The Peril of Background Music
I was up til 2 AM yesterday re-encoding and re-uploading our most recent episode of STBD because Ann pointed out something I hadn't noticed (but have been told before): the background music was too loud to hear the dialogue.
Very often, I don't notice that because, while I'm editing, I'm paying attention to the dialogue. I block out the music in my head. But to someone who's never heard that dialogue before, it might get trampled by the backing track. (I made that mistake a lot in our first two seasons.)
The other side of the coin is audio compression. I've noticed a LOT of background noise coming through in our final mixes that I don't pick up in Final Cut Pro. If the entire mix is going to be leveled up during compression, figure that your background music will get a bump as well, and might interfere with your dialogue.
Labels: audio, compression, editing, encoding, video production
posted by STBD @ 8:02 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
It's not only that you're blocking out the music in your head. There's a familiarity that you get with dialogue as you hear it over and over. Once you're familiar with dialogue, you understand it whether you hear it clearly or not. It's like how you can be in a crowded room with all this chatter going on, and you hear someone clearly say your name. You're not used to the random chatter, but you're used to how your name sounds, and you can pick it out.
It's the same thing with dialogue editing. YOU can hear the words even if you turn the music up way louder than it needs to be. That's because you've already internalized it. I used to have this issue... I mean, I guess I still do, but I compensate for it by mixing to the meters instead of mixing to the understanding in my head about how the words go and how the background sounds interact with them. Set a level that you like for your background music and set a level that you like for your dialogue and stick to those.
As far as noise in final mixes, IMO you should be mixing your show with headphones on in a soundproofed room. There's too much noise all around you that you don't "hear" because you're used to it. Refrigerator sounds, sirens, hum from a light, disk drive noise.... It all masks the noise that's in your program. Listening on headphones blocks out the IRL noise and allows you to focus on what's REALLY in your program.
Even though I don't compress my show sound (though I probably should), I make sure I noise reduce the program before posting it. Keep your different inputs on different tracks so you can run them out to SoundTrack Pro quickly, NR them and replace them. When I *do* compress things, I use compressors more as limiters. I just want to make sure that the program is never louder than "X". If something's low, I bring it up before compressing and if that adds to the background noise, I can hear that in the headphones and NR it with STP.
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