Welcome to the width, media and monuments podcast. I'm Steve lack. A member of the width communications committee. And today we'll be listening to. 

Uh, presentation we gave on how to get the best sound for your production as part of our Wednesday one programming.

We talked about all things on you, including how to choose a location. Things to think about with your costumer. How to pick the right mix and post-production issues when it comes to sound.

So get out your notebooks because a lot of really great tips are coming your way right now.   

hello everybody. I'm Steve Lak. And I'm here with Cheryl Houghton writer at house audio, which is one of the coolest Atmos rooms on the east coast. If not that much room on the east coast and with Donna . I'm sorry, I did it. I blew your name. Cheryl is the senior mixer and founder at odd house audio.

And for over 20 years she has been. Working with PBS TV, one Nat geo.  I mentioned her Adobe Atmos rooms. She's doing a lot of, Atmos mixing and  film projects here out of this studio. So Cheryl's amazing. And Donna  works at Henninger media as  a mixer recordist, and she's also a freelance, location sound, mixer and sound operator.

What we're gonna talk about tonight is what you need to know about sound. And my feeling as a sound person is sound is as important as lighting to capture your vision and to make your project work.

So one of the things we'll be talking a lot about is location and how to choose the right location and what to do when you get there to get everything you need recorded. another staple, especially in the DC area is recording the interviews. So we'll talk about,  the best way to capture interview, audio, and talking head audio.

Something that a lot of people don't think about is  costuming considerations for. close can be really noisy. And we deal with a lot of that in post, And then we'll move on to my favorite subject, which is gear. Um, you don't have to spend a fortune, but you can.

And many of us have. a really important topic is what you can and can't fix in post. there's no one button you can push to fix poorly recorded audio. So that's really what we want to focus on And then the final thing we'll be planning for your post-production audio needs, sound design music.

Are you gonna need ADR? Are you gonna need Foley? What are your deliverables? What is your mixer need to know? Those are all really important things that don't get thought of until the last minute. And so it's good to think about that in advance.

 So let's start with,  considerations when scouting a location.  I like to say,  develop an ear for locations, as well as an eye.

filmmakers will look around and constantly be going, that'd be a great place to shoot. Oh, the lighting was great here. Well, you also have to pay attention to the acoustics of,  of an area, and with the sound of the location, sounds like,  I did a film once where they were actually shooting right in front of the James river and it was, it was difficult or in a parking garage, parking garages are always, are always troubling.

And we'll talk a little bit about techniques to mitigate that or busy downtown area. so you have to think about what issues you can anticipate.  if you're shooting in a big building and a big office building that, you know, the air conditioning is going to be kicking on and off during your interview, maybe there's a contact at the location that, that you can get in touch with an advanced that can help you with turning the AC off during your shoe.

Controlling that same thing with a humming refrigerator and in an office or a break room or somewhere, you know, can it be unplugged? Donna, do you have any tips on how to shoot in a parking garage or,  throwing a blanket over the refrigerator or things like that, that you've done a location? I've been lucky enough to not have shot in a parking garage yet.

Although I feel one day it will come. Um, but I have done some short films,  like in a house with a very large entryway where it's tile or marble floors, really high ceilings. And it's very echo-y. so definitely sound blankets are a great way to try and dampen that noise. If they're throwing some carpets on the ground, some blankets on the ground, they can be legitimate sound blankets that are marketed as such, or you can also go with moving blankets.

they've got some weight to it and they're really large and,  a good way to kind of get a sound blanket, but on a budget.  those are definitely helpful. I also ended up getting a pair of, cheap,  T stands so that I can hook the sound blankets on the T stands,  and angle them how I need to.

So I'm not having to hang it up on somebody's wall or be relying on,  stationary things around me to,  throw the blankets over. So, um, I try and keep that around with me. And then also too, which I know we'll talk about a little later, but just always keeping the mic as close to the speaker as I possibly can.

That definitely helps with, decreasing reflections. If you know, a boom operator is pretty far away from the talent or even just, you know, six inches too far away from the talent, those echos,  in a reverberating space can like really accentuate.  so just getting as close as you can. It helps a lot too.

