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ErikG

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    Sweden
  • About
    Sound postie, doing sound editing and mixing for TV and feature films.
  1. Marc, its almost always the same here. Im really just curious how it differs in various areas and countries and use cases and how it may or may not affect workflows. And I am all post, and really only go outside to record sound effects :-). But I try to stay as aware of on set issues and solutions as I can. The more I know about on set differences in workflow and tech etc the more it may help me in post.
  2. What type of metadata do you enter on set and in what " format"? Here in Sweden it's mostly slate/scene (entered in the scene data) take and then any additional info like PU for pickup, example 0021/44/4 PU or 0021/44/IV PU. Is this similar or very different where you work? Examples and if possible the reasoning behind the how and why is much appreciated! Is this really a euro/US divide or is it different within US? Here in Europe. I know it's different, but the above is what I see here most of the time.
  3. Thank you all for sharing! I have gained a lot of new knowledge that I hope I might be able to help put to use in the future somehow. The sooner the better.
  4. ErikG

    Nuendo 7

    Afaik it's still 400hrs Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
  5. I'm a do it all editor and rerecording mixer. I have done dialog editing on some 30+ features and probably 20-30+ TV drama episodes. Does that count? Personally I almost never give up on the boom. If I feel it doesn't work or add something to the sequence, I'll still keep it, I do what can be done and keep it muted, as I know that the rerecording mixer may not always agree with me. Editing to me does not work like that, toy don't toss a track for a scene because it doesn't work in parts of it. You only remove parts that DONT work and needs fixing in some other way. On the series I do at the moment it's probably on average 70-80 percent boom, shot in a small town area or in reasonably quiet buildings most of the time. But in each scene there will be a line or two, or five, where the booms just isn't working, where it needs fixing using alts, with many slates but very limited amount of takes there is often not another alt take boom to replace the line with, so the lavs are really used all the time. Not everywhere, but often.
  6. I felt it was anecdotal, and not really part of that thread that's why. Thank you for your kind words Olle, I'm not so sure you are right, but I can bang out a decent mix.
  7. As viewers we are now getting so used to hearing lavs on shots where folks walk down stairs etc. and on wide shots with a lot of movement. So when you don't get that hyper sound of bodies moving (studio shoot of a fake studio stairwell with super sounding boom), or when having to replace it all with ADR it may not match whatever you do as a mixer, simply because the end result is now to pristine. So adding in som lav grunge/noise will make it more believable. Stupid? Absolutely? Absolutely needed to not get the feel that the full scene is ADR, yep you bet, at times we just have to. It's not the first resort, it's the very last, and then the director says, "NOW it sounds ok, what on earth did you do?"... Pristine audio isn't always the end goal.
  8. Are you really sure about that? ;-) With a good sounding lav placed in the hair or so, I can make it match a boom so closely that I think you'd be very hard pressed to be more right then wrong saying what is what. I can also make booms sound like lavs but there's not much enjoyment in that. With lavs in close proximity to clothing it's easier to hear the difference obviously.
  9. Well, whenever you folks give me or one of our editors a great sounding boom, I promise we do use it, whenever I turn to lavs it IS for a reason. Boom of axis or not reaching, actor suddenly turns away from the boom making the boom unintelligible for example. I don't play lavs because I love to fiddle with less than perfect sound (because they don't sound as good as the boom requiring more work), I do it because I have to. If an editor threw out perfectly good boom parts just because a single or two lines had to use lavs I would be very crossed and be a really upset mixer. They wouldn't get many more chances if they didn't apologize and not repeat the mistake. I also get upset when editors just work and deliver the boom when it is not 100% and there are good sounding lavs that compliment it. That makes me equally upset. And when a scene plays perhaps only 50% boom or less then we are getting to the point where there is no sonic reason to keep the boom as it only increases workload and as the boom has to be compromised to match the crappy sounding lavs that will have to be used because the boom isn't working. Then I may as well use lavs for all the lines in the scene, because that may end up with a more uniform sound that matches the picture in a better way. There are no rights or wrongs to this, the end result is everything, the way to get there is only a journey. Each step is as important as the next. When you deliver a great sounding boom in 90% of the time and I have to make do with less then perfect lavs for the rest, I promise I won't complain. But when I get booms recorded that just isn't good enough and lavs that clearly no one listened to or even noticed it needed reattaching between takes as it rattles and scratches away. Then you simply haven't done the best job you could. And this is the way we often get sound to post, thus the frustration in the OP and showing in my posts.
