Endangered species: Production Sound

[studiomprd]

I'm teaching Production Sound at a couple college film programs, and have encountered a discrepancy between myself and a post production (ProTools) Instructor, a new Part Time Instructor who is moonlighting from his full time gig at DigiDesign!!

He is telling our students that there is an industry trend to do massive ADR, and not even bother with production dialog.  As it is coming back to me (since I'm not taking his class, just hearing from my students) he seems to be overstating a preference for, use of ADR over production tracks that I don't believe to be the case.  Certainly we all appreciate that effects heavy shows (visual effects as well as sound effects!) may compromise the ability to capture (used to be "record") usable production tracks, and it is nothing new that we want to eliminate from our production recordings as much as possible of any non-dialog sounds so that they can all be separately included on M&E tracks and properly placed and mixed (sound editors, Foley, etc).

here is one emailed comment: "Tom Xxx, the Protools sound instructor said there was a trend toward ADRing ALL of it these days, which I don’t think it quite true, but anyway he said it was because they were releasing the film in so many foreign languages they would just do the English too, and replace all the ambient and Walla-Walla too along with it! Like, if someone was talking while they set down a coffee cup, that cup sound would be in the dialog and have to be sound designed along with the ADR, so they would just do the English along with the rest of it because they had to rebuild the coffee cup sound anyway! "

my students have mentioned this a number of times this term (Tom's first term teaching) in our discussions of the importance of Production Sound, and making the efforts required to enable capturing usable tracks if reasonably possible; unfortunately I find he is undercutting the value of trying to record dialog that can be used, or at least having considered the options before planning to "ADR it".  This is especially a problem for student films, as they do not have the "Waterworld" (100% ADR'd) budgets to allow extensive dialog replacement.

So, am I somehow missing this new trend, or is production dialog still preferred?? your thoughts, (my ammunition) please...

[curleysound]

I noticed several shots in Die Hard 4 with ADR that, if not for extenuating circumstances, were totally doable production sound shots. I'm noticing this more often, but then, I measure how good a movie is by how much I find myself doing this.

[tourtelot]

Directors who care about the emotional impact of their pictures will still care (and therein may be the rub!!)  As well actors who still care (see above).  If no one cares anymore, will any of us be regretting the finding of a new career in any case??  All ARD?? Mostly ADR??  Very much ADR?? Not in any movie I've ever worked on.  Then again, I wasn't the soundman on Waterworld.

[Brandon Barnts]

Well, at least with the little indie films that I work on, everyone is pretty much on board with trying to avoid ADR.  The director wants the original performance, the actors want the original performance and the producers don't want to pay for unnecessary studio time.

Sure, they'll completely cover everything with Foley for the sake of the M&E, but that doesn't mean they have it all use for the final English mix.  If the production coffee cup sounds ok, you can keep it and skip the ADR; if you're doing the M&E mix, then you bring up the Foley version of the cup.

At least for the production companies I work for, I believe the delivery requirements are essentially a full English mix and an M&E.  When it comes to hiring actors for all the various foreign language versions, that's comes out of someone else's budget (not the producer's I'm working for).

[gpiegari]

I'm very much aware of the misconceptions flying around regarding production

and post production sound.  However, I'm VERY frustrated to hear that many of

them are actually being "taught".

Glen P.

[Philip Perkins]

I don't know much hard production and postproduction experience this guy has acquired working at Digidesign, but what he's saying sounds to me like some kind of Digidesign fantasy.  He may be correct for cheapie direct to video horror movies and the like, but my experience tells me that most directors don't end up liking ADRed lines in a real drama very much, and will use even compromised production sound over pristine ADR given the choice.  Most actors don't like it much (except for those that are only about the extra money), they are trained to give a "total" performance, action and voice at once.  And, as your friend from Digi knows, the resources available today to clean up production sound are hugely greater than they were, partly courtesy of his company.  Meanwhile, there is "reality" and etc TV--all production sound, "dogme", and all sorts of psuedo-verite techniques at work in cinema production today.  ADR is not free, folks--it is a time-consuming and expensive process that often yields very flat performances.  It also requires considerable post production to both edit it into sync and to massage it into something believeable as production sound. 

Philip Perkins

[greg sextro]

"Tom Xxx"  doesn't know what he's talking about.  even though we all hear on set: "we'll fix it in post,"  i can't emphasize the number of times i hear from directors that they "hate" to ADR...

