambience if you're shooting outdoors is absolutely critical for when you get into the mix, you're going to need that to help bridge those gaps. As the camera is cut, you know, the film is cut from one camera shot to another, the ambience sound will change. And so it's really important to be able to have some recorded ambience or room tone so you can help smooth those transitions out and make it and help prevent from pulling the audience out of the overall story. So that was really important thing there as well. We had some backpats as part of the bro hug at the end. So we needed to kind of time those right. And part of what they were trying to accomplish here was you can see that Tai gives him a hug, but then he kind of really kind of leans in, you know, in kind of desperation, like, I really, really appreciate this thing so much friend kind of thing. And Jacoby's you can't see Jacoby, you know, Jacoby just coming in for a real quick hug. But then he realizes, oh, Tai's really serious about this. And so we had to show Jacoby kind of hitting Tai on the back as well. And so we did that with sound. Once they're done with the talking, of course, we remove the EQ from the music again. And then we go into this slow fade out. Now there was there's some car doors closing here. And I actually did record those here. You can hear this is a car door opening when this car is opening right here. We recorded that again prior to production. I actually recorded the door closing, but it came out. In the end, I asked also, obviously, when we shot this wide shot, I recorded that with a shotgun microphone right behind the camera operator and DP Levi. And that's the one we ended up using because it sounded farther away. And so that actually worked better for the shot. So sometimes the really obvious things can work out better. And so that's the part that's actually in this right here, which actually is most of our park ambiance as well as the car door closing. And then the music slowly fades out. So there's some lessons that I learned and hopefully will make things a little bit easier for you when you go to make sure maybe if your first film or if you go to mix future films. I hope that was helpful for you. If you have any questions, go ahead and leave those down below. And if you've not already subscribed, make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video. Talk to you soon.