if you could ADR everything, would you?

[Peter Moretti]

I think one problem is that the sound guy rarely feels empowered to speak up. He essentially keeps his mouth shut, holds his bag and boom and hopes the lavs can save the sound. If he starts interjecting between takes, he's going to be seen as a trouble maker, so he doesn't. Hence he works under conditions that are less than ideal to get good sound and, as a consequence, a lot of it has to be ADR'd.

 

[M.Halsell]

I think one problem is that the sound guy rarely feels empowered to speak up. He essentially keeps his mouth shut, holds his bag and boom and hopes the lavs can save the sound. If he starts interjecting between takes, he's going to be seen as a trouble maker, so he doesn't. Hence he works under conditions that are less than ideal to get good sound and, as a consequence, a lot of it has to be ADR'd.

+1. Sound rarely gets the same deferential treatment as picture.

 

[Marc Wielage]

+1. Sound rarely gets the same treatment level as picture.

That is very true. Even on large sets, the sound department has to pick and choose their battles carefully. If they whine about location problems every other take, they're going to be looked upon as a squeaky wheel. And instead of getting the grease, they often just get replaced with somebody who complains less.

What often does help is to have a director who is very sound-aware and wears headphones so that he or she will hear any and every problem during the take. If the sound person can hear the problem, anybody listening on headset can hear it, too. It doesn't cost a lot of money for the sound department to provide wireless headsets to other people on the crew (particularly the director, producers, and the script supervisor). That way, even before the sound mixer calls "I hear a truck!" at the end of a take, the director can say, "let's do one more... I heard some truck noise on that." I gotta say, I'm appalled at the directors who don't want to wear earphones or headphones during a dialogue-heavy production.

 

[Sergio Perez]

All ADR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmPYVbKWF70

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVy2Z0lHd6c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wil5KKeXmi8

Honestly would love to have all recorded on location. But when one is an Indie, with low budget, and good sound professionals are hard to find, going ADR actually helps to boost the professionalism of the overall production, and one can control better the other aspects of production.

Yes some performances from certain actors will sound worse- depends on their own "musical sense" for sound and acting capabilities- but my experience for fiction makes me select ADR as the way to go over here were I am. Of course if I as a director don't need to bother with who does my sound, if they can deliver, I would prefer on location audio. Mas for indie work, I prefer ADR.

 

[Simon Lok]

Is there a logistical reason you are considering that approach?

Yes.

The entire film is short in just a few locations. The locations were selected based on look and availability. All five have pollution issues (the usual... airplanes, helicopters, air conditioners, cars, people...). One indoor location leaks sound from outdoors... as in birds are chirping loud and clear. There was consideration of alternate locations but none were found to have any less pollution issues. Production budget does not include ability to shut down entire streets or shutting down the airport.

The team happens to have a solid audio setup... U-87, pre-amps, sound isolation equipment etc. We tested the ADR approach using the studio audio setup with a few scenes half way through production just to see what would happen. The actors were able to recreate their performances in just one or two takes. We were able to get beautiful isolated sound. The editor was present while we were doing the ADR and was able to match things up within minutes of getting the sound recorded. Sound guy messed with equalization, reverb, filters and added some "room tone" to them (is there a different phrase for outdoor "room tone?). Watching the result, then sitting on it a few days and watching them again... it appears to me that the scenes have a new life to them. They were good before, but now with the ADR audio, they are awesome.

We then shot without regard to capturing clean audio for the remainder of the scenes on the concept that we will just ADR the whole thing. Seems to me that if you can do things this way... why wouldn't you?

If the main issue is the performance, maybe you do screen tests with the actors that include them doing ADR and see how well they can recreate emotional scenes?

 

[David W. Jones]

So if you don't mind me asking Simon, how can you add days to your post schedule without changing your budget?

 

[Simon Lok]

So if you don't mind me asking Simon, how can you add days to your post schedule without changing your budget?

It did change the budget, but in a good way.

The number of pages of script shot per day doubled (possibly tripled in some cases) once the decision was made to rely on ADR. The shooting kept going when there was a police helicopter overhead for 30 minutes (and when it came back again 1 hour later), when cars drove by, when airplanes flew overhead, when neighbors decided to have loud conversations, when neighbors decided to walk their barking dogs, etc.

The amount of time needed to ADR is a scene is a very small fraction of the amount of time it takes to shoot it. The net result was a reduction in the total production cost of the project.

