[Richard Crowley]

“Groovy”! ????

Quadraphonic LP – the birth, short life, and death of quad vinyl

https://youtu.be/tEyPPYuTkcw

Bottom line: Stick with 2.0 stereo music mixed to Front-Left and Front-Right until you get more experience.

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

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[Richard Crowley]

The common standard for music has been stereo for at least 60 years. Monaural music will sound unnatural and “vintage” to most of the audience. At least those who have two working ears.

One of the reasons for having the Front Center channel is to separate the dialog from the rest of the sound. Unless you have special things happening which make stereo dialog more appropriate.

Music coming from the rear channels will be perfectly appropriate if you have a scene where the POV of the character is seated in the middle of an orchestra; Else it will proably make the viewer wonder why music is coming from behind them. But unless your production features a musician, you may have to justify why you mixed music coming from behind the viewer.

Your question is becoming philosophical, about style, motivation, etc. vs. a technical question. When you watch movies of the same (undisclosed) genre as yours, do you hear music coming from the surround channels? Is the music an underscore to the plot, or is it “diegetic” ( part of the scene like a busker on the sidewalk, a radio playing in the next room, etc.) If your professor asks why there is music coming from the back, do you have a logical explanation? I would expect underscore music to come from the screen (Front Left and Front Right). But I would expect diegetic music to come from wherever you would hear it in the scene. In my philosophy it is rather like the 180 degree rule for shot direction.

Diegetic music
180-degree rule

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

[Richard Crowley]

[ryan elder] “Do most movies with a 5.1 surround mix have stereo for the music then?”
Do you mean Hollywood multi-million dollar blockbusters? Or do you mean “indie”? Or do you mean student projects?

I would imagine that most big-budget films mix the music into 5.1 (or 7.1 or whatever). But since we have not the slightest clue what your project is, you will have to ask yourself, does it make sense to mix the music into the surround channels? I mean “make sense” from the POV of the audience seeing it for the first time. Not from the POV of the producer/director/editor enamored with the tracks.

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

[Richard Crowley]

Even if the final mix is 5.1 that does not preclude using 2.0 stereo music tracks. The stereo music would go to Front Left and Front Right, while dialog gets panned somewhere between Front Left and Front Right (depending on the scene, etc.) And you can filter any very low frequencies from the 2.0 music stem to send into the .1 Low Frequency Effects channel.

Then you can put ambient, SFX, whatever into the Rear Left and Rear Right channels. Without knowing the content of your production, it would be impossible to suggest exactly what would go into the surround channels. You might add some reverb from the 2.0 music channels into the rear surround, but it seems unlikely that you would need a full 5.1 music mix unless you were doing something rather unusual.

For that matter, you could just deliver a 5.1 mix with content in only Front Left and Front Right. An exhibitor that can’t handle 2.0 seems pretty lame to me.

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

[Richard Crowley]

You can’t properly mix everything together (dialog, narration, music, effects, Foley, etc. etc.) if each element comes with its own “ambiance”. By the time you mix that all together you will have an unintelligible mishmash of sound.

The dialog needs to be CLEAN and as free of extraneous noise and ambient reflections, reverb, room tone, etc. as you can make it. AND you need a good 30 seconds of “room tone” for each setup. And your SFX, Foley, etc. need to be a clean and isolated as possible.

THEN when you have all the elements in the right places at the right levels, THEN you can apply whatever kind of effects you need to match the scene. Wind noise and distant surf, or traffic noises going by, or indistinct chatter and clanking glasses in a pub, or reverberation in a cave or whatever. But only AFTER you have all the clean elements mixed together. That way everything sounds “natural” like it all really happened there in the place the audience sees the scene.

NOBODY can predict exactly what the final mix will need while they are recording during production. That is why you need CLEAN, standalone, isolated elements to mix together in post production.

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

[Richard Crowley]

Just starting out, I would ask for an ordinary stereo mix. You have more than enough on your plate without worrying about mixing down the music before you even get to mixing the main tracks in the production.

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

[Richard Crowley]

It depends on what you asked for (or contracted for, or paid for, etc.) I would expect that unless you specified something otherwise, you would probably get a 2.0 “stereo” mix-down of the music. Depending on how the music was created/recorded, you could get individual tracks of different instruments. But then you would have to mix down the music in addition to doing the dialog, music, effects, etc. mix for the video. And it sounds like that would be rather beyond your experience at this point, or perhaps cut into your timeline to finish the mix for the video?

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

[Richard Crowley]

Those two guys would appear to know nothing about recording production sound. It is completely different from recording music, either live performance, or studio recording. Stick with your experience and feel free to ask questions on these forums. You can consult those guys next time you want to record a rock concert, or next time you want to split the cost of a pizza. But for production audio recording advice, stay away from them.

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

[Richard Crowley]

I listened to all of your samples.
In one of them I heard no artifacts at all, so it is not clear what is the issue?
In the other samples, I heard “rustling” noise from clothing.
The microphone is far enough away from his mouth that it would be extraordinary to hear plosives.

If there were a problem with plosives, then popular solutions include windscreens (foam or fur)..
And if you look carefully at most TV newsreaders (“anchors”) on local and national news,
you will see that they often have the microphone clipped on “upside-down”
Since the microphones are typically omnidirectional the still pick up the sound properly,.
But if they are upside down, they are more protected from the stream of air coming out of the mouth.

However, I do NOT hear plosive or related artifacts your examples.
If you just casually clip a microphone in a random place without checking, you are vulnerable to those artifacts.
You must be more intentional about WHERE you clip the mic, and how the cord is supported along its length.
I usually monitor the sound from the recorder with headphones and have the subject move his arms and body around vigorously to listen for those kind of noises from clothing.
Remember that the cord itself picks up noise and mechanically conducts it back to the microphone head.

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

[Richard Crowley]

[Todd Terry] “BUT… doesn’t that beg the question? A mic output is a mic output… and aren’t there exactly the same connection/mixing needs if I am using two body mics as opposed to two booms? I’m probably missing something, but I don’t know what it is…..”
A body microphone is essentially guaranteed to be at least one order of magnitude closer to the sound source (the mouth of the actor/subject) than any boom microphone could possibly approach. So, ipso-facto you will get a hotter signal AND a signal with higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) because the microphone is order(s) of magnitude closer to the signal which dramatically increases the SNR. Inverse-square law of acoustic physics. To my way of thinking a boom microphone is an extravagant luxury that cannot always be justified.

There are examples of very high-budget, high-profile feature films using body microphones on actors, singers, and even animals (horses), I don’t really buy into the presumption that body mics always produce “inferior” sound. You mentioned that this is an unfunded charity case, so we don’t know exactly what are your criteria for quality vs. expense trade-off?

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