POST
FUTURE WORKFLOWS
hour trying to get rid of the waves and other ambient sound. The premix is a result of me learning the problems. When I present that to the client and he or she says, ‘what can we do about the beach?’, I already know the inherent problems. If I’m just presenting either an automated premix or someone else’s premix, I have none of that knowledge. I can’t have that conversation with them, I’d have to go and investigate.
HATFIELD: There are uses for it. Game engines are using it. You type, ‘I want a cityscape, sirens, sky, wind, this high up…’ and it can then build that out of sound effects. And then you finesse it, ‘this is in France, so we’ll swap American for French sirens’. That can be a basis to start your sound design. The game developers are already creating that content and we’re delivering audio for people to do that.
However, I don’t see a use for it in mixing yet. But in the near future I think it’s going to be a really exciting tool for sound design.
SIMPSON: In terms of just building up an ambience and any limitations, why couldn’t you use that for a film?
HATFIELD: If you created an automated mix, you could and then think of implementing it, but I wouldn’t just let it do its thing and use it to make final decisions.
NORWELL: It doesn’t know about story telling.
NEWTH: I think the AI - as in plugins and sound design – can be fantastic for building atmosphere. You can suddenly go, hang on, I want something more rural sounding or a dirtier sounding urban atmos. Rather than going through your sound library, you can create a soundscape and mix somewhere in between. And that’s exciting because it’s quick and that’s the bottom line for us.
It’s all about deciding on your compromises; what you’re going to put at the forefront and what you’re going to pull back. This is where it’s important that we’re doing it, humans are doing it, because there are so many compromises to make.
GODWIN: If you’ve dealt with a piece of dialogue, which is incredibly noisy - let’s say, it’s on the beach again - if the shot shows a huge wave crashing behind the actor,
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DNA Journey, Voltage TV for ITV Dubbing mixer Kate Davis at Directors Cut Films
then you’re going to accept that bit of noise behind the dialogue. But if the actor’s stood somewhere, down near a cave or wherever, then you instinctively know that you’re going to have to clean that up a lot more. You’d accept that maybe the dialogue is going to deteriorate slightly because I need it that much clearer. I don’t see how AI would be able to make those decisions.
How can you increase turnaround times?
FRY: There’s certainly pressure on turnaround times on the terrestrial channels. We’ve worked across continents in the past. When we used to do X Factor, that would be around the clock. We’d have people mixing them overseas and then come in the morning and pick them up.
Less though from the streamers. The over-runs and offline delays are the biggest issue for us in post.
GODWIN: There’s always a finite amount of time required from being locked to being finished. You’ve got to have time to shoot the Foley, you’ve got to have time to shoot the ADR, you’ve got to have time to do the effects.
FRY: I can mix a show in an hour, just the guide, it depends what the clients want. If they want me to spend five days on it, then
it’ll be very different from whoever spends an hour playing with the guide. I don’t think that’s ever changed.
SIMPSON: We’ve worked on virtual production stages, where it’s motion tracks and they’re shooting everyone in front of the LED screens just to get the lighting. The background has already been done.
I’m wondering if in a situation where the pre- vis has been built or when it’s a series where we’ve got tracks and we know that the offline editor is going to put in all this temp stuff that they’ve found on Freesound…
At HIJACK, we often get involved in workflow and camera shooting plans at a fairly early stage. You know how a DIT will create the LUTs. We don’t do the equivalent for sound, where everything is happening in the shoot. If we knew what the sound content there was going to be, could we create a good audio pre-vis or animatic or something done on reel? If we really planned heavily at the start, could we be doing track laying, knowing roughly what the parameters of the scene are? They know where the cut points are going to be. And when it comes to us, we’ve got less back tracking to try and get to where we want to be?
I’ve heard of this happening on big films where they’ve brought in a sound effects editor for the dailies.
But I guess it would involve having a proper
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