Sound recording at the site VS. dubbing

Hello, we are planning a Fan Film for the Puerto Rico Jedi Outcasts. Most of our scenes will be filmed outside, on some occasions on sites that are quite windy or where some other kind of "noise pollution" is abundant. So we are considering recording the dialogs in a make-shift sound room and using these instead of the original audio track. The tricky part is making sure the dubbing is in synch with the movement of the actors' lips (lip-synching).

On the other hand, buying good microphones for a decent quality recording can be expensive. Does anybody have any recommendations? Anyone prefer one option over the other? What are some of your experiences with a dubbing process like this one? I'd really appreciate your feedback!

 

Depending on what kind of mic you have for dubbing, it might not sound the greatest. Also, you'll have to add in a ton of ambient effects which can be a pain.

 

Heres a little trick from a sound engineer. Dubbing is fine and shouldnt be a problem if your actors can speak along with the film decently. For ambient sound just record a few minutes of audio from the location you are shooting at to capture the areas sound and you can mix that in to what you are doing.

If you need more detailed help you can pm me.

 

The best way to capture sound is to get a microphone that you can have plugged directly into your camera that you can get close to the actor's mouth (without it being in the picture, obviously)

This perfectly syncs up the dialogue with the movement of the lips, and sounds good too. However, if ambient noise or wind is too much of a problem, you frankly HAVE to dub. Unless it's part of the effect you want, of course...

 

Robert Rodriguez shot El Mariachi total silent (his camera was too loud) then right after he was done shooting, he'd use a radio shakc mike and his marantz recorder and record all the sound a dialogue for the movie. He then hand synced it all later when he was making his cut. He said that a lot of times he had to cut away during dialogue becuase the actors would slowly get out of sync.

I've dealt with this a bit and I just went into a sound proof room (my band practice room) and then we watched what we filmed with our regular audio a few times to get the timing of our speech, and then just re-enacted the scene again to get good audio. We just used our camera mic so the sound would match up with the rest of the dialogue (am I spelling that right?) and stuff in the movie. Later, in my editing program, I just synced it up and it worked perfect.

Hope that helps,

--Jam "sound editing credit" ball

 

It does require a lot of extra effort, but in the end, re-recording the lines will help your film immensely. I myself use a Sennheiser Me67, which is a very nice - but expensive! - shotgun condenser mic. For something considerably less expensive, try a condenser from Azden; I hear nothing but good things about them.

As for the procedure itself, I can understand your trepidation about getting your actors to do accurate lip-synch. However, with a little preparation an ADR session can be made a lot easier for your talent and you.

1. Start by preparing the clips to be dubbed. Put two short beeps, spaced an equal distance apart, in front of where the speaking begins on the clip's waveform. Be sure to leave a space of equal length to the first two between beeps between the last beep and where the dialogue begins. It should sound like (beep...beep...[line]). These beeps will serve as your actor's cues to begin speaking.

2. It's helpful to have each clip singled out as its own file so you can loop it (hence the name for what we're doing: ADR, or 'Looping'). Render the clip out, beeps and location dialogue included. Set this clip a-loopin' in your favortie media player and plug in a set of headphones for your talent to hear it.

3. Record away! Your talent now has audible cues, can watch his or her lips as the line is spoken, and can also hear the location dialogue over the phones. They should be able to nail the line after a few tries. If not, you've just learned who's capable of multitasking and who isn't.

 

Wow, there are a lot of very helpful tips and tricks here. Good sound is really important in every production, so... thank you everyone!

 

Use the on site recording as a reference when dubbing. Makes it easier than to watch the screen and trying to match.

 

Yeah, based on your suggestions, we are thinking of recording the original audio at the site anyway and then dubbing over it, and using the ambient audio also recorded at the site as background noise.

Does this sound like a good idea to you guys?

 

Sounds good to me. Great tips here.

Slight off topic, but it fits here... for my latest project, I used the in-camera mic. We were inside, but the mic still picked up a lot of camera noise. so I edited as usual, got everything together, the exported from AE as an .mp3. I then took this into Goldwave, used the noise reduction, and brought it back into AE. I muted the original composition and placed the new sound file on to. Voila! Noiseless sound. Depending on how much wind you have outside, it may work for that, too.

 

some editing software allows you too reduce sounds... i don't know if this will help, but its another way to help


best of luck to you though, either way it'll be cool

 

Last night we ran a short sound test, and everything went great! We used one of those headset-type mics (the ones with an adjustable mini-boom), and I was quite surprised by the result. We recorded a few lines, and with the help of a good sound editing program, managed to get really clean lines of dialogue to be used for dubbing.

Again, thanks for the help!

 

ADR isn't really that hard to do... and you don't really need all that expensive a microphone to do a good job of it.

However... if you can record audio on set do so... things usually sound much better.

-Spiff

 

I use wireless mics. Works like a dream.


EDIT: BTW, each actor has his own Lavaliere mics, which is why it works like a dream. 'Tis a little spendy though.

 

Yes, we are sort of in a tight budget here. Next up we're going to experiment recording ambient sound at the site using the mic on the camera.

We'll see how it turns out.