[David Waelder]

I spent a good deal of the spring, just over a year ago, on the TV series Alias. We were doing a quiet scene between Jennifer Garner and Michael Vartan just outside the old soda fountain set on the Disney lot. Adjacent to that is the plant that noisily converts old sets to wood chips for recycling and it was running full bore. Things were pretty noisy so I casually mentioned it to the director to confirm that they routinely looped all the exterior dialog. Oh no, he said! They never loop a thing! Everything on  the show was production track! Uh Oh! I threw some wireless on those perfomers right away. Of course, TV has a more relentless schedule than movies but it's useful to remember that TV almost always, in my experience, works with production tracks.

David Waelder

[tourtelot]

And let me guess; Disney was making so much money on the chipper that they couldn't let a Network TV show get in the way?  And we wonder where the "we don't really need to give a shit about sound on this show do we?" comes from.

A Disney UPM used to give me trouble about how many nine volt batteries I used on a series.  I told him that I used 9v batteries to fuel the Disney jet that was always flying from LA to Portland, OR with one or two "cheese" aboard.  The UPM just shook his head, and walked away, but I NEVER heard about 9v batteries again.

[studiomprd]

thanks, folks...

this is a troubling topic, and the reason I brought it up here is to prepare myself for a discussion that I think we agree I ought to have with this instructor.  I know the school is proud of having a DigiDesign professional teaching the course, but I also wonder what experience he has to be making such statements about production sound.  When my students questioned me about it, I had to tiptoe around questioning the competence of a fellow instructor.  A staff person in the department also brought this to my attention, but naturally does not want to get caught up between two of his co-workers and friends.

BTW, regarding the "Waterworld" comment,  the production had carefully considered the many real problems in production and made a decision to ADR the movie after cutting it; their choice would seem appropriate, it received its only "industry recognition" in the form of a nomination for sound!

your further comments will be appreciated.

Thanks again!

[old school]

Hey Mike, greetings. I think you should have a conversation with your fellow instructor because it sounds like a lot of the information about him is second hand a best. He may be that far off base, but that is hard to believe. Maybe you both can learn from each other and better the kids education at your school. As for Waterworld, thanks for the clarification. Keith Wester was the mixer on that and many other films, and IMHO was one of the best I worked with. I learned much from Keith about recording and dealing with people. No matter how hard a film was, Keith never gave up on a shot, or got P.O.ed at the people he worked with. I also once taught a class at UCLA with Keith and I know how hard that is, for me anyway. Good luck and let us know how it goes. BTW, average production track is better than great ADR work in my book.

CrewC

[RPSharman]

Richard,

Thanks for your story about "American Beauty" -  So many people forget that when we mix a project, we are doing just that, mixing a PROJECT.  We are not just mixing a shot.  It's great to hear that your foresight paid off with the use of the production track.  Matching sides shot at different times or days apart is so crucial, and the post guys love an even production track.  One of the most valuable lessons I learned before I started mixing was this concept.  It is ESPECIALLY important on shows that will have no opportunity to have a professional post mix, so it's critical to teach kids who will be starting out at this level that production sound is very important.  I dabbled with Pro Tools for a while and attempted to fix the audio on a short that a friend made without a professional production sound crew.  What a disaster!

What I also try to explain to young guys I hire is that even if you are recording something they perhaps shouldn't use, it's still important to turn in a mix track they can use if they have to.  Additionally, getting the best production track possible likely helps the actors in recreating their performance during the ADR session.  Unless, of course, it's the performance they are trying to replace!!

Robert Sharman

[Andrew Bellware]

This could be interpreted another way:

[snip]"Tom Xxx, the Protools sound instructor said there was a trend toward ADRing ALL of it these days, which I don’t think it quite true, but anyway he said it was because they were releasing the film in so many foreign languages they would just do the English too, and replace all the ambient and Walla-Walla too along with it! Like, if someone was talking while they set down a coffee cup, that cup sound would be in the dialog and have to be sound designed along with the ADR, so they would just do the English along with the rest of it because they had to rebuild the coffee cup sound anyway! "

There are two main kinds of deliverables on a motion picture which was made in the English language world: the English language versions, and the Dialog, Music, & Effects (DM&E) versions. The coffee cup example is a good example of what the problem is when delivering the DM&E's. When you mix those DM&E's you have to come up with that exact coffee cup sound without the English dialog or your mix will get rejected by the QC department of the distributor's dubbing facility. Their priority is to make sure that their "dubbed" version of the movie sounds exactly like the English language version of the movie, just with their own language added.

