IAC DISCUSSION FORUMS

John

Getting the sound levels, and quality right have been a problem with some IAC competition entrants for some time. They are considerably better than they were 10 to 15 years ago when many were still finding their NLE feet, but there are still issues and ones that are not penalised to the extent they should be in the judging process.

The bar needs raising and your clear explanations will help many please continue and expand.

One area where errors occur in quite a good number of movies is in the use of PC speakers during the editing, the movie is made and seen only on a PC/MAC or a TV and not simply listened to on a good quality HiFi system, for it is this latter action that is going to show up the problems.

A movie is not just about visuals, it was 90 years ago but no more, so let us all improve the sound quality.

One movie of mine took 2 hours to edit an 8 minute movie and then another 6 hours recording the commentary and getting the sound just as I wanted it.

col lamb wrote: The bar needs raising and your clear explanations will help many please continue and expand.

Seconded!

col lamb wrote: One movie of mine took 2 hours to edit an 8 minute movie

Whilst your point about the time it took to add audio is well taken, I'm staggered you can produce 8 mins of visuals in only 2 hours. That is only enough time to watch the final footage 15 times!

I really need to increase my work rate.

Hi Col - yes, monitoring is such a contentious issue! For detailed preparation work I use a pair of headphones, as it's truly the only way one can hear 'everything' - all those hidden clicks, bangs, wind noise rumble etc, that you might not hear until your final production is played at some major competition. I then 'clean up' the sounds as required, or as much as possible, to ensure I have the best quality material to work with in my project.

However, headphones are far too detailed for mixing with unless you're familiar with the 'false' impression they give. For that I switch to my studio monitors (any decent two-way full range Hi-Fi speakers will do just fine) and an external Hi-Fi amplifier connected to the computer's audio soundcard. The EQ on the amplifier is set to flat but I have the loudness button switched in (always have had) for very mild bass boost. However - my defence is that I listen to absolutely everything with exactly the same settings - music, DVDs, downloads etc - so this is the sound I am tuned to. If what I am doing sounds good on my system I know I'm halfway there because everything else sounds good!

I'd like to hear from everyone about issues they are experiencing, whether with their own film or against others at shows and competitions, such as too loud, or too quiet, or poor or excessive dynamic range. Good or bad. More comments gives us a better chance of finding common issues and addressing them

John

PS: In sympathy with Col my last film probably took four times longer to mix the sound than it did to edit the visuals. It did however take me about 8 months. I too need to increase my work rate!

John, you say -
However, headphones are far too detailed for mixing with unless you're familiar with the 'false' impression they give.
That's a surprise! But it does explain, perhaps, why even having used headphones, there is still more wind noise, for example when heard from speakers in a larger room.
Would this be due to the different acoustics of the larger room compared with our house spare room or whatever we are lucky enough to use for editing?

Great, John, I hope other editors will now spend far more time on sound than they do.

Please let's replace all wind noise, and no pops clicks or hisses In the commentary of our movies

As for speakers I had a long run in with the host of the DV Doctor web site a few years ago, now this guy used to mix live concert sound.........he failed to grasp that a movie soundtrack that sounds great on PC speakers is not necessarily going to sound great in the projection hall.

Speakers have a certain bandwidth, that is a frequency range that they can handle, and the sensitivity to a specific frequency is not necessarily linear across the bandwidth.

Also in the projection hall how the speakers are positioned dramatically effects the sound quality.

The acoustic properties of the hall also have a vast influence on the sound quality.

The same goes for ones listening devices (ears), a non linear sensitivity and a reducing bandwidth and sensitivity as we get older. Not to mention differences between the ears, not the grey matter, but each ear has different properties.

Ergo, it's a topic we all should study to improve our movies.

Hi Peter - if 'over the ear' closed back (or even open back) headphones are used they can give a false impression of how the mix will sound 'in real life'. This is partly because headphones can isolate the mix from ambient noises in the room or from outside, which doesn't happen in a projection hall, cinema or even a lounge. Mixing is sometimes performed 'too clinically' because one can actually hear everything with such clarity that a larger dynamic range is the result and therefore a lot of the subtle sounds end up being too quiet and simply get soaked up in the ambience of a typical room. The same can be said about the extended frequency response of a lot of headphones, which don't truly represent the typical frequency response of anything other than top-flight cinema systems. Some sounds you can hear on headphones may not be audible at your local clubs due to limitations of the loudspeakers and furnishings (or lack of them) in the room soaking up the high frequencies.