Furthermore the quality of the overall result appears to be dramatically higher. Not only were the actors able to match their performances, in some cases, the performances were actually better. In other cases, the director was able to acquire multiple choices for the audio that he can now consider which one he wants to put in. The use of elite microphone tech, solid pre-amps and then recording directly to editing workstation has several incredible benefits that I never truly understood until I tried it.

#1 - The actual quality of the sound is perfect. Perhaps it is "too perfect" but that is the same with the Red workflow (capturing perfect histograms in raw and then working in post to give it the "look" possibly even blowing some things out to get the look that is desired... well the is the same idea, capture perfect studio sound, apply the equalizer, filters, etc., to get the desired result).

#2 - The sound is on separate tracks, making 5.1 output very easy to accomplish. Let's say it's a wide with two people on the left and the right, outdoors. You can easily map person #1 to center/left and person #2 to center/right. Then you can add the birds to the rear left and rear right. Furthermore you can have the birds at volume X as the characters walk into the frame and then drop the bird volume to say, 0.75 X or 0.5 X when the people start talking at the same time that the camera rack focused from the background to the people. If you depend on production audio for the foley and background, breaking all of that out into separate tracks is just as hard as redoing it. Some times it may not even be possible.

#3 - The freedom on set is a truly wonderful and uplifting experience. Concentrating purely on the look frees the creative. Worrying about sound really hurts morale. Needing to have PAs run around trying to hold cars is an annoyance.

I was very much a capture all audio at production kind of a guy until we did this project. Everybody always told me that ADR is bad, ADR results in a low quality result, ADR means poor performance, ADR is impossibly difficult technically to get done, ADR is extremely expensive, ADR is impossible to match with production. Now that I've done this project the only thing that I have found might be true is that ADR is hard to match. The rest, so far as I can tell, is false.

Now that I have this experience with this project I've gone completely the opposite direction. If it's possible to get awesome production audio then yes that would be a good thing. If I could shoot everything in a sound stage that would be fantastic. However, if I can't, I've decided that rather than trying to match up ADR vs non ADR, I think I'm just going to do full time ADR because it is cheaper, better and faster. I was just wondering if anybody else has come across this or decided to go this way.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Honestly would love to have all recorded on location. But when one is an Indie, with low budget, and good sound professionals are hard to find...

No, good location sound professionals are easy to find if you just ask around. They're on IMDB, they're in Local 695, they're on Facebook, they're on JWSoundGroup.net ... there's lots of places. Call one of the dozen or so sound suppliers around America -- Gotham Sound in NY, Professional Sound in NY, Trew Audio in Nashville and Burbank, TAI Audio in Orlando, Location Sound in N. Hollywood, Audio Department in Burbank... there's lots of them out there. Good UPMs know how to track down good crews, and it's just a question of whether a fair rate and equipment rental can be negotiated.

But I think you fool yourself if you believe re-recording films from scratch as ADR is practical. This kind of thing is frequently done for animated film, where no live action material exists except for the actors reading individual lines in studios. Then the problem becomes how to place those lines in a realistic space, while you add enough sound effects foley to "sell" the reality. That is a very, very time-consuming and costly operation. And I again say that the danger is the end result will have a "canned" and "artifical" feel to it that will detract from the emotion and the drama you're trying to create.

If the budget doesn't exist to do it right the first time, then my suggestion would be to reassess what the budget requires and find the additional funds. Kickstarter, Indiegogo... there's a dozen ways to crowdsource films nowadays. If (say) another $20,000 would solve the sound problem, then that could easily handle a month's worth of live shoots for a modest sound crew. At the least, then you could be sure you're getting the best possible results pending on your choice of locations.

 

[Elsie N]

It did change the budget, but in a good way.

The number of pages of script shot per day doubled (possibly tripled in some cases) once the decision was made to rely on ADR. The shooting kept going when there was a police helicopter overhead for 30 minutes (and when it came back again 1 hour later), when cars drove by, when airplanes flew overhead, when neighbors decided to have loud conversations, when neighbors decided to walk their barking dogs, etc.

The amount of time needed to ADR is a scene is a very small fraction of the amount of time it takes to shoot it. The net result was a reduction in the total production cost of the project.

Furthermore the quality of the overall result appears to be dramatically higher. Not only were the actors able to match their performances, in some cases, the performances were actually better. In other cases, the director was able to acquire multiple choices for the audio that he can now consider which one he wants to put in. The use of elite microphone tech, solid pre-amps and then recording directly to editing workstation has several incredible benefits that I never truly understood until I tried it.