  10. Crew, it's not at all about love for lavs. I love and prefer booms, use them most of the time when possible. I fight at length to avoid just using just lavs for a scene if at all possible. But a lot of the time it just doesn't work. It's about getting sound that works well to tell the story, gives us a good chance to deliver a mix with good intelligibility, gives us as rerecording mixers a sporting chance to do our job and deliver on time, according to spec and keeping the client happy. You will NEVER know on set what camera angle will be used during editing on a tight & wide shot. So how do you mix it? Wide? Tight? In between? And neither will work well in most situations. As they are likely to cut between both cameras as well. And yes I applaud PSM that turn in a really good mix for the editors to use, it will tell the editor and director what qualities there are sonically during a scene that would otherwise only be possible using a dialog editor to prep the scene ahead of actual editing. So what you do and deliver is really important! The better it sounds the better the edit will sound, the more it will correspond to what we will then do in post. And obviously whatever you mix is also what is heard in the cans on set, what is heard during dailies and the basis of decisions about sound on set. It does not mean it is a great and usable track for post, it just won't be most do the time. And yes on some types of projects with insane time schedules a good mix track might be just what is needed to get the dialog good enough rather than wading through all the ISOs and spending time on creative work rather that corrective dialog editing. But that is no way to deal with dialog for a drama or a feature. I have enormous respect for PSMs and boomers, I know I do not know what you folks know about getting the best sound possible on set. So I rely on your expertise to give me the best source material possible. Please respect what we do as mixers as well. Your job on set is to deliver the best sound possible giving as many good sonic options for the rerecording mixer as possible while focusing on one thing, to capture great sounding dialog. Edit: this does not mean I want you littering the set with extra mics for "sonic options" that just results in recording 99% crap, this means that every mic recorded gets the attention it needs to sound as good as it possibly can. On our end our job is similar but also very different, delivering a mix that works well, pleases the client and sounds as good as we can make in the time we have available, and we will do that by any means we have access to. So, please do take care to make sure those lavs sound as good as possible because we may need them in situations you do not realise. Lavs should simply not just be recorded as emergency support as they will have to be used more often than you think. And the lavs need your love to. Otherwise your recordings will sound worse in the end as we may have no other choice than to use that lav with clothes rustling, buried in all that cloth making it sound really bad.
  11. Another post mixers view here. Longwinded post ahead sorry... Although I'm from Sweden and have unfortunately never had the experience using a US style mix track. Here it's always a two channel mix with boom on 1 and lavs mixed to 2. And it is really only ever used as a reference for editing and dailys. I wouldn't mind us also just mixing to a single mono track. But that still doesn't mean that we'd use more of it in post. Some PSM questions, I know very well how this is done here in Sweden, so this is relating to how you do the mix track in US in general. How much do you "work" the sound? How much do you eq and filter the tracks that go to the mix track? ---------- Regarding mix tracks: How do you expect post to be able to rework a scene when choosing between a mix track and ISO's? I can say that many PSMs simply do not understand what is required during the mix and what possibilities directors and producers expect to have at their whim. If I had to try to level, pan, split, filter, eq, de-noise just using a single mix track from a take it would make me handicapped during the mix. And it would make the mix sound worse. Room noise sounds different when it's mixed to a single track, transitions when crossfading between mics will change the sound of the room. With a really good PSM it may be slight, but it will change. In post I can choose what bg sound part of the recording I will use when I make my crossover from one channel to the next, you can't do that on set, so we can minimise noise in ways simply not possible mixing live just by very basic editing. When dealing with a transition from boom to lav and back again, you have ONE chance to get it right, I can rehearse and change it as much as time allows to optimise the transition. When you give me a mix track it will either need to be severely EQed because booms and lavs simply sound different as such. Lav placement and distances between