As the year continues, many of these posts will be philosophical in nature. Some will be in contradiction to previous postings. These are not intended as truths or assertions, they’re merely thoughts…ideas. Think of this as stream of consciousness over a wide span…
As I wrap up this live action VR/360 short I’ve been working on, I’ve been starting to postmortem the process in my head. One particular element of the project caught me a little off-guard…dealing with mic bleed in production dialog and production fx.
In normal film projects, this isn’t such a big deal. Most production audio is going up the center channel, so the most you have to worry about is phasing. VR projects really require panned dialog though. Not having it quickly breaks immersion. My partner on this project and I did consider this and planned accordingly, but the project required a more thorough approach than we had anticipated. I found myself constantly diving back into RX/editorial mode while pre-mixing; trying to remove PFX and dialog bleed from the different characters’ lav channels. Any time something sneaked through in a piece of dialog…and I do mean as part of the background noise under a line, not sounds around a line…the panning of other characters or objects would have this momentary shift in position. It was really hard to judge what would be an issue before the pre-mix stage. You could make guesses out of context, but it wasn’t until you actually start laying the production in against the effects and foley and get your reverbs roughed in that you could truly understand what would work and what didn’t.
If I take on another project like this in the future, I’m going to plan for some extra editorial time between the pre-mix and mix phase.
If I ever have the luxury of talking to a receptive client before they actually shoot their VR content, I’m definitely going to recommend they try to pace their dialog to minimize actor overlap. I know, I know, this will never happen, but mic bleed in spatial audio mixes is such a huge pain.
I have had this problem in 5.1 and Atmos cinema mixes where we panned dialog… Cloverfield and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Mic bleed is an problem when panning lavs. The more isolation the better. Our location recordist did a great job with that on both those films. We are trying to isolate the voices on our current project too, but there is much less isolation on the lavs on this one. I don’t know how location recordists obtain good isolation in their lav tracks, but it will be a much more desired goal than in the past, now that we are moving towards VR where there is no “Center” track!
It’s definitely an increasing problem, Doug. I’ve been fortunate enough to not have to deal with panned dialog in most of the films I’ve worked on in my career…though I know it does happen. I just don’t see any way to avoid doing it the VR/360 space, because there’s such a clear need for it to support the immersion. We really do need the opportunity to start interfacing with production mixers for these projects…if we can ever get brought in early enough.
All we can do, and it is something, is to tell the production sound mixers who provide the tracks we work with what we do with their work and what we would like differently from them when possible, and they can take what they can from that and go forward with it. Remember that they do grueling work under very difficult conditions to get anything at all resembling useful sound, so are generally deserving of our great appreciation, even when the results are less than pristine. Feedback on this sort of new requirement for their tracks would be appreciated by most location recordists. I will have the good fortune to meet up with our production mixer on some pickup shooting to be done next month and will let him know what we are doing with his tracks so he will understand and do the best he can to improve isolation between characters. An email from the cutting room to the location mixer with thanks and constructive criticism (where warranted) is a courtesy I try to provide on all my shows these days.
I love panned dialog where it is appropriate, as in POV films like Cloverfield and Elephant where it adds to the immersiveness of the film. More conventional mise-en-scene requires a more conventional center-channel-centric approach.
VR now is in a kind of R&D phase of development. Where possible, you could have a lot to say to the location recordist about separation. Here’s hoping you and the production can connect early enough to have an influence on your next VR show.