But IF you ADR'ed the entire picture, then QC CAN'T reject your M&E mixes because they absolutely WILL sound identical to the "Full English Mix". There are no other production effects on your dialog tracks!

(The problem with us in the English speaking world is that we feel the performance gets skunked when we don't have that on-set recorded dialog with the real performance which happened during the shooting of the picture. I have a bunch of half-baked theories about English-speaking people and their relationship to language, Shakespeare, and Stanislavsky, regarding why that's so much more important to us than it is to cultures who have a higher tolerance for movies dubbed into their language, but I won't get into that here.)

Getting back to the original point -- I have seriously considered ADR'ing an entire picture for the DM&E mixes which go out for non - English speaking countries, yet retaining as much as I can of the production dialog for the North American version. It's cheating but it works like this: when you deliver the DM&E's there is an English dialog mix (the "D" in DM&E) which is entirely ADR. There is no production background sound on the dialog tracks. The Music and Effects make up all the rest of the audio one hears on the English language tracks in this "overseas" version.

But then we go and mix a completely different version for North America. This version has the production dialog in it and a somewhat different effects mix because of the production sounds that we keep.

Therefore we have BOTH ADR'ed the entire picture AND used as much production sound as possible. It's cheating because the English - language mix we delivered for overseas as a "reference" for when they make their own mixes is not actually the one we release in North America. But with the exception of Australia and the UK they won't be using that mix anyway, just referencing it for their own mix (at least that's the way I justify it in my own mind).

I doubt I'm the first person to think of this and I suspect that some people have been doing it for a while.

Just my incoherent two cents,

Drew

[Marc Wielage]

He is telling our students that there is an industry trend to do massive ADR, and not even bother with production dialog. 

This guy is full of beans. He may work for Digi, but I'd like to see his resume of the actual post houses he's worked for, along with his screen credits. Production sound is extremely important, and I have yet to encounter a director who prefers ADR to the real thing, except in cases where they had no other choice.

Even when ADR is unavoidable, they still have to have usable production dialog just as a guide for the editor and the sound editors. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but this Pro Tools guy is totally out of line. Tell the class to read David Yewdall's book The Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound, which is a far more accurate source of information than what this Digi guy is saying. Yewdall's new edition is here on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Motion-Picture-Sound-Third/dp/0240808657/ref=sr_1_1/103-6561779-5843012?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184571311&sr=1-1

I see there's also a new Focal Press book, Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures: A Guide to the Invisible Art by John Purcell, which I suspect will be equally informative.

--Marc W.

[studiomprd]

I read Drew's response, but that just doesn't sound like what is actually happening, at least to me.  Much as Tom hit a nerve,  I think that producers would object to the costs, Director's would curse the performance, and professional actors would throw a crap-fit! (unless a scale day-player who needed the extra $$).

I think experienced production mixers are striving to keep the sounds that belong on the M&E tracks out of our production recordings, and dialog editors back us up by working their magic to clean stuff out of the Dialog tracks. Sure, foreign language dubs will need to be "ADRed", just as foreign language films get ADRed into English, but production tracks are preferred for the original language.

Of course there are exceptions (Robert Rodrigues's "El Mariachi", with a non-sync camera and no real production sound, or Sergio Leoni's spaghetti Westerns where the actors were all speaking different languages to each other...) but these are the rare exceptions, not the common practice.

[Daniel McIntosh]

Director Hal Hartley told me several years ago that he had been thinking for some time of making a film with all of the dialogue done to playback.

[cmgoodin]

Director Hal Hartley told me several years ago that he had been thinking for some time of making a film with all of the dialogue done to playback.

And you think lip-sync is bad now.... Have you ever seen a stage show that operated with live actors lip-sinking dialog to a playback track?  Unless there is music or unless the actors have rehearsed with the track hundreds of times, it is almost impossible to get the lip-sync right.

---Courtney

[Uncle Bob]

My business is primarily audio post/sound design for lo/no/micro budget projects, although I do take on the occasional production sound gig.  I also work as a music supervisor and preproduction consultant.

Quality production sound is the best monetary and time investment a producer can make for their lo/no/micro budget project.  When called upon in my role as a preproduction consultant I have a simple spread sheet to show my clients how much they will actually save by hiring a competent production sound crew.  ADR is a time consuming process, especially when your talent has no experience performing it.  To compound the problem it is often months before lo/no/micro budget projects are ready for audio post so the talent is no longer in character and they are usually spread around the country working on other projects, so scheduling becomes another problem.  To top it all off every scene that is ADRed will have to be completely Foleyed, another major cost.