Yeah. Getting that mic in there. Yeah. How do you deal with, um, when you get post audio and it was shot from 10 feet away well, I go to lab at that point.  I listen to all the mix and see  which one is the best option. And oftentimes, and I know that we're going to talk about this.

The love as you know, is too noisy to use for whatever reason. And like, you know, too much clothing, too much, whatever, too much rustle, I do usually go to the boom first. I like to see if the boom sounds good.

And if it's too far away, a lot of times what you can do is you can actually run it through different types of plugins. Like  isotope RX, has a decent, you can take some, uh, dialogue. I state, you can take some of the room out of it. You can actually, I like to use ETQ around the six K area, depending on the talent and how it was recorded.

Sometimes if you knock out a little bit of a little bit of room out of the voice, without even running it through a processor, you know, just run a through EKU. It helps. It really does. Um, sometimes lot of times a boom too far away, you'll get up a Tubby sound So maybe just a little scoop in the lower end,  but using plugins to deal with problems, um, in the wrong hands can be worse than the problems to begin with.

So you have to be careful if you're say an editor and independent filmmaker doing your own sound  just keep everything in moderation  and really don't go overboard with that type of stuff. Otherwise you could be causing more problems. and there's  different things that you can do to, to  bring out a boom that's too far away say the same technique with the camera mic.

but just a little bit more of it with the camera mic. So,  say everything fails, you're doing bails you out fails. Oh, I think we had there as a, uh, camera mic, but you know, that, that sound bite is really important and it is it's, it's important to the store. It's crucial, it's a crucial bite or a crucial line.

You have to have it in there. You can't do ADR for whatever reason, or if it's an interview for a doc, you know, and there's lots of different things you can, you can do to fill out, um, got a camera mic, but,  we really don't want. Which is the whole point of tonight's presentation. Here's how you don't have to do that.

Right. So,  be aware when you're scouting locations,  is there an airport nearby or is there a fire station or a hospital, you know, on the same block or right up the street where ambulance are going to be going by while you're shooting, or  are you shooting in an area where there's construction projects working during the time you're shooting, do you need to take your scheduling into consideration in those areas and heavy traffic areas?

So these are the things, when you're scouting locations and you're thinking about what your shots together to keep in mind so that you can get the best sound possible and avoid some of these, issues later on down the line.

This, this is what I preach.

So that sound, when you're on a shoot always recorded at least 30 seconds of room tone, natural sound at the, at the location. And every time you change the set up, do it again and make sure everybody on the set keeps quiet during it, but it will save you hours in post, and be aware of changes to the environment.

So as you shoot, like you'll notice the changing light  So you also need to notice the changing Sonic environment.  listen for birds, insects, wind weather, be aware as you shoot at how these things might affect your editing choices later, or cause you to spend more time in post.

So that's why you want to get that Nat sound. Every time you have the opportunity. And it's not just, it's not just the 30 seconds. It's for instance, if you're doing a film where you know that you're going to want to grab more and fill it out, you're not sound either an independent feature or a doc say, or even, especially on nature, doc, go ahead and like, while you're scouting out and setting up your camera and during your lighting,  let the people, let the sound person go off and record, you know, the sound and then you can lay that in and  even if you end up not using it or you end up sound design anymore, you can lay in that Nat as a texture.

And it just adds so much more realism to what you're trying to do. And it's so nice to get natural sound that's recorded properly. when you're trying to mix and fill out  any type of program, whether it's a short or it's a documentary,  you think about there's. Sound libraries that have tons of ambiances and things, but those aren't from your shoot. Right. You know, so they're different. They're, they're not the real thing and it makes a difference and you can tell the difference. Yeah. And even, even if it's a bad camera, Mike, uh, I T I tell people, please least lay it in, lay it in and give it, give it to us because, you know, we can just lay it in as texture and it gives it that just sense of realism, that sense of texture, that sense of another layer of real sound.

Well, and that  it brings us to the last point on this. If you shoot it, if you record it, please deliver it to your mixer. It doesn't play good if you recorded, you know? Oh, I know we got that room tone somewhere, but we don't have it.

And that happens a lot too, if it doesn't do any good. If you leave it in your avid bin and don't send it to,  when you're doing interviews or talking head, maybe you're in an office, maybe your man on the street, for documentaries and things like that, it's going to be, it's going to sound the best.

If you can find a room that has carpeting and curtains and is a dead room, um, if you haven't, if you had that option, um, if, and you got to listen for lighting hums noises that are picked up on the mic, um, do you have any control? We talked about this already over the air conditioning. Um, a lot of times, if you're in a room like that has a desk with maybe some shelving and things that does help break up the echo, you can move items around on the shelf, but some books on the shelf, things like that, they keep it from, from bouncing around.

 Donna, do you have any like specific tips for recording, interviews? if it is a talking head interview and, um, the interviewee is stationary, definitely setting up a,  if you're on the street and someone maybe is moving a little bit more, or you don't have the, the space or the time to be setting up a stationary, boom, by all means having someone standing there and holding it totally fine.  but if there's not a whole lot of movement and blocking happening,  it's definitely worth saving your body a little, little grief and, and getting a mic stand there.

 So when you're planning your production and especially, you know, if you're doing a, a film that has costuming involved, as opposed to maybe a documentary where you're just talking to regular people, but even then it matters, um, there are noisy materials and there are quiet materials.

 silk is really noisy and there's a lot of silk ties out there that people will stick logs behind. And then you hear throughout the whole thing.  Gore-Tex is really noisy. If you're doing like outdoor documentaries. Yeah. Starch shirts, tight collars. Those are things you've got to really be aware of leather jackets  squeak.

, so you just be aware of that. I mean, you, you don't want to say, you know, make your costuming decisions based on your sound needs, but if you can, take salmon into consideration when you're costuming,  also clunky shoes, shoes with heels,  they'll add to the noise that you need to deal with later.

Jewelry, bracelets, necklaces, earrings. Those kinds of things are things that, you know, we're always having them. What does that sound, what is that? You know, and the one thing, you know, when you say footsteps is that we, we face a lot especially independent film.  and in documentary is that you want those footsteps there.

You want to hear them. Okay. And that's great if you know that your film is gonna go somewhere where they have to have what they call fully filled music and effects, meaning  if they mute the dialogue, they want to hear the film. So in other words, what has to happen to get that is you have to fully those footsteps.

 if it's something that you can avoid and then just add in, that's great. Because a lot of times what we'll do is we can't take them out. We have to do two passes to get to, to fulfill that DME. So  it's kind of a big issue. It's bigger than you think. What did this just off the top of my head, but I never thought of this before.

W do you ever get wild sound of people walking? I do sometimes. Yeah. Like, is that something that good to do? Like if you, if you have somebody in a scene who has, you know, they're walking up and down the hall they're talking or whatever, to get a while to get wild sound and just them walking with no dialogue without, well, I, I don't think it's worth the film time.

Yeah. I don't think it's where, I mean, if you have a good Foley artist, they can do that really quickly. So it's not really.

Yeah. Yeah, I would just do it. Right. But one thing about the interview that I forgot, we forgot to mention that I've, I've had problems with, um, there wasn't on your list is chairs. Oh.

if you're in a chair that squeaks or they move and they Creek, it's sometimes it's impossible to get that out, like without destroying the voice. So, you know, be careful that they're not in a chair that squeaks or it's Rocky or, or anything like that.

If they're sitting down, 

might technique. This is what we were saying earlier. Dialogue is king. You know, your goal is a clean recording of your actors, voice with little or no background noise, no distracting echoes or reflections. You want to get it as clean as possible before you go into the mix. And the way you do that with a boom is we mentioned this already, but it can't be said too much.

Get them  Mike, in as close as possible, every inch counts, that'll help mitigate background noise, echo from the room, things going on around you. Um, the thing that I do basically, you know, you ride the frame to get the boom as close as possible. And if you're not risking  getting the mic in the shot, then you're not getting close enough.