I'm slightly surprised to hear that you have experienced a problem with wind noise 'the other way around'. Usually this is evident on headphones, and if it is treated to become inaudible then it shouldn't appear on any other system. One tip Peter - listen to each individual clip in your film to isolate issues such as wind noise, or mute any music or commentary tracks that are playing at the same time. It could be that an errant audio clip is being masked (or distracted from) by music or commentary, then it becomes evident when played on a larger system or when you are not 'concentrating' on your production as much. Psychoacoustics is a wonderful topic!

Col - I agree, there is no such thing as a 'perfect' speaker. In fact a 'perfect' system sounds awful! The key is to mix/watch/listen as much as possible on the same system. In 30+ years I have changed my monitoring system once and my amplifier once, both due to old age (theirs, not mine!) I listen to absolutely everything on the same system, with the same settings - commercial CDs, DVDs, my own band mixes and my own films - so I know what they sound like. If anyone is using a separate speaker system when editing to that which is normally used to watch DVDs on, it might be helpful to watch part of a commercial DVD on the editing system every now and then to 'tune' ones ears to that sound. Immediately follow this by ones own production and any difference will be immediately noticeable!

Hope this helps - John

Another great post John

I am an avid concert goer and may time I would like to bat the sound mixer guy over the head with a 4x2. All to often we hear, excessive bass and drums, badly mixed strings, low volume backing singers and the worst of all a lead singer whose mouth you can see move but where their singing is totally lost in the background. Professionals is to good a word for many of these guys who just sit their with the headphone on oblivious to what the audience can hear. At one Beverly Knight concert the bass drum was litterally painful for the whole of the first half, someone tapped on the sound guys shoulder during the interval and it was better in the second half.

That just shows then may so called pros still get it way wrong.

One tip, when you have completed the movie and sound, playback the movie on the PC and when it starts switch off the monitor so you are just focussed on the sound. Refine and then repeat listening on the HiFi system with no visual disturbance, focus only on the sound quality.

Wonderfully informative thread, thanks to you fellows!

It certainly is amazing how different one's sound track can sound in varying locations. There's not much we can do about that but certainly it pays to listen to a finished production (DVD or BD) in as many locations as possible before deleting the audio mix from your computer. My main test is playing the disc at home on a proper TV screen using the audio system there, two decent Mini Bose speakers. I have a pair of good studio monitors connected to my edit system and rarely find that they have misled me in any way. I also have an audio 'window' within Media 100 which shows the levels of each track, as we all do presumably, which also indicates the master track level. I find that I can set a level that sounds OK almost everywhere. Whether my audio complies with all the technical limits outlined by the experts such as John is another matter.

Probably my final reply with thanks to all who contributed.
To John's comment -
I'm slightly surprised to hear that you have experienced a problem with wind noise 'the other way around'.
I suspect my headphones (Direct Sound - Extreme Isolation some years old now) may be better at the isolation than the range of wavelengths audible as, listening carefully to a music track, the bass doesn't sound too great and that would probably cover the wind-in-mic noise problem.
My main problem with that is currently on a new film using old Hi8 footage (Michael has seen it) when live comment from men was recorded on a windy day using, apparently, a Sony mic that came with a tape recorder but actually, if I remember correctly, the camera switch was still in the on-board position and it was that microphone in use. I cannot eliminate the wind noise without affecting the men's voices too much. But that's another story!

How many members in the video club community will read these post's on SOUND?????
When watching a video at past club meetings this was one topic I brought up. Over the years things have improved.
Most software has a sound indicator to balance the sound at correct level.
Most club holiday videos are the sounds recorded on holiday and when editing stick a bit of music on. Presto they are happy.
So for most non technical video makers, edit your sound like you edit your video.
Saying that I have seen some wonderful club videos where the sound was excellent and made the video.
Many years ago I did a film and the dialogue with two people was windy noise planes and cars.
Filmed it with all the noise. Next day got the actors to re-say their lines in my back garden on a Sunday afternoon and lifted the first track off and dubbed the Sunday version on.
Sunday I find is always a good day if you need to shoot in public areas for little noise.

Hi Peter - I suspect you might be right. Sometimes the construction involved in gaining extreme isolation can result in a less than full range of frequencies being reproduced. Extreme isolation headphones shouldn't be needed unless you're working in a noisy environment, most closed back or open back headphones will suffice. I use a pair of Panasonic open back headphones, which technically aren't ideal, but they serve well enough for me to listen to the clips in order to correct any issues with them. I don't tend to mix on headphones so it's not vitally important they have a flat frequency response - if anything they are a little 'bass heavy'.

Hi Frank - I suspect the answer to your first question is: not enough! A couple of points I'd like to bring up though - one can't balance the sound using the 'sound indicator' of computer based software. The balancing of sound is done in the producer's head, no amount of software can do this for them. By 'sound indicator' I assume you mean the output level meter? Peak meters are almost completely useless and PPM or average meters have to be interpreted in order to obtain the best results, but these only indicate the mixed output from the timeline, unless you're lucky enough to have a level meter for individual tracks. Even then, they are usually only used for the initial setting up of each channel. The balance of all the sounds is done acoustically as each producer sees fit.

