The best advice any location mixer and post sound mixer can give to directors is simple: listen.  Stop and listen to the set, listen to the room, listen to the exterior and listen critically.  If you hear traffic, you’ll record traffic.  If you hear hums or A/C you’ll record hum and A/C.  Sounds logical but often, in the haste to “get the shot” no one is listening – to the rooms or the recordist. As someone who has both recorded location audio and mixed post audio I can personally attest to being told in some manner or another on set “we will fix it in the mix.”  Producers should however be aware how this choice affects their post audio budget.  In a big, big way.

With a crowd of people on set, all clocking hours, it’s tempting to put audio issues off to post.  When these issues can be addressed simply it is much more cost effective to deal with it on set.  Of course there are many situations that must be dealt with in post: wind and rain machines, noisy locations that can’t be controlled, and so on.  This is not for those known issues.  This is for the A/C blowing loudly in the room, noisy computers that should be turned off, removed or moved back or some vexing R/F frequency interference on the radio mics.  With the advent of HD, noisy computers, drives and monitors are now moving closer and closer to the set.  This one is easy – move them.  Reverberant spaces should get damped down with blankets and hard surfaces should also be blanketed.  Many recorded sound issues cannot be fixed in post.  Much to the disbelief of producers barraged by dubious marketing claims from sound companies or a general misunderstanding of equalization and noise reduction strategies.

Dialog replacement is always a choice to be made but it is generally a choice that makes for unhappy directors who are wedded to the production dialog much like they are wedded to their temp music score.  And the costs of dialog replacement are not insignificant.  Actors must be paid for their additional time for recording and a great deal of extra time is spent in audio post.  The lines must be recorded, then all the takes must be sifted through for their approved performances, it must then be cut to sync and mixed to match the original production dialog.  All of this additional time and effort in many cases could have been solved by waiting that extra half-hour for “the guy with the keys to the A/C”, damping down reverberant spaces or giving the location mixer time to properly set the frequencies for their wireless systems.

Take the time to listen to the room, listen to your professional location mixer and above all else carry a good set of headphones and listen to the playback of takes.  An extra moment or two to get it right from the start could save a great deal of time and money trying to “fix it in the mix.”

 

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