 I usually will pick a spot behind the actor that I can hang the mic over and line that up with it and then drop it down until it's in the. And then pull it back up and watch that spot and try and keep the mic right on that spot. But, um, basically as close as possible, don't worry as much about, oh, we're not getting the right spacial perspective or we're not getting the natural reverb of the room.

If we get too close, that's the kind of stuff you can add in post really easily, but you can't get rid of it as easily. And along the lines, too, of getting that,  Mike line of where you're in the shot, where you're not, I do the same thing of picking something in the background that I can kind of focus on of, okay.

This is where I need to stay to be good. Um, you know, like an edge of a picture frame or. Uh, turning the wall or some kind of detail that can help me as a visual marker. So I know I don't dip below, um, during the shot. Um, and then also too,  if I'm not behind the camera and I can't see the, frame that's being created asking the, the grip or the AC someone who's helping the cinematographer.

Cause if I can, you know, I don't want to distract them from what they're doing. They've got a lot to set up for the next shot. So if I can ask someone who's assisting, um, then I feel like it's maybe less of a nuisance and,  I can get the information I need maybe faster and I'm not distracting,  the cinematographer from the work that they need to be doing.

 that's definitely critical is getting that boom line. the main thing with booming too is to keep it overhead. as much as you can, that really you shouldn't be booming from below unless they're are like no other options. The only times that I've really boomed from below was being in a basement and it was a wide shot.

There was nowhere for me to go to be hidden without a shadow or the boom inline.  no matter if I got up super high, like the ceiling was just in the shot. So at that point it's like, yeah, maybe I need to boom from below. but it's not always ideal because you can get,  more Basey frequencies,  since it's going to be closer to the person's chest and set up their mouth.

So you're going to hear more of the base coming from their chest.  and then you also run the risk of getting jewelry sounds if that's part of their attire for the day.  so definitely booming overhead is going to be the best move. And,  when you boom, to have fluid movement movements, you don't want to be too rigid standing there,  cause you're going to need to be moving around.

 and the more fluid you can be, the less likely you are to accidentally Jostle the boom pole and get a sound of a cord hitting the pole, which might make a noise. Or also for example, I would take off my ring that I'm wearing right now when I'm booming, because if I accidentally knock that ring on the boom pole, that's going to get recorded.

And so the take and,  another thing to clean up and so we don't want to have to worry about, so I wear minimal jewelry as a location mixer when I'm booming.  cause there's just no need for it. 

So after talking about boom techniques and location settings, We got into a pretty extensive discussion about. Lob technique, how to place a love and how to use a love. 



I now the problem child.

 generally if you put the Mike capsule over the talents, sternum, it gives you kind of a good balance between proximity and natural sound. Um, but again, it depends, you know, listen for costume noises, be careful of cable noise, hairy guys with a mic on their chest.

You can actually  hear it rubbing against their hair.  those are things you need to think about a little,  technique is to tie a loose knot below the Mike, about an inch below the mic. That'll reduce the cable movement.  it acts like an absorber.  you tie a loose knot in the.

My cable before you run it down to the transmitter. yeah, I definitely do that as well. Helps a lot. Yeah. And so you, you attach the law, you can use gaffer's tape to attach it to clothing.

Um, if you attach it directly to the body, you can use mole, skin or medical adhesive. Uh, you can hide a lot in the color under their clothes or behind a men's tie. So sometimes you can attach it to someone's glasses. So the nice thing about a, a lot of is it's omni-directional so it doesn't really have to be pointing directly at the where the person's talking. You can move it around a little, to get the least amount of noise. You'll still get a good signal. Um, You can even point it down. If you're getting like plosives and teas and popping sounds, you can flip it around  and you'll still get a decent signal.

 there's a little technique of taking,  first aid tape and folding it into a triangle and sitting in the mic on that triangle and then doing another one on top of it to make a little sandwich. So the mic capsule poke out from these two triangles of tape that are stuck to the person's body and that'll help eliminate a lot of noise because it won't move around.

Um, actually exactly. Yeah. Cause one piece of tapes on their chest and the others on the clothing. So it's creating that buffer between the two. So there's not the wrestle that you would get of just the mic straight on the clothing.

