Basic Mixing audio post production tips?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 11:42 pm

Hey all,

I'm going to be working on a short soon, and this time I really want to concentrate on the sound. I've been doing some basic music recording, and know a little about basic mixing.

What I am wondering is how is audio for movies mixed that is staying in stereo? I'm assuming you want to first clean up the dialogue and apply noise reduction to get it nice and clean depending on how well it was recorded. Then when mixing keep the dialogue in the centre of the mix, and I was thinking of copying the ambient background noise and have one track of it panned hard left, and one panned hard right. Sound effects I'm guessing need to be not as loud as the raw files, they always seem too loud, so decrease the volume on those a bit, play around with reverb for the ambient sound.. hmm What am I missing? Is there any basic walkthroughs, tips or links you can send to get this kind of information? I'm trying to keep it relatively basic, but better than most audio that's just slapped together like my last one in adobe premiere elements. This time I'm going to import my video into some music recording/editing software.

Please help!~

Luke

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 8:42 pm

anybody? There must be someone knowledgeable in this area!

Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 6:55 am

What you are asking about would take a lot of time to answer. Suggestion. Do some searches on the Web. Schedule a one hour session with a Post Production studio near you and ask the engineer to do one small part of the project and see how he or she approached the mix. Ask lots of questions during the session IF you do not understand what they are doing. It is probably the best money you could spend.

Basically most post production is done with stems (they can be stereo or mono). In the simplest mix you have a stem for the music, for the sound effects and for the dialog or for a more complex mix you may have many stems for each. You would then mix to pix using the stems locked to a time code. It takes some time and experience but is NOT rocket science and you could learn this but if the project is eminent you may want to work with a real post production team for the first go around at least.

Best of luck!

This topic sponsored by: