The Evolution of Sound for TV Ads

Audio post-production for TV and Internet ads has evolved over the last 10 years at a tremendously fast pace. The way sound professionals would structure their workflows has changed comparatively as many other areas and professionals started to be involved in the overall production of both ads and commercials.

So, what does the anatomy of audio for TV and Internet ads look like today? For starters, from the audio point of view, the actual commercial shoot is handled by an outside company who, alongside an advertising company, hires the sound recordist and the location mixer. These people are responsible for capturing all the on-location audio. Nowadays, a combination of Lavalier microphones and a shotgun are commonly used to record all tracks to a multi-track digital device.

By using this type of equipment, the recording team can use each microphone to record its own track; but at the same time, the location mixer also focuses on creating a two-track mono, or two-track stereo mix of all the microphones being used by the sound team.

This raw mix is then routed to all the cameras on Set (or the camera, if the production doesn’t entail a large budget). During the post-production process, the editor will then use these two tracks. The audio, of course, since it’s recorded on set will probably contain quality problems, but this characteristic is what allows the editor to hear all the dialogue that was captured.

The Workflow

As time passes, more and more TV ads and commercial productions are using digital cinema cameras that are also used for shooting films. Rather than just recording moving images to a strip of film, these cameras generate high-quality digital video files.

In this workflow, smaller, low-quality, conversions of these large video files are generated for posterior offline edit. Since this proxy files are smaller, they are more manageable to deal with, especially because they also include the same file names and timecodes as the master file they were generated from. This is pivotal for the entire process when the raw and rough cuts are approved, and the final pictured needs to be developed.

The Offline Edit

Once these proxy video files are generated they are handed to the editorial company, where an assistant editor loads the footage into a Digital Video Editing Workstation such as Final Cut

Then, the offline editor, with the help of the agency and the creative team, can start culling down the footage as part of a much broader creative experiment, generating the best cut possible. When shooting commercials, it is common for the offline editor to generate different versions of the project: 60-second, 30-second and 15-second versions of the commercial can be created from the general shoot and are subsequently presented to the client.

As mentioned above, the audio files used during the offline edit is traditionally the two-track real-time mix that was generated on Set by the location and production mixer. These files may, or may not, contain discrete microphone signals; however, the original production audio tracks should be loaded directly from the production audio source. 

Since these production files are simply discrete recordings made directly from the microphones and are not mixed together with other sources, they become the highest quality sources available for the mix. 

The Record and the Mix

The editor and the creative agency team will eventually come up with an initial version of the final cut, which is then presented to the client for approval. This rough cut will include location dialogue, temp or final music, and sometimes temp or even final sound effects. 

The assistant editor will then make an AAF or OMF file, which will contain all the audio files used during the offline edit. They will also create a raw cut picture guide that will come in the form of either a vide or a layoff to tape. These days it is common to see these types of files using the former format, a .mov file, as it is highly comparative with other workstations.

The audio mixer will then load all these files into their digital audio workstation, assuming that both the AAF or the OMF files contain embedded audio files only and no video. If this is the case, then the mix engineer or sound professional starts combining everything in the mix. A mix for TV broadcast, of course, is very different from a mix for popular music. Strict adherence to specific volume peaks and average levels for broadcasting must be taken into account, and, most importantly, special attention to the clarity of voices and visual synchronization is no less than pivotal.

From this point onwards the mix engineer tackles the conform and layback stages, which are different parts of the workflow where the file is treated in order to recreate the final cut of the product and, if approved, to be transferred to some type of digital tape. There are many ways to do this and there are many versions of this workflow; however, when mixing audio for commercials it is highly recommendable to get acquainted with the legal issues behind volume levels, as those are the ones that can hinder all your process.

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