Do you have facilities to do ADR work? If so you might not kill yourself over the sound. I've heard nearly 60% of sound is often redone in the studio (Lord of the Rings was more like 90%)

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

What about voices, that's what I'm mostly concerned with. What's ADR work? Pardon my ignorance.

ADR stands for Additional Dialogue recording (or Automatic Dialog Replacement ), and basically what happens is the actors are called back into the studio to re-record their lines. They must sync it back up with the visual, and while that can sometimes be tricky, it's worth it.

So basically what you'd be doing is re-recording the bits that didn't work out. I'm guessing you're on a really low budget so this would simply mean hooking up a microphone to a computer or whatever and getting your actors to watch the visual as they re-record lines in a program like goldwave (free), then you'd need to place the new audio track and sync it back up in your editing program.

-Chris

Low budget, ha! You mean no budget. I'm not really trying to make any movies for some film festival or anything. Actually I'm still in high school taking a couple of pathetic video classes. The teachers don't teach me what I want to know so I'm learning it from other sources.

Do you have any tips or tricks to get the audio to match up and sound realistic. Also, any ideas of a good microphone (low-cost) to use for recording the audio? And finally (last question I promise) are there any tricks to get ride of background noise?

I'm in your position too, I'm a high school student who got into filmmaking this year. For recording audio, the Sennheiser MKE300 looks good to me for it's price (like $150USD). Sennheiser is a good brand and that is one of their cheaper models, but apparently it works well.

Background noise is a killer. The best thing to do is to try and get as clean audio as you can possibly get ON SET. I had problems earlier in the year in a competition with audio, because it wasn't recorded clean enough and it was a real hassle trying to clean it up. In short, it's hard, and you really need to know what you're doing to remove it without screwing everything else up. There are apparently some good plugins in programs like Adobe Audition etc. but unfortunately that costs some money.

It shouldn't be too hard to sync audio back up for basic conversations etc. For actual sound like walking etc. you can easily just download sound effects and sync it up in your editing program. Just get your actors to watch the clip a few times with the bad audio, make sure they get the feel etc. Then, you can get them to record while watching the clip to sync it up. (Just minimize the recording program and play back the original clip with no audio, so they can record. Then just keep at it until you're happy with it.

Remember that there is always a little sound in the background, even if it's mega quiet. So when you redo the dialogue, add a soft audio track with basic ambience, or whatever suits the scene, and run this over the whole scene. This is also useful when cutting conversations etc.

-Chris

Thanks for your suggestions, I'll have to go check out that mic.

Here's a little tip someone once told me, I'm not sure how well it would work but it might be worth a shot. I've heard that Red vs Blue (www.roosterteeth.com) would record their audio underneath a blanket when they first started out. I have no idea if this is true (rumors on the internet being what they are) but I do think that this would help elimate some of the background noise. It would also create a muffled sound, but everyone in Red vs. Blue are in helmets so this works for them.

ADR is very difficult and time consuming. Many actors, especially newer, less experienced actors aren't very good at rerecording their voices. And it's difficult to schedule actors to come back and rerecord their dialogue after you've finished shooting.

For someone just getting into filmmaking, I think ADR is a really bad idea. I?ve been making movies for years and I try hard to record good dialogue tracks on set or location.

Audio is so important and so many movie makers don?t but enough time (and money) into it. Even if you have a great script, great actors and a beautiful picture, poor audio will really hurt your final movie.

The main reason your audio sounds terrible, Knotty, is because you don?t get your microphone close enough to your actors. I?ll bet you?re using the mic on your camera.

Using a good shotgun mic like the Sennheiser (I?d suggest the ME66 over the MKE300) and a boom pole to get the mic as close to the actors as you can, will greatly improve your sound quality.

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The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)