On 75% of the projects on which I work I spend more time cleaning up poor production sound and/or doing lengthy, frustrating ADR sessions than anything else.  Okay, the money is nice, but would rather be enhancing the sound track than making horrible production sound barely acceptable.  I signed on to be an artist and create, not to be a mechanic fixing things that shouldn't be broken in the first place.  Or, as Randy Thom advised me to say, "I'm a genius, not a miracle worker!"

[old school]

Hey Uncle Bob, I like your attitude as well as your advice to production. Keep it up. One can seldom go wrong when heeding the wisdom of Randy Thom.

CrewC

[studiomprd]

thanks, Uncle BoB, although this term, I'm moving onward, and again seek some advice and input from my co-conspirators here on jwsound.net, please...

the question this term is:

"what should a (required) production sound class at a film school be ??"

let me amplify, and clarify:

the students are not in the class because they want to be sound mixers; they all want to direct!

they are required to take 2 sound classes in the program: production sound, and post production sound, actually mostly a ProTools class. In that regard, production sound gets it's share, but the reality is a lot of post stuff is stuffed into the production class, too!

OK, so what do "we" production, -and post-production too-, sound folks think these future moviemakers need to learn in their 3 hour per week 14 week classes Especially with so much changing so fast, and all these students exposed to the "flavor of the month" and <$1k "Hi Def" camcorders, lighting an entire scene (all shots, if there is more than one!) with a single "china ball", and "who needs a tri-pod" techniques, should they be taught "plug 'n play" sound, like how to select the best mic to mount on the camcorder, or how to connect a "brand-X" mixer to a brand Z camcorder, or should they be taught about sound, about production sound, about "movie sound", and what we have learned in over 100 years making movies

I have, as you would expect, my own opinions on this; born of working with way too many "movie-makers" who did not have a clue, and also thought they knew it all, though what they "knew" was largely wrong when it came to sound.

Should we (sound instructors at film schools) put our focus into equipment instruction manuals (aka Quick Start Guides), check-off and "tips" lists of 10 (or 15) things to do to have great sound???

As always, I'm re-evaluating my course syllabus, and trying to improve on what I can offer students, who want to direct, in the limited time I have their attention on "Production Sound"

OK, discuss!!

[Uncle Bob]

I think that all film students should be taught my personal mantra:

Sound is half of the experience - Steven Spielberg

Audiences are very forgiving of visual problems as long as the sound is solid.  However, the reverse is not true; if the sound is poor the audience will not care how beautiful the picture.

Most films, especially low/no/micro budget projects, are dialog driven.  If you can't understand the dialog you don't have a film that an audience will enjoy.  So in the budget vs. quality equation solid production sound becomes an imperative.

Here is an excerpt from my blog on the importance of production sound.

________________________________________________________________________________________

In the summer of 2006 I woked on an indie feature, spending over 700 hours on the audio post. ALMOST 300 HOURS WAS SPENT ON CLEANING UP POOR LOCATION SOUND!!! After spending all of that time the dialog for over half of the film was barely passable. We did some ADR but most of the talent was spread out across the country doing other projects so we had to live with what we had.

As a quick breakdown of costs figure that you will spend $450.00 a day on a top quality, professional location sound crew (mixer & boom op). For a twenty-day shoot that costs you $9k.

Okay, let's say that you DID NOT spend the money on a qualified production sound crew. The following scenarios have occurred in my audio post facility. Here's what a 100-minute project will end up costing you in audio post:

1. Location sound clean up and editing.

This includes auditioning and resyncing better audio from the alternate takes that did not make it into the film.

Figure on 1 hour per minute of location audio for clean up and editing.

100hrs X $50.00hr = $5k

2. ADR

We have about 50 minutes of the production sound that cannot be salvaged. Most of the talent you will be using has little or no experience doing ADR, so it will be a very time consuming process.

150hrs X $50.00hr = $7.5k

This does not include the cost of transporting and feeding your talent, and paying them if they are working on scale. If your talent is spread out across the country doing other shoots you may have to pay top dollar doing remotes at studios located near your talent, the associated cost of using ISDN lines and FTP sites, and the additional time/cost of uploads, downloads and importing into the primary audio post facilities editing system.

