The EM Poll

The Sound of a Craving Heart

May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jeffrey P. Fisher

           

The same gear used to record your music is well suited for audio postproduction for commercials, documentaries, animation, and narrative projects. I recently finished editing and sweetening the sound for an award-winning indie feature, The Craving Heart, and in this article I will share tips gleaned from the experience to provide insight into the process of working with sound for picture.

Getting the Job

The gig came through my colleagues Douglas Spotted Eagle and Mannie Francis at VASST (www.vasst.com), who oversaw postproduction duties for the film. The project arrived in its raw form as a nonlinear editing (NLE) file, and the various media files accompanied it on a single external hard drive. Director-editor Stan Harrington had used Sony Vegas 6 for video editing as well as for placing the initial music and effects (see the sidebar “Stan the Man” online at www.emusician.com). Because I use the same software, I simply plugged in the drive and watched the movie directly from the Vegas timeline.

Although the film was shot in the high-definition HDV format, I worked from a proxy DV version for smoother real-time playback because it is difficult for a computer to play HDV in real time if video effects, such as color correction, are involved: the performance may drop well below 29.97 frames per second (fps), and for sound-design elements to sync properly, the video playback must be rock solid. When the project was finished, my work was married to the full-resolution cut of the film.

This was a long-distance project: I was in Chicago and the director was in Hollywood. To handle work-in-progress approvals, I sent Harrington my Vegas project files by email. That worked because we both had the same media (my drive was a copy of his). I would still need to send my sound files, but I would avoid using audio plug-ins the director lacked. With a three-week deadline looming, I put everything in that I felt was needed and deleted whatever the director disagreed with, rather than wasting time getting an approval for every little detail. This approach ultimately saved me time and effort.

The soundtrack I received had all the dialog and a few key sound effects. The music cues — including songs by Katy J (see the sidebar “Scoring Craving” online), an instrumental by Douglas Spotted Eagle, and a sparse underscore by the director himself — were present, as were some crucial sound-design elements. My jobs included cleaning up dialog, building convincing backgrounds, finding and adding missing sound effects, sweetening elements, and creating a mix. Fortunately, the film was full of sound possibilities, and my head was swimming with creative ideas.

Initial Preparations

Always clone the project's hard drive and work on the copy. Regularly back up your changes to the original drive as well as to an off-site location, such as an online storage facility.

Being organized from the beginning is important; otherwise, you'll waste time hunting for missing elements in a highly complex project. For example, Craving had over 520 media files, equaling more than 200 GB of data. With a project of that magnitude, you have to develop a methodical work flow and be thoroughly organized on the hard drive and timeline.

The editor kept his audio tracks to a minimum by placing different types of sounds on the same tracks. However, mingling dialog, music, and sound effects never works because each type of element requires different approaches to EQ, volume, and panning.

FIG. 1: Buses work for premixing similar sound elements into stems and for applying the same audio effects to multiple tracks.

Starting with the original 7 tracks, I moved dialog, sound effects, underscore, and Katy J's songs to dedicated tracks, which brought the track count to 20. As a precaution, I worked on duplicates of the tracks but kept and muted all the originals, moving them to the bottom of my Vegas timeline. I also locked the video into place so it couldn't be inadvertently nudged.

The eventual track count topped 40. I also added buses and routed tracks to them accordingly (see Fig. 1): these three bus tracks, known as stems, were dedicated to the primary soundtrack elements of dialog, music, and effects (also known as DM&E).

There are two important things to remember about audio postproduction. One: dialog rules — what the actors say is always the main focus and what the entire soundtrack should be built around. Two: it's the mix that matters — just like in music production, individual elements may sound horrible on their own but may work within the context of a mix.

Dialog First

Always start with the dialog, because it takes the most time and is the most tedious and noncreative part of a project. We live in a noisy world, and much of that noise gets into dialog recordings. Although audiences can tune out steady noise, when unwanted sounds jump around, they become noticeable. These jumps in presence require extensive smoothing if the dialog track is to sound right.

Noise gates are useless for dialog work because their opening and closing action is too noticeable. Expanders are better for reducing softer noises without completely cutting them off, resulting in a more natural sound. To the dialog bus I added an expander set for 12 to 15 dB of expansion, which was effective 90 percent of the time. Manually drawing volume automation envelopes and using short fades also helped. I prefer manual volume adjustments because they make the dialog sound smoother.

EQ can also be used to clean up noisy dialog tracks. Use a highpass filter with a 24 dB-per-octave rolloff set at around 100 Hz. An equally aggressive lowpass filter set between 12 and 15 kHz is also useful. You will improve speech intelligibility with an EQ bump in the range of the consonants, around 2.5 kHz. Use a slight EQ cut at 600 Hz to overcome the muffled sound of lavalier mics hidden under clothing.

A dedicated noise-reduction tool is a must for serious audio postproduction work, and Sony's Noise Reduction 2.0 plug-in is my go-to tool. Using too much of this type of effect can make a track sound swirly and artificial. However, you can avoid getting unwanted artifacts by doing several passes on the noisy track and dialing in just a few decibels of noise reduction each time.

Many editors cut the picture and dialog at the same place. Unfortunately, any change in the audio gets magnified when it occurs simultaneously with a picture edit. Good dialog editors overcome this by using split edits, or J and L cuts, along with crossfades. A J cut places the dialog edit before the picture edit. An L cut edits the dialog after the picture and extends the noise from one shot into the next. Cutting on hard consonants and using crossfades will help hide edits too. Be aware that split edits require you to unlink the audio from its video file, and you risk losing lip sync if you move the audio.

Although cameras can record in stereo, dialog is usually tracked in mono. Harrington prudently used the camera as a 2-track recorder and isolated the actors on their own tracks. These recordings appear as stereo files on the timeline, with each actor panned hard left and right. I split the tracks and converted them to mono in order to move the dialog back to the center of the stereo field.

Unfortunately, the dialog tracks suffered from phase problems caused by the actors' lines bleeding into each other's mics. As a remedy, I isolated each of their tracks and intercut between them using volume automation.

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