Mixing Audio for TV and Film: Audio Post-Production Workflows

Audio and sound professionals responsible for editing and mixing audio tracks on a daily basis, routinely come across with a wide-ranging set of challenges that make optimizing dialogue lines, voiceovers, and interviews a time-consuming and difficult process they need to deal with. 

Whether it is reducing on-set noises and flaws or building a well-spoken and clear performance, achieving such a degree of cohesiveness from multiple takes is pivotal for any type of film or audiovisual project.

When it comes to mixing audio for video, there are several basic processes of audio post-production sound professionals need to comply with; however, the scope, roles, and workflow will always be different depending on the type of project they work on.

TV

Depending on how large the scale of the production is, whether or not the show is 30 or 60 minutes long, and depending on whether the project is a network series or a webcast show, the amount of time required to finish audio post-production for a single episode of a TV show can range from a single day to even a full week in order to get all the aspects of the soundtrack sorted and mixed.

If we were talking about the whole audio post-production process for a commercial, we would be really talking about 20 to 40 minutes of an actual program out of a 30 or 60 minutes broadcast. That provides stations with 10 or 20 minutes per show to capitalize on by running the commercials that make the audience crazy.
A rather accepted rule of thumb for audio and sound professionals is “one hour per finished minute” for audio post-production. However, if we were talking about a big-budget TV show, dialogue editing and dialogue post-production can take up to 20 hours. In fact, in projects like these, audio professionals can spend up to 20 hours per episode just working on dialogue replacement (ADR) and editing. Of course, budgets have also seen an important reduction over the years, and so have production timelines, which is why the vast majority of today’s shows are in the one-week (or less) timeframe.

Occasionally, there will be an audio professional responsible for commanding all aspects of finishing a TV show soundtrack, but more often there will be separate engineers to handle dialogue, SFX, music, and of course, the final mix. Normally, and although you may get a spotting session with the director or the producer of the show, there is a list of items that require attention, including editing music elements, SFX, notes and, of course, dialogue notes for everything that needs some care.

In the words of Doug Mountain, Supervising Sound Editor for Warner Brothers Post Production Services, he can spend up to 25 hours just getting rid of unwanted sound elements and noise from dialogue recordings for every episode of a show like Batwoman.

A current trend in Hollywood and L.A. production circles is to have a small group of freelance audio engineers split up all the tasks and assemble all audio components when the time for the mix comes. Freelancers can also work on several TV shows at a time, normally in personal studios or communal production facilities.

Film

Film audio post-production offers audio professionals with a wide range of workflow options depending mainly on how large the budget is. Hollywood features have, of course, larger budgets and larger audio teams, and certainly much more time to assemble all the audio elements required for a feature soundtrack. Low to almost no budget films may have a tiny production team, a single audio professional to do all of the audio post-production, and a rather short turnaround time given the budget constraints.

On large projects, it is always positive and advantageous to have a one-on-one meeting with both the producer and the director before the whole production begins. A new director may be quite unfamiliar with audio post-production workflows and pre-production processes and may not consider audio needs until their edit is done. This can result in them spending all the budget before even getting to the audio mix —a situation that needs to be avoided when possible.

As with TV, audio post-production for films encompasses several tasks, such as: 

• Dialogue, which can include noise reduction and ambiance patching

• ADR

• Sound Effects

• Music Editing

• Mixing

The time required to complete each of these tasks is entirely dependent on the nature and genre of the film (action, sci-fi, horror, and animated normally demand many more sound effects and, therefore, many more hours).
Whilst the vast majority of both TV and Film soundtracks contain the same elements and have similar needs audio-wise, it is necessary to approach each workflow in a different way. In fact, such an approach depends on the director, the producer, the agency, the length of the project and, of course, the budget that has been allocated to take care of the project’s audio needs.

*The images used on this post are taken from Pexels.com