Minor Project Write up

I had a lot of problems after the initial rough cuts trying to mix this video. After listening to everyones suggestions it gave me more of an idea of what I could really work on rather than just trying to fix everything. 

To start, I wanted to fix the talking. Everything from panning to reverb to how close and far the character on screen was from the camera. This was a difficult to do actually. At first I couldn't get the right reverb to match the room, it was either too big or too small. When I would find a good setting, I had to see if it would work with the automation, and it was really hard to fine tune everything. I had to double the track so I had a track where I would do volume automation, then a separate, copied, track used for the effect. It was hard to match the volume with the reverb. This most likely took the longest to do. Mixing all the voices together was most likely the hardest to do because of how bad the ADR really was. I had to compress some of the voices, and use EQ to try and get plosives out of the dialog, and they are still in the mix.

The next part of the project I worked on was the sound effects. Going back and listening to them they were really low and some were clipping. I had to walk a very fine line with the compressor trying to compress certain parts to not clip, but not degrading it so much to take anything away. This didn't take as long as I thought but it still took some time to fine tune. There were some effects that were so low, they barely had any waveforms, so I had to use gain to raise them enough so the parts were audible enough to comprehend. With the sound effects, was the room noise. In the actual movie, there was a lot of dead air, nothing in the background, so I had to go get some room noise to try and fill in some of the dead air. It was hard to find the right tone. Like working with the vocals, it was hard finding the right tone for the room. After much trial and error I finally found one that I liked. 

After I got the sound effect worked out, next was the music. This was the least troublesome of everything. This was just an automation problem. Bringing the levels up and down respectively. One aspect of the music that was hard was to try and bring the diegetic and non diegetic sounds in and out in a way that the listener can comprehend but not notice. I put an EQ on the diegetic sounds to make them sound like a radio, then for the non diegetic sound, I didn't do anything to it. Just had it go over the card scene. 

Combining all of these elements, voices, sound effects, and room tone was straining and clipping the session. Bringing levels down, compression down and some reverb and other effects was a chore. Trying to find the right level of everything, while keeping everything audible took a little more time that I expected.

Despite all of the problems I had, it was really fun re mixing this whole project again. Towards the end, I had no time to mix in 006, so I had to use the audio labs, they were not as good, and I had to use headphones, but I got the project done.