Yes, Sound Mixing & Sound Editing Really Mean Two Different Things

At this year’s Academy Awards, ‘Ford v Ferrari’ won the Oscar for Best Sound. This is not to be confused with the Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing, which was landed by ‘1917’. 

At last year’s installment, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ won the Oscar for best sound editing and best sound mixing. So, what’s the difference? Isn’t sound mixing a core part of sound editing? Well, not quite. In a nutshell, sound editing refers to collecting the sounds needed for any type of audiovisual project, whereas sound mixing is about what is done after those sounds are collected.

The sound editing category used to be referred to as sound effect editing. In a film, when scenes are shot, the audio and sound team is focused almost entirely on getting clear dialogue lines and avoiding all types of unwanted noises. After that, it comes down to the sound editors to put other sonic elements to complement the dialogue. 

This sounds could be of any nature: ambient sounds, like a car passing by or the approach of a distant airplane. In the case of ‘Ford v Ferrari’, this would mean the sound of car engines revving at more than 5,000 RPM in conjunction with the crowds, amongst many other sounds.

Walter Murch, an Academy Award-winning sound editor for ‘The English Patient’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’, has always conceived the use of sonic elements around dialogue lines as making a mosaic.

In an interview, he explained that almost 97 percent of all the sounds that we hear in a film are added at a much later stage. In order for the sound team to achieve the final effect of the final soundtrack, there is a large amount of replacement and a new addition of sonic elements. Why sound teams do that is not only to make everything sound more convincing for what the audience sees but also frequently to add other sounds that are blending into musical effects.

Sound mixing refers to a later stage after the sounds are inserted, under the audio post-production overarching phase. The main goal here is to mix the sounds perfectly with the recorded dialogue lines.

It could mean making that airplane actually seem distant or adding reverb to a nearby group of people chattering indistinctly to create tension in a scene, but it also means matching the audio levels of the pre-recorded dialogue lines at different times.

What is sound mixing? 

The sound mixing board is like an organ church, Murch said. Sound professionals are constantly playing these complicated organs while making key decisions about the final arrangement of the sonic elements of the film, but let’s take a step back first.

Let’s say you have an audiovisual project in mind, and since you have worked in the film industry you’re quite acquainted with the different stages of audio post-production, and you have acquired a set of skills that allows you to think that you can seamlessly tackle mixing sound for your film. 

If the statements above are true, then it is probably true, but there are a few differences between audio post-production for film and mixing sound for a small commercial release.

For a 30 minute film, you normally put between 120 and 300 hours of work depending on the quality of the audio you’re working with. If the project has major audio problems, like a large number of unwanted noises and poorly recorded dialogue lines, you can expect the number of hours to increase, but if you’re given good quality audio you can cut that timeline down to 100 - 110 hours.

Keep in mind that Star Wars spent a whole year on audio post-production, so if you want that level of quality for your audiovisual project, depending on your experience, it can be wise to reach out to an audio post-production studio.

Now that we know that sound editing is obtaining the necessary sounds and that sound mixing is layering those sounds, there are many aspects to consider about the latter: what format? Stereo or 5.1 surround sound? Sample rate and bit depth, loudness control, ADR, Foley, and many more.

You may have believed that mixing audio for a film was just that: mixing. You thought the editor would provide you with a pristine dialogue track, the music director would give you a perfect soundtrack and the score composer would hand you a perfectly emotional score. The vast majority of Hollywood films get that lucky, but if your picture editor is not experienced enough at audio restoration, then you will spend a lot of hours cleaning up those dialogue tracks.

Sometimes it is much wiser to let the pros do the job. Mixing sound for film depends on a lot of factors and the expertise of the teams you’re working with. If sound editors are able to provide you with clean audio lines, the process will, of course, be smoother; however, this is not always the case: the vast majority of audiovisual projects and films face a lot of setbacks audio-wise, and it is the job of the sound mixer to avoid any bottlenecks in order to prevent further delays. 

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