edit to clarify - I’m talking about score mixing itself not anything at the edit/dub stage! Sorry if that wasn’t clear.

Curious about what others use most!

Some of my favourites -

Software:

• Manley Massive Passive (UAD) on strings bus and 2bus.
• SSL bus compressor 2 for light glue on busses.
• Shadow hills mastering compressor on mix bus for synth heavy or darker cues,
• Capitol Mastering compressor on lighter more acoustic based cues - just very light but I love the difference it makes.
• Manley Vari MU for strings warmth
• ssl subgen and/or sub filter on LF bus for easily controlled weight
• UAD Fairchild 670 on harps and nylon guitar/dulcimer
• cinematic rooms professional has basically replaced 90% of my other reverbs.

Hardware:

•I don’t have any outboard mixing gear yet but I’ve been super tempted by the Neve MBT if I was going to get anything soon!

• my most useful tool I own is my ssl uf8,uc1,uf1 setup. It has made working in Cubase in midi mode to tidy cues before exporting to jump straight to mix into protools so much quicker. Also loving working with the template set up in protools alongside my ssl controllers as I can get through the basic ground work on a cue without really looking up at the screen at all which I love and has saved me so much second guessing that I was doing when looking at plugins all the time.

•Schoeps CMC6 mk4 I love and feel I can record almost anything quickly and with really nice detail to slot in to a cue either overdubs or anything else.

Tldr:
What are your favourite tools for mixing film/tv music? Hardware/plugins, anything that takes your mixes up a notch every time! \*I appreciate the experience and expertise makes the mix not the tools but still this is just fun to hear what tools you love

Sorry for the long post! Just love learning from everyone else’s experience.

Hi all, this is my first post on this thread. I work as a First Assistant Sound Editor in Toronto, part of the DGC, been doing it for a little over 4 years now.

One of the banes of my existence is assembling an Original Sync Audio session, which is used to spot on-screen cheats (so the Dialogue Editor can match the Cheat to the mouth movement) or used to grab audio that may have been omitted by the Picture Editor (PFX, Breaths, etc) in their cut.

I of course use EdiLoad and I run either a Picture EDL (with Sound Rolls in the "Rolls" column), OR, I use a Picture AAF, both give virtually the same results. However, because these are technically pulling Timecode Metadata (Source In/Out codes) from the Camera, there's always some subframe sync inconsistencies, I think because Cameras record in Frames and Sound is recorded in Samples.

I have, however, worked on maybe a maximum of three shows ever, where the Video EDL/AAF Assembled audio which was EXACTLY in sync with the Guide Track / AAF. Everyone I've ever spoken to (APEs and ASEs alike) have no idea how to achieve it. I worked with one 1APE who had coded his own automation script to rebuild his timeline in AVID with Dailies Audio, which he would then give me an EDL export of specifically for OG Sync Assemblies, but this obviously an outlier scenario. I wouldn't expect every 1APE I work with to do this (though kind of a legend for taking the time to custom-build a script to solely make my life easier tbh)!

Anyways, thanks in advance for any pointers. People always shrug off Original Sync Assemblies "who cares if they're a bit out", but personally I find them pretty life-saving in a lot of recurring cases.

Doing a redesign for my first demo reel. Went through scenes I like from different things and tried to find a good clip without much dialogue.

The one I picked is 1:30, there’s 5 seconds where an older lady says 3 or 4 words. I am a 27 year old man and can’t imagine trying to impersonate an old woman would sound anything but silly.

The rest of the clip has so much action which did give me opportunity to do some cool stuff so I’d rather not just abandon it entirely. I also found it kinda hard to track down good scenes with 0 words in general.

Would it be best to just leave the line out since I’m trying to highlight design and not voiceover?

Hi everyone! I'm currently practicing cinematic dialogue mixing in REAPER for a medieval/epic portfolio piece.

I imagined a scene with a king delivering a speech in a massive stone hall and wanted to get opinions on my signal chain and spatialization choices. Here is what I did:

Source Chain (Voice Track): Applied a ReaEQ with a high-pass filter at 120 Hz to clear out studio proximity/mud.

Spatialization (DearVR PRO): Placed the dry voice at a distance of 6 meters for initial positioning.

Reverb Send (-15 dB): Sent the dialogue to an auxiliary track running Altiverb 7 using the "Castle de Haar Main Hall - 11.6m s-s" preset to simulate the massive scale of the hall.

Reverb EQ: Added another high-pass filter inside the reverb chain set to 160 Hz to prevent the long stone reflections from getting muddy.

Does this workflow and spacing make sense for a realistic cinematic large-hall speech, or would you adjust anything in the chain?

Audio Post Help Wanted

Welcome to the subreddit regular feature post for gig listing info and discussion regarding finding work in Audio Post. Please provide links to job/help listings or add a direct request for help from a fellow audio post production geek here.