#1 - The actual quality of the sound is perfect. Perhaps it is "too perfect" but that is the same with the Red workflow (capturing perfect histograms in raw and then working in post to give it the "look" possibly even blowing some things out to get the look that is desired... well the is the same idea, capture perfect studio sound, apply the equalizer, filters, etc., to get the desired result).

#2 - The sound is on separate tracks, making 5.1 output very easy to accomplish. Let's say it's a wide with two people on the left and the right, outdoors. You can easily map person #1 to center/left and person #2 to center/right. Then you can add the birds to the rear left and rear right. Furthermore you can have the birds at volume X as the characters walk into the frame and then drop the bird volume to say, 0.75 X or 0.5 X when the people start talking at the same time that the camera rack focused from the background to the people. If you depend on production audio for the foley and background, breaking all of that out into separate tracks is just as hard as redoing it. Some times it may not even be possible.

#3 - The freedom on set is a truly wonderful and uplifting experience. Concentrating purely on the look frees the creative. Worrying about sound really hurts morale. Needing to have PAs run around trying to hold cars is an annoyance.

I was very much a capture all audio at production kind of a guy until we did this project. Everybody always told me that ADR is bad, ADR results in a low quality result, ADR means poor performance, ADR is impossibly difficult technically to get done, ADR is extremely expensive, ADR is impossible to match with production. Now that I've done this project the only thing that I have found might be true is that ADR is hard to match. The rest, so far as I can tell, is false.

Now that I have this experience with this project I've gone completely the opposite direction. If it's possible to get awesome production audio then yes that would be a good thing. If I could shoot everything in a sound stage that would be fantastic. However, if I can't, I've decided that rather than trying to match up ADR vs non ADR, I think I'm just going to do full time ADR because it is cheaper, better and faster. I was just wondering if anybody else has come across this or decided to go this way.

Thanks for giving us the benefit of your experience.

I've done some ADR before and had trouble matching up. But no problem making it seem as though it was done on location in that instance.

When I hear the term ADR I think back to a Natalie Wood film, can't remember the name or even the story... Daisy Clover maybe? But I do remember her in front of a screen doing dialog takes and a beeped countdown that gave her the pace of the dialog. That was years ago which obviously means it has been a tried and true practice they even incorporated into the story.

I'm actually going to practice this as a work-around with actors who may or may not have yet perfected their craft... and rather than shoot take after take trying to nuance a line, I think this will save budget for me as it has for you by just working on that one person's lines from a scene.

Maybe it will match or maybe it won't... but I'm thinking it can be made to work even in a less than big budget environment.

 

[Hugh Scully]

Now that I have this experience with this project I've gone completely the opposite direction. If it's possible to get awesome production audio then yes that would be a good thing. If I could shoot everything in a sound stage that would be fantastic. However, if I can't, I've decided that rather than trying to match up ADR vs non ADR, I think I'm just going to do full time ADR because it is cheaper, better and faster. I was just wondering if anybody else has come across this or decided to go this way.

Good to see you back on the thread. Sometimes people drop threads and run when the subject can be considered "controversial." I'm glad that you've found an approach that you like. You are obviously enthusiastic about it technically and aesthetically and that's great.

Technically, the decision to capture good production sound does have drawbacks but I accept them, including hours of dialog editing to make them work well enough. Matching ADR inside of production audio can be a challenge and as someone has said, it's a fact on most productions. The project I'm currently working on, I've spent much more time cleaning up the audio than I did in the actual video edit. So, there may be some sense to your approach in the ways you describe it.

For me, separating an actor's visual performance from their auditory performance is anathema and I will only undertake that effort as a fix as a last resort. However, we do take liberties with acting performances, cutting different takes together, "taking the air out," etc. So maintaining the fidelity of a performance is in lots of ways, a bunch of baloney too.

Your approach is interesting.. It's fun watching the scenes created this way, when you know it ahead of time, I have to admit. There's a deliberateness to them that has a certain charm.

 

[PatrickFaith]

... Now that I have this experience with this project I've gone completely the opposite direction. If it's possible to get awesome production audio then yes that would be a good thing. If I could shoot everything in a sound stage that would be fantastic. However, if I can't, I've decided that rather than trying to match up ADR vs non ADR, I think I'm just going to do full time ADR because it is cheaper, better and faster. I was just wondering if anybody else has come across this or decided to go this way.