mics, reflections etc adds more complexity to the job. Or perhaps you are super talented mixers doing all the eq needed for the mics to match perfectly (this I doubt as again you don't have the same time we do in post to make it perfect), then when I DO have to use the ISOs I will then have to match your changing levels, filers and eq, and I will NEVER know what you did to the signal on the mix track so I will be chasing your changes. If you mixed the scene during the recording with levels and eq and filters changing during the take it just makes it even worse. So to be able to use the mix track in dialog editing I will also get the severe drawback that I will not know what mics were used to create the mix when I need to remix from ISOs. What parts are mainly boom and what parts are lav? I need to know as they ALWAYS gets treated differently. With a mix track I will not know and have to split it up by hand as I think it needs to be split to be able to process the different tracks to create a coherent sound. When I have a mix track I have no "handles" I can't simply just extend one channel here where you may have cross faded the signals less than 100% perfect to get that exhale or last syllable. There's simply a large amount of extra work to prep both a mix track and ISOs in editing. And it will clearly make mixing more complicated most of the time. Mixing audio is a "hi tech sport" we use a multitude of tools to create the sound requested by directors and producers. Using a premixed mix track will severly limit the options during the mix. And one thing is for sure... We do NOT want to spend precious mix time to rebuild a scene from ISOs then and there if it is needed and the dialog editor only supplied a mix track. ---------- Regarding extended lav use in general: Yes TV drama is getting worse, more and more wide and tight shoots limiting the usefulness of the booms from set. Low/mid budget films aren't much better either at times. I am fortunate enough to not have to work on TV shows with such extreme time limits as Henchman does, and happy for it! But regardless yes we do use a lot more lavs then we did in the old days when there were mostly single camera shoots. What you may see on set as a "airy" boom, will at the end of it all just sound like a bad recording with bad intelligibility when it has to compete with sound fx, walla and music in a way you could never foresee on set. As a mixer My preference is clear: Tight boom>semi tight boom>lav>lav>lav>lav>lav> wide boom>really wide boom (is really mostly useless 90% of the time, honestly). But this isn't always the case, a semi tight boom just may not get the "contact" and intimacy I need on a close up that has been shot w multiple cameras. Then I'm very grateful for a great sounding lav, and I'll take it to the bank and deliver what the scene needs. ---------- I am also fortunate enough to be in the position that when the post producer heard they wanted to do a lot of tight and wide shots on our next series, they made some tests and asked what I thought, and I said, yes it can be used, but dialog quality will suffer the more multi camera shoots there are and that it will be near impossible to deliver a really great dialog sound under those circumstances. He agreed with me and decided to ban multi camera shoots unless it was totally necessary to make a scene work as he wanted the best possible sound for the show. Those types of phone calls make me a happy man as that will mean more and better booms, and more individual slates where lines will be repeated making replacements and avoiding ADR easier. If you made it through reading this far, thank you for taking the time to read and spending the time trying to understand a mixers point of view in these matters. Sincerely Erik Guldager, Sweden.
  12. Jay, re-reading my post it looked kind of bad.. I hope you didn't take offence... Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
  13. There's no AI in a IR reverb. Where did you get that idea? Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
  14. I hate lavs, I only use them when I really need to. Unfortunately more often that I would like, but if I could go with 100% boom in a film I would! A mono track to the editor woul be ok-ish if it's like 98% boom and just lavs on wideshots and the odd line that Really needs it. But most direct mixes i jave heard has to much lavs in it IMHO.
  15. As a sound editor and mixer I have to say this. I have never just used a mixed track from production when the isos are available. Never ever. Also only delivering a mono mix to the pic editor it will either be boom only or mostly or mixed with lavs. And we all know how a lav sounds when rubbed or bumped etc. How would the pic editor know if it at all was useable? Personally I feel the 2track with booms and lavs split to the pic editor is the best. Even better is when they can be bothered to edit with all the isos straight away, saving us time in post.
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