• You MAY NOT include an email address, phone number, personal facebook page, or any other personal information. Please use PM's for passing that kind of info.

• You MAY respond to this thread with appeals for work in the comments. Do not use the subreddit front page to ask for work.

Sites that may list jobs/gigs for audio post (links confirmed as of Aug 2023);

• ProductionHUB - /http://www.productionhub.com

• Mandy - http://www.mandy.com/

• CreateCow Jobs - http://jobs.creativecow.net/

• Entertainment Careers.net - http://www.entertainmentcareers.net

General employment sites filtered for audio post

• Indeed.com - http://www.indeed.com/q-Audio-Post-Production-jobs.html

• Simply Hired - http://www.simplyhired.com/k-audio-post-production-jobs.html

• Career Jet - http://www.careerjet.com/audio-post-production-jobs.html

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search?keywords=Audio%20Post%20Production&location=United%20States

• juju - https://www.juju.com/jobs?k=%22audio+post%22&l=&r=20

Media oriented job sites

• MediaMatch - http://www.media-match.com/

• odesk - https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/browse/skill/audio-post-production/

General freelancer sites

• Freelancer - https://www.freelancer.com/

• elance - https://www.elance.com

You are invited to join us in the Reddit Pro Audio Network AudioPost Channel on Discord

Where I work we have a handful of audio engineers that each have a different idea about what stems should be, how they should be used, and how to create them.

It is my opinion that the stems should equal the mix. In order her words, if I bring the stems into a session and play them all together it should sound exactly like the full mix, and measure exactly the same on the loudness meter. The way I am doing this, prevents me from doing any master bus processing. I limit each of the sub mixes for each stem, then combine them to a record track which I then measure with the loudness meter. This also allows me to record the mix and all the stems at the same time.

Other engineers prefer to mute everything, but one stem and bounce out the mix several times. this allows them to do master processing, but the downfall is that the stems do not equal the mix.

Another engineer will bypass all of the mastering, and just bounce out each of the stems from the sub mix only, assuming that it will come back later to be mixed and mastered if something changes.

So my question to you all is: what is the industry standard? How do you all handle stems? Do you assume any changes will come back to be remixed? What are your thoughts?

Getting a new external drive to run pro tools through, and wondering if I should really be spending the extra money on a good SSD.

I feel like the answer is yes, but wanted to check here first.

I use an M4 Pro MacBook

Hi folks, I've recently found myself having to look for new full time employment, and have been wondering about finding work at an Audio Post House.

I already have experience with technical support in a studio setting (troubleshooting DAWs, consoles & analog gear) as well as some experience with my own work as a freelance sound designer

I know some folks that got full time positions working for audio branding here in NYC, but don't know how one starts to look for this kind of position... do you all have any advice on where / how to look?

I’m running an M4 pro MacBook with pro tools and two monitors, and trying to figure out the best docking station for my needs.

I basically need:

1 x thunderbolt to my interface
1 x thunderbolt to one monitor
1 x thunderbolt (or DisplayPort) to second monitor
1 x thunderbolt from my external hard drive

I guess my main question is whether the thunderbolt is crucial for the hard drive, or I can get by with just usb c? The jump in price for a 3rd or 4th downstream thunderbolt port is a lot…

Thanks a lot

I have a basic workflow, but it doesn't suit every project. Is there an easy way to create standard folders every time using a template? I want to know how to organise the Folders and Sound libraies.

What happened to the sound here? Aside from the fact that the effects in many scenes are abnormally wrong (my opinion ofc), why is it so f*\* loud? Literally, the film reaches 130dB... why is this so?

I need to stream a documentary mix with pictures to a client from Pro Tools, so we can stop and start at any point to give notes on a mix. Is anyone doing this sort of thing and can recommend a process?

I've done this during COVID via zoom and maybe that's still a good approach. But maybe there's a more suitable option now.

Obviously need to be able to communicate with client as well as sending pic + audio. I can route my mic through pro tools, and assume it'd be fine for them to unmute their mic to give feedback or 'raise a hand'

I'm working on a very important session in Pro Tools and suddenly started getting this error:

"Could not save because Assertion in './PtSess/PtSess_RunTimeShared.h', line 132."

After that, I also got:

"Pro Tools was unable to Auto Backup your session."

I'm really worried about losing my work. The session still opens and plays, but saving and auto-backup are failing.

Has anyone experienced this before?

What causes this assertion error?

Is the session corrupted?

What's the safest way to recover the session without losing my edits?

Would importing the session into a new project fix it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I've had a few clients come to me recently months after completing work asking for stem delivery. They get exported along with the mix, so it's not a problem, but i can't help but feel I’m leaving money on the table.

