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SOUND EDITING & MIXING IN THE 21st CENTURY |
> Dave...I Feel Much Better Now.
by Leslie Shatz
When I started my career in 1970, new technology was sweeping the industry. The Nagra had recently been introduced, allowing a production to be much more mobile, with a smaller sound crew, less cables and Swiss precision. The idea of filming on location was sweeping the industry (not only due to the Nagra, but to camera changes as well) and the hand-held style was all the rage. Insert recording meant that for the first time during a final mix you could stop the recording process in the middle of a reel. You could go 'backwards' and then punch in and change the mix. It was no longer necessary to mix an entire 10-minute reel without stopping and this offered the possibility of creating soundtracks that were more highly polished than ever.
Much has changed since then and each change has assumed the same seemingly epic proportions: Dolby noise reduction, the "X-Curve", stereo release formats, 6-track release formats, automated consoles. But, for me, the greatest revolution has been the introduction of digital workstations. Gone are the omnipresent and reliable Moviolas. Gone are the Nagra's and, in many places, magnetic film recording. Gone, too, are some talented sound editors and mixers who were unwilling to make the fearful transition to this brave new world. We are now blessed with "efficient" tools that do "cool" things and make it seem that anything is possible. We can deliver 6-track answer prints which are almost perfect copies of our original material. We can make our tracks as loud as the human ear can stand, and as quiet as it can perceive. We can do all this from the convenience of a typewriter keyboard and TV screen. We no longer need large crews and we don't need to carry and rewind heavy reels of magnetic film. But in spite of all of these advances I ask: are movie soundtracks better now than they ever were? Or for that matter, are movies better now?
We can certainly say that movies and soundtracks are more complex than ever. But we might have difficulty comparing today's tracks with those of the great films of the past and deciding that as a group one is better than the other. "Once Upon a Time in the West", for example, was made over 30 years ago, but achieved lasting distinction for its use of sound and music, in spite of the fact that the technical quality of the sounds themselves was very poor. Much like in an opera, the film employed music and sound effects as an integral part of the storytelling, using ideas that probably originated at the script stage. In doing so, it set a standard that few pictures have since surpassed.
The Russian filmmaker and scholar V.I. Pudovkin believed that the invention of 'talkies' signaled the death knell for the art of motion pictures. Russian filmmakers of his day had elevated the art of montage and silent filmmaking to a very high level. His fear was that the soundtrack in movies would be used only to slavishly reproduce synchronous dialogue, making no creative contribution to the film as a whole. There was no stopping the marriage of sound and film, but today, many films could be criticized for exactly what he predicted.
Computers are blind workhorses, electronic beasts of burden. They are not the problem. To blame the computer would be like blaming a wrench. What we have done with them is what has caused difficulties for the sound editing process and for post-production in general. Picture changes are a breeze-cut, copy and paste. But perhaps they are too easy. A friend of mine, a re-recording mixer who worked on a recent and popular film, counted over 3,000 picture changes between the start of premixes and the final release. And now, with digital distribution formats, where will it end? Will we be making changes after the 'film' is in the theater? Will the post budget and schedule need to accommodate post-release re-cutting and re-mixing? Will we try to make one film be all things to all audiences, with different versions for different regions of the country?
With digital technology, we can make perfect copies of anything we can cram into the machine-but we're being buried with copies. We've become digital packrats, measuring our wealth in gigabytes. In the commercial libraries we find pristine renditions of ancient optical sound effects, or worse, we find the same sound named 10 different ways. We have been seduced by the convenience of these libraries but not by their suitability to an individual film. New technology helps us manipulate and duplicate our material, but it's not the copy that matters. It's the original sound itself, and it's use, that determines the effectiveness of our tracks.
We have watched mixing consoles evolve from non-automated to fader automated to completely automated. We would once brag about a 72 input console but now 500 inputs doesn't seem excessive. What do we do with all of these extra inputs? Do we make a soundtrack 7 times better? 7 times faster? 7 times cheaper? The big revelation is that digital technology has not made our soundtracks less expensive to produce. On the contrary, they are much more costly, with more cuts, more versions, more changes than ever before. But the cost of editorial labor has remained more or less stable, and crews have become smaller.
Where do we go from here?
I believe we are now leaving the period of audio 'gluttony', marked by loud mixes with lots of sub-woofer activity and excessively literal treatments with every movement attached to a sound or voice. The binge is coming to an end, allowing more freedom for the soundtrack to pursue its own course and not only enhance the ideas on the screen, but assume its own identity. I was very impressed with the soundtrack for "The Limey", where dialogue was woven in and out of sync with picture, and sound helped the film play with time, taking us into the future while the picture remained in the past.
Although soundtracks may not always be more evocative now than in the past, public awareness of sound is at an all time high level. DVD reviews frequently comment on a show's sonic creativity. This higher awareness and greater public demand will hopefully allow the creators of the track an opportunity to work out more flexible schedules and budgets. Time is the one element essential to creativity that no technology can grant us-time to try new ideas, time to let things percolate, time to perfect and polish.
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where the sound crew will be fully integrated into the post-production team. |
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It's no coincidence that we have merged sound editing and mixing in our new coast-to-coast local. Intercon-nectivity is the key to our future. Crews are probably going to become smaller-but the amount of production will increase, with more shows playing to more specialized audiences, which will all expect a very high level of soundtrack quality and creativity.
I have contemplated the future with dread many times in my career. Television will put movies out of business, workstations will put traditional sound editors out of business, high costs will put American crews out of business. None of these dire predictions have come to pass. Despite the fact that our working methods will continue to evolve, sound editing and mixing for movies will, in its essence, remain the same. Despite the technology changes, we will still push ourselves to our limits as professionals, still need to work with a vision of the whole movie and the whole soundtrack and still strive to create work that supports the film at it's core. We must use all our ingenuity to cope with the tremendous ups and downs of our industry, keep our skills current and strive to see the future as just another edition of the past.
Leslie Shatz is a sound designer and mixer.
He has helped create the soundtracks for such films as "Dracula", "Ghost"
and has just received an Oscar nomination for his work on"The Mummy".
He has been experimenting with digital techniques
for motion picture sound since 1984.
He can be reached via email.
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Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 21, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 2000
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