3. Picking takes and syncing/editing ADR.

You now have to pick the take you want to replace each line. However, the deliveries of the lines you choose have to match in tonal quality so you will most probably have to compromise. Then the voices of the various talents will have to be EQed so that they match each other.

50hrs X $50.00hr = $2.5k

4. Foley.

Since you now have just words floating in the air you will have to do Foley. I'll be generous and say that we have retained a top-notch Foley studio & walkers who can work quickly and we that have thoroughly prepped for the session.

30hrs X $250.00hr = $7.5k

5. Ambiences

Now you will have to put in ambiences so your characters have someplace to "live". Again, I'll be generous.

Field recording w/prep, OOP (Out Of Pocket expenses) and transfer into the audio editing system: 20hrs X $50.00hr = $1k

Picking and editing ambiences: 10hrs X $50.00 = $500.00

You have now spent $24,000.00 fixing production sound problems.

If you subtract location sound clean up and editing as part of the normal cost of audio post and the cost of the professional production audio crew YOU JUST WASTED $10K+ BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T WANT TO PAY A PROFESSIONAL PRODUCTION SOUND CREW!!! And you still haven't spent a dime on the "fun stuff". Imagine how much it would cost if you went to a big name audio post house that charges $250.00 or more per hour!

Let's not imagine it.

330hrs X $250.00hr = $82.5k

$82.5k + $7.5k for Foley = $90,000.00 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On a "Hollywood" production budget they spend 5% to 10% of the budget on audio post. So on a film that cost $100 million to produce they will spend between five and ten million on the audio post process. Everyone talks about how "Blair Witch" was produced for $40k. What nobody mentions is that the distributor spent almost a million dollars on audio post before it was put into major distribution.

There are six categories of audio post:

Dialog

Foley

Ambiences

Sound FX

Music Editing

Mix.

As a rule of thumb big budget films spend two to ten man-hours per category per minute of film. For a 100-minute film that is a minimum of 1,200 man-hours up to 6,000 man-hours for the audio post process and sometimes a lot more. They are also anywhere from 25% to 90% ADR.

Indie productions don't have the budget for this expensive, exhaustive process. So great production audio becomes a very real necessity to any indie project if you want to achieve commercial success and stay within your budget.

You or the screenwriter spent a lot of time crafting the dialog in the script. Your talent spent a lot of time learning those lines and prepping to deliver them. Unless you are doing a silent film those lines are telling the story. Isn't that important?

________________________________________________________________________________________

As you can tell I am a proponent of capturing great production sound. 

I don't think that any of your students are going to leave school and immediately be given a multi-million dollar budget with which to work.  They are going to be working on a shoestring, so it behooves them to budget carefully, and quality production sound will give them the most bang for their buck.  They should be thinking of the sound of their project from the very first preproduction meeting. 

Sound is a very powerful influence in our lives.  We can only see about 120 degrees, we can hear 360 degrees.  The very first sense that becomes active is our hearing; in the womb we can't see anything, we can't taste or smell anything, we have very limited things to feel.  But we can hear music, our mothers voice and hundreds of other things; it is our very first contact with the outside world.  Our hearing can tell us about things that we cannot see.

A carefully crafted sound design can provide immense insights into the characters and situations of a film.  A character in a dark closet can tell from the external sounds where they are.  Cars, buses and sirens?  Probably the city.  A creak on the floor boards?  The killer is approaching!  The sound of a characters footsteps can enhance the audiences knowledge of his intentions.  The choice of the sound of a slap across the face can be painful or comic.

I worked on a project where the protagonist was constantly making choices.  "Dark" door slams indicated a poor choice, "lighter" door slams indicated a good choice.  We spent hours recording motorcycle sounds; the Harley became an extension of the protagonists changing situation and personality.  I spent days recording and reproducing/reconstructing the sounds of NYC.  Reviews mentioned how much the city was another character in the film.

So, I guess that the answer to your question is: the equipment doesn't matter all that much.  It's the knowledge of how a sound can enhance a project just as much, if not more, as the choices of lighting and lenses. 

[Noah Timan]

Should we (sound instructors at film schools) put our focus into equipment instruction manuals (aka Quick Start Guides), check-off and "tips" lists of 10 (or 15) things to do to have great sound???

