I’m perhaps foolishly doing everything myself on TEXAS 1960. Camera, editing, sound recording and final mix. Elana’s doing color correction. The idea is to learn now… and speak more competently to real editors, cameramen and soundmen on future projects.
But Christ! Final sound edit feels like a fog. The internet, usually so forward with advice, is nearly mum. It took me hours to find the following information, which could be described as opinion rather than fact:
- Dialog voice should ride around -10 to -12 db, with peaks at -6db. (Overridden by a friend at a post house who says they put a hard limiter on all voice at -10db, no peaks above.)
- Dialog voice should get a boost at 2500Hz (mid-range of human voice) and at 6000Hz (high end, for crispness). (But again, it’s just someone’s opinion.)
And then I talk to some friends who work as editors… None of them have opinions on this stuff. They send their big projects to audio post houses for final mix, professional black boxes where obsessive audio nerds do… Well, I don’t know what they do. No one I know seems to really know. It presumably involves chickens and black candles.
So then I talk to the directors I know who’ve sound-mixed their own successful independent films… Only to discover they’ve all gone by a method of “it sounds good to me”. To be frank, they have something. I’ve seen their films and had no complaints about sound… which is reassuring… But regardless, I’d like some freaking guidelines. How can I go by “it sounds good to me” when I have grave suspicions that rock and roll has permanently damaged my hearing?
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