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Old 21st December 2006   #10
jayfrigo
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As sound budgets shrink, crews get smaller, rooms get smaller, turnaround times get smaller... A film mixed in a room that looks more like a music control room than a movie theater is a bad idea. You might get by for small budget art flicks that are primarily "talkies", and mid- to lower-end TV (other than MOW (movie of the week) or one-hour prime-time drama which is usually done on mid-sized stages), but you simply can't get the best mix and proper consistency from theater to theater with a music style mix of a movie.

This is something that people without sound for picture experience often don't realize until it's too late. It's really a different discipline, with a different language, different tools, different workflow etc. If real dub stages are squeezed out by some of these low budget video "films," I think that would be a real loss.

Already I hear some single man mixes done in things that look like converted music studios, even on some medium-budget films, that just don't translate to the big screen and to a proper theater. I hate to point fingers, so I won't (I went to one major studio comedy recently that was appalling), but big Hollywood films sound the part for a reason.

The stages at places like Sony, Warner, Universal, and TODD-AO are the gold standard for this kind of thing. Even if you decided to lose the big Harrison for an ICON, you can't lose the room, and you don't want to try to put everything on a single person. Again, the art-flick and non-dramatic TV are more flexible, and for DVD remixes, you actively want a smaller room, but mixing film in a music room is like mastering with earbuds.
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