I agree, you have to do what makes sense to you and your film. A couple of tricks I have picked up from David Fincher films is over the shoulder shots and dialog reaction shots are used in ADR so you don't even see the actors mouth (so super easy to sync). There is a ton of this in girl with dragon tattoo, and you don't even notice, actually i think he did it to increase the tension.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I have a friend that was a dialogue editor on a movie with a scene shot on a noisy location where ADR would have been used, except one of the two actors in the scene passed away right after filming was completed, so they did everything they could to make the production recording work.

 

[Simon Lok]

I have a friend that was a dialogue editor on a movie with a scene shot on a noisy location where ADR would have been used, except one of the two actors in the scene passed away right after filming was completed, so they did everything they could to make the production recording work.

Hahahahaha... I asked the producer about this issue, not actor death, but rather, what happens when the actor flakes. Her response, we ADR with a voice actor... I started laughing. Then she said, she's serious. Then I realized... wow, she is right.

 

[Simon Lok]

No, good location sound professionals are easy to find if you just ask around. They're on IMDB, they're in Local 695, they're on Facebook, they're on JWSoundGroup.net ... there's lots of places. Call one of the dozen or so sound suppliers around America -- Gotham Sound in NY, Professional Sound in NY, Trew Audio in Nashville and Burbank, TAI Audio in Orlando, Location Sound in N. Hollywood, Audio Department in Burbank... there's lots of them out there. Good UPMs know how to track down good crews, and it's just a question of whether a fair rate and equipment rental can be negotiated.

But I think you fool yourself if you believe re-recording films from scratch as ADR is practical. This kind of thing is frequently done for animated film, where no live action material exists except for the actors reading individual lines in studios. Then the problem becomes how to place those lines in a realistic space, while you add enough sound effects foley to "sell" the reality. That is a very, very time-consuming and costly operation. And I again say that the danger is the end result will have a "canned" and "artifical" feel to it that will detract from the emotion and the drama you're trying to create.

If the budget doesn't exist to do it right the first time, then my suggestion would be to reassess what the budget requires and find the additional funds. Kickstarter, Indiegogo... there's a dozen ways to crowdsource films nowadays. If (say) another $20,000 would solve the sound problem, then that could easily handle a month's worth of live shoots for a modest sound crew. At the least, then you could be sure you're getting the best possible results pending on your choice of locations.

Preface - I am not trying to snippy. I am asking an honest question. I really want to know how you guys do this production audio thing.

How does the Local 695 sound guy stop the airplane from flying overhead and/or make the police helicopter that is hovering for 30 to 60 minutes at a time to go fly some place else? How does the super sound guy make the dog stop barking? The neighbor stop talking? The car with the loud radio to never show up? The kids running around in the park who are playing ball? I've even run into this problem in the middle of nowhere the woods, the damn plane still shows up every so often.

I have paid $300 a day for a professional sound guy. I have paid $500 a day for a sound guy. I've even paid, one time, $650 a day for a sound guy. In my experience, all they do is tell you when the sound is polluted. Once they do make that statement, you go shoot it again.

You do a location scout and its fine, then when you show up to shoot, something is different. The temperature rises by ten degrees, so now the whole damn neighborhood has their damn air conditioners on. So the sound guy says no problem, I can use a super duper microphone that won't catch that. Well, that's not always going to work because the actors have to walk and move. Even when it does work, it's not perfect. So the the sound guy says okay, I'll remove that noise using a tool. The audio quality suffers. It's never quite right anymore after that. It's like running a video stabilizer. Yeah, they work some of the time, but some of the other times, you can really see it.

I keep hearing over and over and over again from EVERYBODY that production audio is it. I believed this wholeheartedly. I worked my ass off to make production audio work for every project I've ever done... until this one, because it just wouldn't work, and the rate of production was so slow, the project was on the very of being cancelled after 4 days shooting due to the ridiculously slow pace of things. When I reviewed the audio, some parts were okay, others were just garbage.

Then there is the stress. Maybe you guys are just way more relaxed than me. For me, there is a stress associated with constantly doing more and more takes. Then there is a stress related to waiting for a clean feed. Then we decided to shoot for ADR... and ... the stress went away. It became fun again. I rediscovered the fun of filmmaking that I had lost while doing this project.

So all you guys who say this production audio stuff is the way to go... I don't understand how you do it. I am honestly asking you to please help me understand how you do it. I really want to know, that's why I guess I started this thread. I want to be educated, because in my experience, doing the whole project via ADR is a much better idea. The only exception is if I could shoot in a sound stage or some other indoor location where I could completely control everything. Heck, even with that, the damn police helicopter could still come around and screw me possibly.

