The importance of lavs from the POV of post.

[Olle Sjostrom]

Erik G wrote- "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. "

I agree 100%

This has been my view as well from Day 1. I am a mixer, sure, but I and (budget allowing) my team are the ones that collect the audio for post to work with. The mix tracks are for the editors (picture editors, that is) and the ISOs are for the Post sound department. If my mixes are good enough, then hey! why not? right? I almost always lav everyone, if it isn't totally unnecessary or impossible. Because I want to deliver options.

And I think that more often than not the sound of the mixes are good enough, but then in post, as Erik states, small details of that mix track that you probably couldn't hear on the day, makes your mix not usable. And nowadays it's also not excrutiatingly painful to sit and cut between takes and choose the tracks that sound the best.

In my opinion, I think we should be happy to know that post is happy with what we can deliver, and so that we can allow for the options.

[Constantin]

I have on occasion worked as a "Sound Designer" on small scale projects. This essentially meant I was the entire post sound department. Whenever I came across a boom that worked for the most part, but maybe didn't work well for the wide and perhaps a few words that were "not on" in the boom, I would quickly listen through other takes from the same scene to find out what else I could use.

Depending on how wide the wide was, I would just replace the dialog from the wide with that from a close-up, or if there were mis-cues I would just replace single words or two. Using something like VocAlign makes this very easy and quick to do. Certainly quicker than to breathe life into a lav.

Also on the wides, I would sometimes attempt (as Erik claimed above he could do) to make the lav match the boom (or sound more like a boom) for the wide only, and then switch to the boom. For me, this could work really well.

Of course, this was only on student and low-budget projects, so I'm not a reference at all, but I'm curious to hear from those who are, how quickly a dialog editor will give up a boom track to resort to lavs or if they fight a bit to make the boom work. Are there dialog editors here?

[ErikG]

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.

[Eric Thomas Rice]

As a PSM in the beginning of my career and learning all I can, this thread is invaluable. I feel lucky for being able to catch this thread live as I'm sure I'll remember the info and cooperating discussions herein for the rest of my career. Just a quick thanks to everyone.