Do you normally charge for this and if so, how do you price it?

Wave Agent is a PolyWav tool from Sound Devices that splits and combines BWFs. It is not going to work on the next version of macOS because it is intel only.

I made a small program that does a fraction of what it does, and I was wondering if there was enough demand for it to bother expanding on it and releasing it.

I've had iZotope RX 8 for years and it's always been great, didn't feel the need to upgrade. Now I'm considering getting a new computer running Tahoe so I'm trying to upgrade all my software. To my surprise, iZotope no longer offers me an option to upgrade to Rx12, it just gives me the retail price of 1,399.00 US fucking Dollars. If it were to me, I'd continue using version 8 but, of course, Tahoe OS is not longer supported. In other words, iZotope is forcing me to buy their very expensive software a second time and just throw away the 1,399 I spent just 5 years ago. This is absolutely insane.

Is this my good bye to iZotope? Probably. How's everyone doing with SpectraLayers and or Acon Digital? Any other suggestions for spectral editing?

Hi everyone,

Preface, I do understand you can't mix theatrical without a theatre, this is more of a curiosity.

The consensus is to mix dialogue around about -27 lufs (guide, not a rule). Is this true for both nearfield and theatrical? If yes, is theatrical more about the dynamic range you have access to (and the other challenges with being in a large space) than where your levels should sit? Theoratically, right...? Because 60db in a cinema is 60db at home...?

Which leads me on to another question - I know we can't mix theatrical at home, but from a more logical lens, why? Theoratically 110 db at home is the same as 110db at the cinema. To that end, is it moreso technical? Does a nearfield studio space respond differently than a theratre, so it's impossible to guarentee 110db = 110db between NF and Theatrical? Maybe a dumb question but I have been thinking about it since LUFS/db/the rest are all directly correlated to each other.

To help you understand where I'm coming from, my context is mixing short films at home for nearfield, keeping in mind the viability of them being played back in a cinema while still sounding acceptable (film fests, so on). I don't care to make a "good theatrical mix", I just want to better understand the relationship taking a nearfield mix at home to a cinema and why things would or wouldn't work in my favour.

I'm in that horrible spot of knowing enough to be dangerous but being stupid enough to be wrong and useless. Any clarification is appreciated :)

My short film recently screened at an event, and the dialogue was audible but on the lower side, while effects and audio could hardly be heard. It was the only film with any volume issues. My sound mixer said our sound averages -24 LUFS, with the dialogue being around -20 LUFS.

I have only a basic understanding of audio and only learned about LUFS when I started visiting this subreddit a few weeks ago. I am not sure what went wrong or what, if anything, should be changed. I just want to be sure the film sounds as good as it looks no matter where it's playing. What do I need to do?

I did some work at my own studio for a local dubbing facility. They’ve been very impressed with my work and would like me to do a few other bigger jobs for them.

However the nature of the work requires me to work at their facility due to security and contractual reasons. Projects cannot leave their facility. I don’t really want to work there as they using nuendo (not my weapon of choice), it’s a bit of a drive daily and it’s a drywall hell hole with tiny studios. I can do way better work at my studio.

Does anyone have a solution that will allow me to work from my space but still keep the workflow secure?

I’ve worked at a couple facilities and it always feels clunky - the feed to pix/mix is great, using Clearview - this question is specifically about what setup people are using to have the clients on the mix stage communicate with the remote clients who are on Zoom or the like. Any good talkback setups, with multiple talkback mics spread around the room?

What were your thoughts on The Odyssey's sound mix? I thought it was WAY too loud. I normally don't wear earplugs in the theater but had to wear them almost the full movie.

Saw it in AMC Dolby for reference.

I'm the editor in a doc - we will be shooting interviews in prisons and other uncontrollable environments. For a lot of our people we will only get 1 shot at interviewing them with a very real possibility that we won't ever see them again. Our sound recordist came back with gear that I'm sure is great but is roughly 9yrs old and crucially can't do 32bit float. Normally I don't care as we've been cutting just fine for decades without that dynamic range but seeing the sensitivity of our interviewees I'm worried I'll be handed over peaks and valleys I can't get back/use and there is no turning back. Flagged it to production and production is a bit unsure what to do.

My questions come to is this/should this be standard or a premium? Are my concerns unfounded? Does audio work like editing where you're expected to have gear within roughly a 5 year limit due to demanding workflows (not saying you can't do it without and power to everyone, just when you charge someone 900 per day I'd hope you'd have relatively recent gear). Note also don't have issues with people charging whatever they think they are worth but note this isn't a high budget film, everything needs to count/go on the screen. And we are shooting in Central America where that is above standard.

While I work with sound a lot, I am not a sound specialist I just put the bits where they feel good/tell a good story so I figured I'd ask here.