Film makers shouldn't edit sound in the same way they edit video. How many producers use multiple layers of stacked video tracks, each one finely tuned as regards colour balance, brightness and contrast, then all blended and cross-faded into each other simultaneously to create a three or four part visual eye-fest for the duration of their film? Nobody. Yet that is what we are constantly doing with sound. Even the most basic soundtrack has three parts - background, music and commentary - that are simultaneously blended together and effected with equalisation, cross fades and volume control curves to create the soundscape. Some of my films have three or four ambient soundtracks alone, let alone spot sound effects tracks, music and commentary. I believe that unless you are at the stage of colour-grading and matching individual video clips, if you're not spending between two and four times longer pulling the sound together, it's not enough.

However, this line sums everything up: "...I have seen some wonderful club videos where the sound was excellent and made the video!"

John

Hi John- Thanks for your reply. My post is not for people who have a good understanding of sound. Many people who have computers and only play around with video would not dream of balancing or edit sound. As long it plays on a DVD after editing and a nice well known musical tune, "That Will Do". The more serious person will learn and seek more information on this subject.
I spend hours getting firstly the right soundtrack and music. Still learning the gremlins on FCP-10.1 all the sound available to play around.

I have to say I disagree to some extent with these negative comments about sound on the average club members' videos.
In the fairly short time I've been involved (blimey - it's nearly ten years now!), the quality of sound - particularly of narration - has improved enormously among most film makers. By which I mean I rarely struggle to hear what is being said whereas previously that sort of issue was commonplace.

Audio is something which is always being discussed at Staines and other clubs I visit, whether as a part of or the whole of a technical workshop evening, a talk from a guest speaker, comments from visiting judges or just comments among members about "work in progress" or finished films. I suspect this has come about as with the improvements in camera technology it is pretty difficult to come up with a poor quality image nowadays (especially if shot outside) and once we get past the basics of capturing a decent quality image, capturing decent quality audio is next on the agenda and this is where novices in particular have the most to gain. I think they understand this

Note I am only talking here about the most basic aspects of both picture (exposure, focus, white balance) and audio (correct level, isolation). When we get to the more creative and artistic aspect (composition, angles, edits in visuals and choice and mixing of different audio tracks) then I agree, there is a wide difference between those who don't consider it at all, those who have a go and are developing their skills and those who know what they are doing. However, ten years ago I would have said at least half our members didn't give much thought to sound at all, now all consider sound quality and nearly all understand the importance of painting with different sound sources and those that don't have a go, simply choose not to (they're not dedicated enough in my book, but it's their choice how far they take their hobby.)

Whilst understanding of the importance of audio might have improved, finding authoritative advice is not easy. So I applaud any attempt made by the good people here to come up with some guides that we may refer to and point other movie makers to. Keep up the good work.

Hi Tim, thanks for your input on this topic, it's most welcome and makes interesting reading. I don't think it was anyone's intention to be negative about club video sound (and I apologise to anyone who thought I might have been) although I have found different areas and clubs in each area vary in their approach to the art of film-making. Not only are the capabilities and desires of improving their hobby (or not) down to individual members, it also depends on the club. You are very lucky in that you have a forward-thinking active and practical group, some clubs are not and some of those through no fault of their own.

I have always tried to help my own club with their sound issues, by presenting an evening's talk on sound. From next season I've decided to offer this to other clubs as well, for anyone that might be interested. I've cut down the first evening's talk on recording to about an hour in length and I'm presently putting together the second hour's worth of talk about editing, so hopefully that will cover most of the basics in a single evening. Some of the editing techniques are a little more than basic, but I always explain to members: "if you go away with only one thing, it should be an awareness of the potential of sound" and then it's up to them if they want to take things further, with help of course

It's hard to create a 'catch-all' answer for everyone, hence Peter's original post about sound levels. Between us I'm sure we can work something out!

All the best - John

I have the good fortune to have worked with a sound engineer/musician for the past 30 years. I lift the edited audio off the timeline as an AIFF file(I work with a Mac). Make a dub sheet for FX, narration; music etc. and deliver it to Alberto and he does his magic with it, returns the mix to me and it drops back in perfect sync, I am always surprised but shouldn't be! We then review the cut and make any refinements. He uses Sonar as his sound mixing program. My problem now is getting good location sound of dialog as Alberto no longer does location work. This is surely one of the benefits of club membership where specialists can help in a production. There is a note on my studio wall that reads ""The images deliver the information but the sound creates the emotion."

ned c