problem with 5.1

[Richard Crowley]

Part of the problem could be the way the dialog tracks/stem was edited. During production did you record the “room tone” in each location/setup? The purpose of having isolated “room tone” is to avoid having ANY dead silence in the dialog tracks. You would edit in room tone anywhere you don’t have any direct dialog clip. You would never leave any empty space in the dialog tracks or stem. That is what you may be hearing? Dead silence is very unrealistic unless you are making a movie about outer space.

Or, possibly the dialog was recorded with enough ambient noise that cutting the dialog clips reveals significantly different ambient noise between different clips. Which is why extraordinary effort is put into capturing dialog as clean as possible. Something perhaps not fully appreciated by people with limited experience. We hear the pristine sound tracks from big-budget feature films and prime-time TV and it seems effortless. But it is most certainly NOT. And because we are living in an increasingly noisy world, we must more and more depend on dialog replacement in post-production.

It is impossible to know exactly what kind of problem you are describing without actually hearing some examples.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Joly Memory]

Hello,
thank you for your answer, yes you’re right, we didn’t add the room tone everywhere on the interview track. My mixer is ok to work a bit more on this, and also with the 5.1. But that’s his first experience with it, like me. I am more used to production with final stereo mix.

The sounds I used (sorry if my english is not perfect) for the documentary are pretty simple.
I have direct sounds with ambiants sounds and dialogues, and interviews covered or not (again, sorry for the terms, I use “interview in” when it goes with the picture, and “off” when it’s covered by other pictures… I don’t know the right terms in english)

So do you think that it would be right to mix the tracks like this in the final 5.1 mix:
LR a mix of both direct sounds and interviews
C only interviews when there are some, and direct sounds when we have a sequence with dialogues
LsRs only direct sounds at a very lower volume (as it will be louder in front). We can sometimes have a slightly louder volume when we have a wide landscape with wind or see.

For the track C, when we have “covered” interviews, is it right to have only the interviews or would we need to add some ambiant sound also ?

I also know that there are many specifications with the 5.1 mix, to be sure that the sound comes out properly in theater.
I read that if we are not perfectly sure, it would be better to work with only LR and C. Does that sound correct to you ? Is that possible to deliver that to the “DCP” maker ?

Thank you

[Richard Crowley]

Each of the separate elements (on-camera dialog, voice-over narration, sound-effects, Foley, sound from B-roll, etc.) should sound good when you listen to them separately. If you listen to the dialog track and you hear dead silence between clips, then you must fix that before moving on to the other tracks.

Once each of the tracks/stems sound good on their own, THEN you can go to the next step of mixing them together into a 2.0 stereo or 5.1 surround mixdown. The decision of where to put things in the 5.1 mix is very subjective and depends on the nature, style and mood of the production. That is something that would be difficult to offer advice for in a forum like this.

Editing each individual track (and stem) and mixing everything down are two separate steps. You can’t properly do the mixdown until each of the tracks and stems are good.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.