Do audio mixers use music off CD's or higher quality sources?

[Simon Dunne]

So, let's take Adele as an example. What source audio recording will they use to put into the final mix for Bond? I'm guessing it's a high quality file, direct from Abbey Road, right?

Now, let's take a movie like Superbad, where they use classic tracks, some of which are decades old. Do they just used the audio from a CD, or try and get hold of the studio master?

Just wanting to know out of interest more than anything.

 

[Marc Wielage]

No, they just take whatever the record label sends over. I used to routinely hear ticks & pops in music used in 1970s and 1980s films, in cases where there wasn't time to wait for a master tape to arrive. I worked on Superbad at Technicolor (but only on dailies), and as far as I know they used took the CD tracks and SRC'd them to 48kHz/24-bit for the final mix, which is pretty standard practice. To my knowledge, nobody is using higher sample rates or bit-depths than this for feature films. One reason is that track counts are going up, and it's hard enough to keep several hundred tracks running simultaneously on a complex mix without also worrying about 96kHz or 192kHz tracks. Chances are, the studio would just send over a DAT or a CD-R of the licensed music track and take it off a stock WAV file sitting in their vault, right off a commercial CD.

What is often done is when the track count in a mix goes very high, they'll lash together multiple Pro Tools rigs at the same time in the re-recording stage, so maybe one computer does mainly Dialogue, one does mainly SFX, and one does mainly Music. There are action films out there that literally have 500 tracks going at one time (not with all the faders up, of course), so these mixes get ridiculously complicated. My observation is that the quality of the room and the loudspeakers is a far more important factor in what you hear than the sampling frequency of the music.

 

[Simon Dunne]

Thanks for the detailed reply Marc. I read an article about SACD's making a comeback the other week, and it got me thinking. 14 years ago, I had a DVD-A copy of a Jamiroquai track, and it sounded great in 5.1. It would be very easy to drop it into a mix. Just wanted to know what the big boys do as it set my minding off! You're correct though, the mix is only ever as good as the speakers it's outputted on.