I think if they're not really interested in working in sound you should probably stay away from getting too far into equipment and heavy technical discussions and teachings, and lean more toward general theory and purpose, and how sound applies to the director and the finished film.  Explain the value of sound as it relates to picture and performance, as opposed to focusing on getting great sound for great sound's sake.  Explain the necessary disciplines and sacrifices that are required of all of the crew in order to let the production mixer do his job -- patience and cooperation from directors, actors, and other department heads; keeping a set quiet; choosing locations that are recordable, and having the patience to turn something down and keep looking if a location looks great but sounds terrible; the value the sound of the boom vs. body mics can bring to a project, and designing shots that can be boomed instead of doing wide-and-tights all the time; and so forth.  If students come up to you with an honest interest in our craft, perhaps you can steer those particular students toward more technical teachings, but it won't benefit a directorial student forced to take a sound class to learn the difference between phantom power and T power.

.02 nvt

[Jeff Wexler]

I totally agree with what Noah says here. It is a danger (and often even a disservice) within our own sound people to focus too specifically on any given piece of equipment, technology or procedure. The importance of SOUND, however it is achieved, is what needs to be taught, or at the very least, appreciated and understood. This is much more difficult to teach, however, than a course in technical things where you can have operational manuals, specifications and other hard numbers, but it is the spirit of sound for the image that needs to be instilled. That said, I fully realize the difficulty, but this is the ideal and should be a fundamental part of the overall goal.

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

[studiomprd]

thanks, Uncle BoB, Noah, and Jeff...

this term's challenge is that our new department chair is a bit of an equipment geek, of sorts, so he just bought a half dozen of the $999 HD camcorders for the students to produce their epic's with, in 24P, 16:9 HD of course...

I'm gratified to read suggestions to basically keep on doing what I am already doing, and the same rationale I have for doing it that way. (want to see my syllabus??)

There seems to be a push for sizzle, and a leaning away from teaching fundamentals we have learned in over 100 years of making movies, and instead passing out toys for "supervised playtime".

I have been requested to have my class "record something evey class"

huh??

ok, continue to discuss...

(and big thanks!)

[Noiz2]

I am also mostly a post person.  To the first part of this thread Tom XXX is full of it.  Having worked on huge films like Titanic to tiny films nobody has ever heard of, with few exceptions ADR is always avoided.  Titanic recorded about 90% ADR (because of set construction while filming and such) but only used a fraction of that I forget the final number but it was well below 50% like maybe 25%.  That is the highest percentage of any film I have worked on.  The point being that the Could have gone for a lot of ADR, it was cut, but if there was any way to use production it was used.

I would adjust Bob's numbers a bit since FX and Ambiance's are not really a separate category.  THe time factor is something that should be drilled into the head of students, more than the $.  It's often poss to save $ but time is still time.  In a discussion on a post list I had observed that sound editorial always seems to end up around 10-15 man-hours per screen minute.  Randy Thom who has worked on a lot more big features than I have said he noticed the same thing.  Low budget films often tend to be on the high side of that figure because they don't have as much access to Foley stages or large enough crews to be really efficient.  Now that was editorial not including the final mix.  On low budget films you can pretty much do away with the premix since you're doing one as you edit but the final mix is still going to take days, if your lucky.  In theory it could go fast but in reality this is where the directors starts doing a lot of fine tuning so it always takes a long time.  You can, if your going to final on a stage that you have limited time on, do a premix with the director and get most of the time consuming parts done with but any way you look at it your going to spend time.  I did a feature that had a very small window on a stage for a final (two days) so we premixed ti hell and gone (100 hours or so). 

So Time is what I would teach them.  I can't tell you how many times I have seen projects that have gotten down to the wire and now they want audio post in a rush...  We only have a week to meet the XXX film festival deadline.  At that point I just say no.  Who wants to put your name on something that is going to sound bad.

My other little bit I would like them to think about is that I disagree that sound is 50% of the film.  They don't really believe that anyway.  I mean if you throw the script in yes your probably there but what people thing of when they hear the 50% figure is mostly FX and design.  I think that number averages more around 25%.  BUT sound is about 25% of the picture also.  That door close off screen that lets us know the killer is in the house.  Audiences "see" that they don't hear it.  Aside for obvious sound FX that people remember as FX there is a huge amount of "visual" information that can come through the sound track.  Nothing really looks big or heavy if it doesn't also sound big and heavy.  A dark house with out a scary house "sound" isn't scary it's just dark.

I know this is sort of the same as saying sound is 50% but I think it puts it in a context that is more meaning full to most (very vision centric) film students.  Your film will look much better with a good sound track.  Of course nobody will care if they cant understand what the actors are saying, or they don't sound like the space they are supposedly in.