If the answer is you just gotta find a spot where you don't have pollution, I guess, okay, I get that and maybe that's the way that things "should be done." For whatever reason, for me, making films in heavily populated areas for NYC. I am guessing a whole lot of you are in NYC too, so that means, clearly, I am the problem, which goes back to my question, what am I doing wrong?

I really want to know if there is something key that I'm missing. I'm looking for what I'm doing wrong and I can't find it. So now I've have been bitten by this ADR bug... and I think I like it... I think I like it a lot... heck... I think that it was reinvigorated me... it has brought back the magical feeling that I was losing when we have to do 20 takes for a shot... 15 of which were for sound pollution problems. I was also losing a lot of the magical feeling when we stood around for 45 minutes waiting for helicopters to leave... the whole time we were waiting we had to have our minds and bodies having to have to be jacked up / full on because the very second the audio feed is clear we gotta start shooting instantly to make sure we got our 30 second shot in while before the feed got polluted again. The stress of working like that was really a drag. Doing things this way with the ADR, film making is fun again for me.

 

[Nick Gardner]

There are tricks, but a good sound guy with the best gear, and really good post audio fixes a lot of problems. If you want to shoot wide and tight at the same time then you are fucking the sound guy, and sometimes you have to. The boom is always going to sound better than a Lav, so let the sound guy get a directional shotgun in there. I am not a sound guy, but I work with some really good ones. On House Of cards, if it's a widish shot, they shoot 15 seconds of a clean plate and then let the boom ops pop the booms in nice and tight in the frame to get good sound and paint them out.

It's the fast cheap good pyramid. Just like everything else.

Nick

 

[Marc Wielage]

When I hear the term ADR I think back to a Natalie Wood film, can't remember the name or even the story... Daisy Clover maybe? But I do remember her in front of a screen doing dialog takes and a beeped countdown that gave her the pace of the dialog. That was years ago which obviously means it has been a tried and true practice they even incorporated into the story.

Yes, Inside Daisy Clover was a big movie in the 1960s that had a major sequence showing Natalie Wood loop a scene. The odd thing about that scene was that she was singing, which normally would never be done that way. There was a better scene with old-school ADR -- literally "looping," a loop of film that ran over and over again -- in the classic 1951 film Singin' in the Rain, which is an entire film about how sound changed Hollywood films. What's very funny is that Jean Hagen (the actress being "dubbed") actually had a very fine voice, and they did not use Debbie Reynolds' voice at all for those scenes. So it's an in-joke inside an in-joke.

The thing to remember about location sound is that there's no shortcuts to doing it right in the first place. I've worked on a half-dozen low-budget films where we still were able to afford throwing 7, 8, 9 wireless mics on the cast and a boom, and got everything to multitrack. And after the scene, we ran in and got alternate line readings to try to help avoid ADR later. In at least two of those films, when we got on the mixing stage, the engineer listened to the original track, listened to the ADR, and threw out the ADR because the original performance was better. The end result was a complex combination of wireless, boom, alts, and a little bit of ADR. I don't think more than 5% of either film was ADR'd, but some of it was. I think the total production sound budget was about $10K, and the total post sound budget was $10K, which is where my "$20,000" figure came from above. These were both films roughly in the $250,000 budget range, and that's fairly low for LA.

ADR can be made to work, and it's a very interesting art form in itself. One trick the engineers often do is to try to re-record the dialogue with the exact same microphones used on the set, so there is no change in sound quality. I saw earlier messages by people who talked about using U87's and other very high-end mics for ADR, but the reality is they most likely will not match the sound of a lav on the actor's chest or a standard boom mic just over their heads. It'll sound like a U87 2 feet away, which is what it is. Watch Game of Thrones, watch Downton Abbey, watch Walking Dead... all shows that use tons of wireless and very little ADR, and they're shot on a TV schedule, largely on difficult locations. And generally they sound terrific.

There are tricks, but a good sound guy with the best gear, and really good post audio fixes a lot of problems. If you want to shoot wide and tight at the same time then you are fucking the sound guy, and sometimes you have to. The boom is always going to sound better than a Lav, so let the sound guy get a directional shotgun in there. I am not a sound guy, but I work with some really good ones. On House Of cards, if it's a widish shot, they shoot 15 seconds of a clean plate and then let the boom ops pop the booms in nice and tight in the frame to get good sound and paint them out. It's the fast cheap good pyramid. Just like everything else.

