TECHNOLOGY FOCUS POST-PRODUCTION TOOLS
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Post-production Tools
With the news that six of Molinare’s audio team have been nominated at this year’s Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Sound Editing and Outstanding Sound Mixing on The Bible – the Lightworkers Media mini-series which was a huge ratings hit in the US for The History Channel – some of Molinare’s key creatives identify their preferred tools to achieve the best sound in the post-production process.
MOLINARE’S SOUND department uses Pro Tools as our DAW. It is the most widely used DAW in the industry and familiar to in- house staff and freelancers. It provides our team with the flexibility and compatibility to work with other theatres and sound creatives to deliver the best results all round. This is great when crewing up on very large projects such as The Bible, as the sheer magnitude of the series requires a similar workflow from all the sound editors involved when meeting those all-important deadlines.
JAMIE CAPLE (SUPERVISING DIALOGUE EDITOR) When working on the dialogues for The Bible, the use of plug-ins was essential for our team to create great sounding dialogue tracks. On this project we utilised iZotope Declick, which is designed to remove distortion from overload recordings. It works by automatically finding clicks and pops on the track and removing them. What is great about this tool is when used correctly, it will not affect the dialogue itself. There were many scenes in
The Bible when the actors were shouting and inevitably there was a certain amount of distortion. By also using iZotope Declip we eliminated the need to re-record ADR for scenes that would have been difficult for the actors to replicate. Another plug-in that helped reduce the need to re-record ADR was Waves X-Crackle. This tool is great at removing the rustle that is often heard on dialogue recordings, and particularly useful when cleaning radio microphone recordings. With a historical project such as The Bible the costumes were often
34 August 2013 iZotope Declip, Audio Ease Altiverb and Serato Pitch ’n Time were just some of the tools used on The Bible
very bulky, making it difficult for the sound recordist to get a recording without a certain amount of rustle being heard on the dialogue. To remove background
noise we used iZotope Denoise. Given that the show was a historical drama, it was imperative that we had clean sounding dialogues that were free from any modern day background noise.
JEREMY PRICE (SOUND EFFECTS EDITOR) When producing the sound effects for a show, it is important to allocate time to record and create the best effects for the job – by manipulating sound to fit with the picture. One of the most important points is not to overcrowd the soundtrack with effects, but to carefully choose the right effects, which will give the viewer the greatest sonic experience. In order to get the best result it is very important to choose what not to hear, so that what is heard is clean and focused. Audio Ease Altiverb is a
reverb plug-in Molinare couldn’t live without. There is
a verb for all circumstances, and Altiverb is fantastic for natural reverbs providing the ability to add your own impulse responses. The unit is also an invaluable sound tool to create unearthly sounds. For example, in The Bible Altiverb was used to produce a powerful godly presence and booming motifs for Satan. Altiverb ran live during the session for natural reverbs and was subsequently used from the Audio Suite to create more specialist sounds. Serato Pitch ’n Time is another essential plug-in for my role as it can make an effect perfect by carefully adjusting the speed and pitch. Pitch ’n Time has the ability to time stretch and pitch shift with time compression and expansion from a ratio of 1/8 speed. This also has the capacity to go up to 8 times speed and pitch, and can be plus or minus up to 36 semitones. As an added bonus these can be adjusted independently from each other. This means the plug-in is great for making real sounds work, while also providing the opportunity to create
unworldly sounds when used to the extreme. In The Bible Serato Pitch ’n
Time was used to make real sounds like a baby’s wail or a camel call align with their mouth movements.
NIGEL SQUIBBS (RE- RECORDING MIXER) These days speed is always the key factor in the mix on productions, not just in terms of the scheduling, but also to allow the re-recording mixer(s) the optimum amount of time to finesse the soundtrack and achieve the director’s or producer’s vision. Furthermore, despite being a TV broadcast first and foremost, our work on The Bible required an increasingly commonplace TV delivery – 5.1 Surround Sound. The scope of this, combined with creating epic soundscapes for stories from the creation of the world to Moses parting the Red Sea, meant that options needed to be kept open throughout the mix. Such soundtracks are incredibly subjective, and the need to adapt and tweak at a moment’s notice required all sound elements to run live. This
meant each mix ran two fully loaded Pro Tools 9 rigs (with virtually all plug-ins running live) in combination with either separate D-Commands on each or a D-Control switching between systems. Fundamentally it would have been nigh on impossible to achieve this without such integration. It allowed not only fantastic flexibility, but the fact it retained all the mix automation within Pro Tools enabled far simpler re- versioning and late mix tweaking in other suites.
CONCLUSION Molinare’s audio department has recently benefited from an extensive refurbishment of its flagship dubbing suites. Pro Tools 10 HDX was the natural progression for the facilities, but with the renovation of Dub A the all-important mix desk choice was a less straightforward decision. Although the ICON desks had coped admirably with The Bible, we needed to consider the combination of other DAWs within the studio to retain as much flexibility as possible. There was also a requirement for an element of future-proofing as much as reasonably possible – the best of both worlds, essentially. The answer was to upgrade to a Euphonix S5 Fusion. A desk that still enabled an ‘in the box’ mixing style, as well as the extra power of the onboard desk processing to cope with the feature work the newly refurbished Dub A had been designed for. As it is a stand- alone desk it also enabled us to use other DAWs and achieve our future-proofing objective. Since the upgrade, Molinare is undertaking work on the feature film version of The Bible, due for release next autumn.
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