And I do, I do all of those things when I'm making somebody with a love and I'm also too, I think that,  it's always nice to ask costuming and, or the talent, if they're just wearing your street clothes or they're bringing their costume, if you can tape stuff to their clothing. I mean, ideally, you know, your tape won't leave any residue and like you said, mole skin definitely for skin only most skin will leave residue on clothing, especially depending on the material.

But I think it's just kind of nice to,  make sure that it's all good. You don't want to ruin like a costume that someone spent hours sewing or something. and then also, um, when miking, somebody, especially with the rise of the pandemic, um, I was like to be like really forthcoming and communicative of how I'm going to make somebody where I'll be touching them.

Like, cause you get really up close and personal. I mean, I've had to, you know, lace, uh, a lav mic up a ladies dress. And I mean, at least since I'm a woman, then it makes it a little bit like more normal, I guess. But, um, yeah. And so things like that or I've,  Like to put, love my ex on the little piece between the cups on a bra for women.

Cause if you have a lower cut shirt, it's harder to hide the law of Mike. And I found that they're putting it there. It stays put pretty well. There's not as much like stretch the fabric or anything.  and it leaves a good amount of space between, uh, the shirt and the microphone as well. So,  it's a good place to put it, but it can be kind of awkward to make somebody like that.

So I just like to, you know, explain to people, what are we doing? Hey, I need to put this. Here is this cool. And most actors are like, oh yeah, totally, it's fine. I'm so used to this. But if it's an interview or if it's someone where it says their first time on set, they might not be used to it.  the third technique on a set with miking besides bloom and love is planning. And meaning planted, Mike's not houseplants houseplant, right? So you can use any mic as a plan. I mean, you can put a lot in there if you're shooting in a car.

 a lot of times I'll put a love in the, Sun visor. so you can hide a lot in there. You could hide a boom in between the console pointing up. Um, so if you're shooting, you know, oh, I did a, um, a shoot once in a church with a super wide shot. There was no way to get a balloon in there.

It was a wedding. So he stuck the boom in the, um, knowing the priest is holding a Bible and we cut a hole in it and stuck them right in there. And it worked great. Brilliant. And it was what we put a wireless transmitter on it. So there's no cabling and he's holding the Bible and the boom was right in there.

So, oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. It actually worked pretty well. Um, but yeah, so you can, you know, plant, plant mix anywhere. always work the show.  as a sound person, when you get a script, the first thing you're going to go through is go through it.

Yeah. And see what considerations am I going to have? You know, when you look at that script and you go, oh, we're shooting in a church, how tight is the shot going to be him? I'm going to be able to get a boom in there. How many, you know, how big is the audience? Um, you know, can I go to the location and advance?

And as an audio post person, I love to be involved during the pre-pro. And so one of the things I love to get, because obviously I don't have footage or actual shot shot anything because it's not happening. It is a script. And then I can go through and I actually can say, oh, you know, this is a really great scene.

We can try to do this. Can you get this, the sound, the sound, the sound, or if I see a shot, I can go, you need to be careful with that. So I wouldn't, I, I think it's really, really important to talk to your whole sound team before you shoot, if at all possible. Um, I know that sometimes your audio coach person is not selected, uh, when you go to shoot.

But, if you know who you're mixing with, go ahead and talk to that person or that team and, and figure that out before you go out in the field, that's a really great point to get your post mixer involved in the pre-pro process. You know, I love it. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times it doesn't happen a lot of times it's like, oh, we're editing the spin.

What we're going to need post on it. We need audio on it, you know? Um, can, you know, when are you available? You know, but if, if you like, like Cheryl said, if you know who you're going to be working with, or you don't know who you're going to be working with, you might want to look into post-production audio during the pre-pro process, it really will help.

 some other things about plants is, you know, you could bury Kate, you, if you can run cables, if you're shooting outside, you could put mikes in trees, you could put Mike's, um, in mailboxes. Um, and then you just have to bury the cables that run the cable. So they're not in shot if you're not using wireless.

