FUTURE AUDIO
POST
How useful are audio clean-up plug-ins?
DAVIS: The difficult thing nowadays is we can do so much. Our customers realise how much we can rescue in post and so they’re doing away with sound recordists but, of course, it’s taking us hours longer in prep and in the mix and they’re not prepared to pay for it or they kick up a fuss, but they are saving £400 a day for a sound recordist on every day of your shoot.
NEWTH: I haven’t had a great deal of experience of synthetic, but I definitely have mic matching and particularly use RX 10. That’s come on leaps and bounds from RX 1.
FRY: There’s a certain amount of separation we can do with RX, but otherwise you end up just rebuilding the mix because it’s easier than trying to clean it all up.
ADDIS: I think you only have to look at the development of things like iZotope from the initial release to where it is now in RX 10 and it’s come on leaps and bounds, but it’s still not at a point where you can just let it do everything for you and everything is totally context dependent.
The recent Beatles de-mixing and re-mastering is an interesting example. There were some articles about Giles Martin talking about the challenges and the compromises. Whilst you can de-mix everything, he was quite candid
in some of his interviews about the fact that if you listen to all of those isolated things in isolation, they don’t work brilliantly. They still have to exist as a cohesive whole because there is bleed between these elements. I think we recognise that challenge from the use of iZotope as well. If you want something, which is just a clean, totally isolated thing, you still can’t do that 100% percent accurately. There will still be aberrations and challenges, but you can bed it into the context of the wider mix and it sits well.
NORWELL: I suppose there are applications. I think in terms of originality, no. I think it’s reductive. I think if you’re trying to create something original in a group, you need to hear and react to each other and it’s the ambience of the room together that creates this original thing.
The limits of working from home and remotely
GODWIN: When we went into the first lockdown, I was about to start an eight-hour drama and I couldn’t get into the studio. I premixed and mixed from home and signed all of it off as 5.1 with clients on remote. Because it was new, the clients were much more accepting. They were just amazed that we were able to do it and get it delivered.
The expectations of remote working are now much higher. We’ve been doing it for a few years now and clients are less accepting of that
hit or miss. They expect it to be similar to the experience that they used to have sitting in the studio and it just isn’t. Reviewing remotely on binaural headphones doesn’t compare to sitting in the theatre.
FRY: Tracklay can be done at home and a premix can probably be done at home without clients. There are certain jobs that will be done remotely. We’ve got a job which is signed off remotely because the client has said, ‘we love that system’.
I wouldn’t want a final mix at home. It’s just not very creative. You can do that remotely, but it’s incredibly clunky and just not very collaborative.
NEWTH: We did a series during lockdown. We mixed half of the first part, offloaded it with QuickTime. The client would review it and get it back and so on. We work to tight deadlines anyway, but you’re working to even tighter deadlines because you need to get that uploaded ahead of time.
DAVIS: There’s no spontaneity with it. If you’re working to a tick list and you’re thinking, what do you mean by that and then you can’t just turn to your client and ask.
ADDIS: I think if you’re talking about technology and ways of working, which invariably comes down to efficiency increase, you’re working on an eight-part series and you’re sat in the room, you might get loads of notes in the first ten minutes and then they sit very quietly back in the room because you’ve already got steer for the whole series and you’re getting a page of edited notes.
SHANNON: Having worked where you can’t have internet or phones with you, anything around contact, one of the big question marks is how do you keep things secure, getting them between your home and wherever? And if someone’s sat there at home, how do we know that person isn’t taking content elsewhere?
The value of automation
My Life as a Rolling Stone, Mercury Studios for BBC Audio mix by Ben Newth and Nick Ashe at Clear Cut Pictures
GODWIN: If thinking about an automated premix, which I would then present to the client, my worry is that during the premix, I’m learning what material I’m dealing with. If we’ve got a scene on a beach, I know that I’ve spent an
Winter 2022
televisual.com 79
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