Yes, yes, and yes. Exactly right. House of Cards is a rare show where the showrunner/producer (David Fincher) is extremely savvy and does not like ADR. He demands that they get the sound right on the day, with the actors right there on the set. And I believe this is a show with very little wireless: they use multiple booms and several boom ops to get the mics in the right place at the right time. It's a great-sounding show from start to finish. Quentin Tarantino is another guy who demands great sound on the set, right there. I recall seeing an interview with Mark Ulano, sound mixer on Hateful 8, who said there was "almost no ADR" in the entire film, and I believe him.

 

[Marc Wielage]

How does the Local 695 sound guy stop the airplane from flying overhead and/or make the police helicopter that is hovering for 30 to 60 minutes at a time to go fly some place else? How does the super sound guy make the dog stop barking? The neighbor stop talking? The car with the loud radio to never show up? The kids running around in the park who are playing ball? I've even run into this problem in the middle of nowhere the woods, the damn plane still shows up every so often.

There is no good answer to this question. To answer it in detail would really require a book. The bottom line is: find a better location. If you can't, then record the best possible "reference track" with the noise in it, and use that as a guide when doing ADR. There are no easy fixes or magic bullets -- just experience, good equipment, good locations, and getting the mics in the right place at the right time. If the solution were as simple as just ADR-ing the entire film, every Hollywood film would be done this way.

So all you guys who say this production audio stuff is the way to go... I don't understand how you do it. I am honestly asking you to please help me understand how you do it. I really want to know, that's why I guess I started this thread. I want to be educated, because in my experience, doing the whole project via ADR is a much better idea. The only exception is if I could shoot in a sound stage or some other indoor location where I could completely control everything. Heck, even with that, the damn police helicopter could still come around and screw me possibly.

I wish there was a magic wand that could help. One thing I will tell you is that in noisy locations, one method to eliminate the room from the problem is to put wireless mics on everybody and then (with skill, rehearsals, and good timing) only have the one mic up for whoever is talking at that moment. It's not ideal, it's not as good as a boom, but it will eliminate most of the room problems from the situation.

Another thing that's done is to soundproof the room as much as you can by hanging sound blankets whenever and wherever it's possible. It's not unusual to see 10 or more sound blankets hung on C-stands just outside the frame to help eliminate or at least cut down on slap echo, air conditioning noise, and other problems. Closing the windows can help. Killing the HVAC can help. Moving generators far away from production can help. In cases where high ceilings create terrible echo, I have seen sound mixers inflate a hundred helium balloons and let them rise up, killing a lot of reverb. There are a thousand tricks like this, and really good sound mixers know them all. Having a good AD and location manager to find good film-friendly locations also helps immeasurably. I once worked on a shoot where they booked a stage that was literally 2 blocks from a train station and 100 yards from a truck lot, and we were assailed every day by noises from both ends. All we could do was wait until it got quiet, shoot, and hope for the best. This was a case where bad planning snowballed into production problems. Good post sound mixers and dialogue editors have great software tools like iZotope RX Advanced, and in many (but not all) cases, they can surgically remove the noise while preserving the dialogue as much as possible. They aren't perfect, but if they can at least cut the noise by half, it'll help tell the story better and preserve the actor's performance.

The website JWSoundGroup.net, headed up by famed LA sound mixer Jeff Wexler, goes into a lot of this stuff in extraordinary detail. It could take you literally months to read all the insights in those messages, but the easiest answer is: hire a great sound mixer and just spend the money. Sound is one of those things where you either spend the money now and solve the problems, or spend the money later in post to fix the problems.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Throwing in one idea that came up when I was watching an interview with Mike Matzdorff about making Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. Because they were very determined to get good sound - and they often shot multiple cameras - it often happened that a boom would slip into one of the shots. After thinking about how to deal with it, they proactively decided not to dump those takes but rather made the somewhat unconventional decision that removing the boom from the shots in post was easy enough to do, so they would simply move on once they had an otherwise good take. In fact, they often made sure the boom op moved in closer to optimize sound without worrying about the boom in the shot. Not a solution for all situations but can work sometimes.

 

[Hugh Scully]

Painting out a boom is a very simple operation when you're locked off. It gets to be more work, but doable when hand held or moving the camera. If you know you have to paint it out, just lock off the camera making it easy. You have to plan and get the shot of the set clear of the mic, as described for House of Cards in the post above.

Also, using a hyper cardioid mic for dialog inside a location with a ceiling will mitigate reflections from the ceiling as opposed to a shotgun which has good side rejection but a tail on it's pickup pattern behind.

 

[M.Halsell]

Audio Alignment Tools

Audio Alignment Tools

Does anyone know of a comparable product to VocAlign?