Um, the rule of thumb when I'm on, uh, on location and Donna can probably speak to this even more. So is I'll set up the booms first, make sure that they're ready to go. Then I'll set up the plans and I'll leave the wireless mics and the lavs for last, because the actors are still going through makeup, getting their, getting their costumes ready or whatever they're doing.

So the last thing to go is the, are the LOBs, except if there's some kind of weird costuming thing where you're going to have to get that lava on there and wired up before they get dressed. Um, so that's kind of the order I tend to work 

Um, I just want to make sure I can get everything done as quickly as possible so that when people are ready when everyone's ready to go, that they're not waiting on me. Um, for sure. So I think that's a good order of things to do is boom plant loves. Yeah. It's like mitigate as much stress as possible as early as possible.

Right. Well, and that also goes back to the location thing. if you know what locations you're going to be shooting and you have the time. You know, if you can go out there and ahead of time and see what you're going to be dealing with, that's really helpful too. And now my favorite subject gear, um, we talked a lot about microphones. Uh, there's different kinds of microphones. It was dynamic microphones and condenser mikes.

Mostly what we've been talking about have been condensed Mike's loves and shotgun. Mike's a dynamic. Mike is a less expensive, more rugged type of mic. It uses a plastic membrane that the sound waves hit instead of a metal one. And it's less affected by temperature and humidity. The reason why you might want to use a dynamic mic like, uh, uh, Shure SM 57 or an SM 58 on a shoot would be, if you're doing a maybe musical application, you're shooting a band or there's high volume effects like gunfire or engines or airplanes, dynamic mikes were great for that.

For the most part, your microphones will be condenser mikes, but it doesn't hurt to have with you and SM 58 or something in case you needed the condenser Michael overload, um, a lot easier, but they're great at picking up softer sounds, dialogue, uh, and, um, and also a condenser. Mike requires external power source called Phantom power.

And it's called Phantom power because it gets the power through the XLR cable. You don't need to plug it into anything, but your recorder will generally supply that.  condenser mics, give you a wider frequency range. A dynamic might gives you, um, ability to have more energy hitting the microphone. Mike patterns.  makes up varying characteristics of directionality.

That's what we call polar patterns or pickup patterns. And, um, the most common types of Mike's used for production are omni-directional. They pick up sound from all the way around and that's what labs are they? No matter what direction they're facing in, you're still getting the sound from them. A unit direction, like picks up sound in a very narrow pointed pattern.

Um, usually you call it Cardi or a SU super cardioid or hyper cardioid. And that's what shotguns are hypercarbia and Mike's, um, it's called cardiac cause it's a heart shape pattern cardio. So shotgun. As a very narrow range. And if you move that out of the way, you're going to start going off Mike. But if you're pointed right at that person, you're getting the most energy, a wider pattern. We'll give you more, uh, leeway to move the mic around, but you get less energy and in any given spot. So that's the difference between when you're looking at Mike's and they say, oh, this is an omni-directional my, this is a HyperCard you in Mike.

That's what it means. And you do have some mix that can be more than one polar pattern. So you can even have a figure eight where, um, you can, uh, actually it looks like a figure eight pattern. So on the mic, you can have one person talking into the mic this way and another person talking to the mic that way.

So, but on the sides, it's not capturing,  any audio. sometimes they even have little settings physically on, uh, on the mic. So, you know, when you set it up, make sure that you set it up so that you know where your settings are. That's right. There'll be a switch on the mic. recorders, you can record into your camera if you're coming out of your recorder, on your mix or mixer with a mic attached, but it's best not to use, like, like we mentioned, you use your camera as your sole recording source, have a separate recorder with a built-in mixer or mixer.

That's feeding a recorder. 

If you spend any time at all on a film set, you've probably heard somebody say. Oh, we'll fix it in post. So we spent some time discussing what you can and can't fix in post and what's involved with that.  

what you can, and can't fix in post. We kind of talked about a lot of this already and the question  can I fix this problem  the answer is usually it depends. things you can change, you can fix if you have changing ambience during shots, um, That's that's fixable. And again, the room tone, Nat sound that you record really helps that we've already talked about this quite a bit, but that's, that's fixable. If, if you did one shot in the morning and another shot in the afternoon and the birds come and go or whatever, we can fix that, but get the rooms out and get the Nat sound that helps out a lot where you can't fix excessive background noise, or the ambience is louder than the dialogue.

