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Background Sounds Editing For Movies As Well As Television Shows
Author : Doron Feldmann
Submitted : 2011-07-10 18:05:57 Word Count : 795 Popularity: 50
Tags: Background, Sound Effects, wav, Wave File, free, downloads, libraries, mp3, royalty
How to cut backgrounds of films and Television
In this posting I'll describe the way to put together the background tracks for a final mix. The background track are tracks of long sound effect that start at a start of a scene and finish at the end of a scene, for example Wind, birds, city traffic, Walla ( crowd voices ) room-tones and so forth.
Cutting the backgrounds for any Television show or a film can be a good deal of work. I find that as a way to be the most effective, the first thing I should do when I watch a movie is placing markers on every scene change and I also suggest naming those markers by the location of the scene. In addition, do not overlook that any phone call between two people or more will be a location change, even if the two people talking are virtually neighbors, it is important to make some kind of a difference between both places. Following placing down the markers for any location change, you head over to the first scene and begin putting in tracts of backgrounds. Basically with backgrounds, the more the better, however when I say more I really don't mean placing six tracks of equivalent Sounds. If what you added doesn't make a big difference as well as only makes a scene noisier you shouldn't place it in. What you need to be really careful about is to select the best track to begin with and not attempt build the right sound by including more and more sound. For instance, in case you need to have heavy traffic, search for a great track of heavy traffic instead of bunch of light traffic sound layered one on top of the other. Furthermore, when you are selecting different sound you can mute and solo to see which sound is adding more substance and which one is adding more noise than substance. You need to have a really excellent library to edit an common movie; we can't keep re-using exactly the same sounds on different places. As an example, if it is a TV show about people going to a variety of bars each and every night, every bar has to have its own factors. After you establish sound for a location you can use a "copy and paste" to save lots of time as well as maintain continuity in our film. Of course, we also have to look for various things for the same place to cover different periods of a day. For instance, office will be considerably busier during daytime as opposed to late at night when there are only few people still left working.
The way most mixers will like to get your tracks is like a checkerboard, by that I mean on each and every place change your next set of sounds needs to be on a different tracks. that would give the mixer enough time to make volume and effects changes on his mixing console, if you put your tracks back to back your mixer will not be able to do the adjustments fast enough except if he uses automation, but that can be allot of work. I most times set my session with three sets of background tracks, inside each set I often set 4 mono tracks and 4-6 stereo sound tracks. always try and keep the same location ( when you can ) on exactly the same set of sound tracks, that will save the mixer allot of work.
An argument between editors ( old timers vs newer editors ) is can you touch the volume of the tracks. The thinking of not touching is let the mixers do that, they can do it much better considering they hear every thing together ( music, dialog, effects and so on ) they've better monitors and so forth, I say this is nonsense, you must balance your background volume wise, what you shouldn't do is adding affects like re-verb and EQ to your Background tracks.
Here is a warning for people who are new to this - if you go to the theater to see film you cut background on, and even worse, check out a Television show you worked on, you will most likely not be happy about what you hear. You built beautiful ambiances however in most parts, you will not be able to hear much of what you did. Do not think you wasted your time. You still added a great deal to the film.
Author's Resource Box
David Mann had been recording and editing background and other types of sound effects for the last 20 year, He is also the owner of the http://www.longbeachrecordingstudios.com/ and the http://www.freshcutsoundeffects.com free sound effects library.
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