Um, there's some amazing noise reduction tools and things that you can do to try and bring out the dialogue, but you cannot add something that doesn't exist. you too far away from your dialogue source, you won't be able to beef it up really. And so, and, and overuse of noise reduction tools starts to sound really sterile and robotic and.

No, I, and also one thing I want to point out too, a lot of people overlook is that when you're recording that room tone, are you recording that? Not sound for us? Um, those two things really why that's important is that sometimes we hear noise when it goes away. So when you're editing and you're suddenly having to Frank and bite something together or.

Space or change the pacing of the way the actor or the interviewee, uh, interview, uh, actually said it, then you're going to be cutting it up. And then suddenly you're going to have space or silence on that track between the bites. And,  the most noticeable thing about noise is when it drops in and out.

So that's one reason why we need  the, those type of things. But the other reason that a lot of people overlook is, is if we have that and it's an easier way for us to sample the noise so that we can actually use it better in our, um, in our noise reduction tools. Um, that's why I always run it out of the same scene.

Like if I feel like it's changing a lot, I'll just ask for a lot of handles when I get it from the editor and I'll roll it out and I'll go, oh, there's a space right before they say that. And I grabbed that noise profile and then I'm able to noise reduce properly the dialogue in a better way, because I have that noise profile.

And I think that's really, really important. And Steve is absolutely right. What you can't do is suddenly take something that's really deep in the noise for, and then suddenly make it this really nice clean, intimate conversation. I mean, that's just not going to happen. There is a lot of ways that we can have.

Uh, overly processed voices cleaned up, um, like it's really, really hard to make them sound good if you're not going to have a small little music bed underneath there, but there's a lot of things that we can do to make it sound a little bit better, but 

You will always be sacrificing quality and it you'll be like, okay, well, I would rather  So that's why I always ask, like, is this going to be under music or do you play any pretty music there?

And sometimes, you know, you're not, and that's just the way it is, but that really does, um, does hide out  his home fluorescent lights, air conditioner, a  60 cycle home, we can usually get rid of that pretty easily. Um, oh yeah, yeah. Wind, uh, that stuff you can get rid of distortion on the recording.

Mike overload too hot. Not as much. There's some things you could do, but again, it's going to take up a lot of your post-production time. It's going to cost you. Effort more money, more time. That's better spent going into the creative sound rather than technical fixing them sound. So if you can avoid it as do, avoid it, low level recording, that's better.

That's easier to fix then overly modulator recording, but it does bring up the noise floor. Then you got to deal with mitigating the noise. And again, it's more time and effort in post-production that best to avoid if you can.  if you're talking to your audio post person before production, then you know, they could actually mark up your script and say, you know, this definitely what we're going to need. And that's, this is what we're going to use. Sound design. Hey, can you think about this? Can you think about that? Um, can you grab that, um, bully, if you're going to do truthfully, meaning you're going to have a Foley artist actually act out to the scenes and record while they're doing it, or are you going to do what I call poor man's Foley, which I do all the time, because I don't have a true fully that, but, uh, you know, I can make sounds all the time using the zoom or whatever Mike, I have on hand, even my phone sometimes.

Uh, and I actually admitted that. And then, um, or on set, like if, you know, you need certain bully sounds like the, you know, somebody tapping on whatever you could actually record those onset and then add those in later. So, I mean, there's lots of different ways to handle. And your door slams are nice too, especially cars, CarGurus lambs are great.

There are so many other topics related to audio that we talked about that we don't have time to cover in this podcast. Things like immersive audio surround sound. 

filed deliverables and what you need to tell your editor in order to get. The things you need from your video editor for post-production audio. But that will be a topic for another day. Be sure. And join us. For our next episode. Which will feature.  another in our series, how I got it made. 

With Jane Barbara and Sherry Radek Stroud. Coming next week.