Is video game audio being mastered?

[ty604]

I always read about game companies hiring this and that classical composer because 'it's the trend right now'. I even read about mixing. But I never see anything about mastering.

Obviously the music is mastered because it ends up getting released but what about the sound design and fx for video games? Is it "mastered" in any way?


Thanks

p.s if anyone here has mastered a video game please tell us any bad or unique experiences with the developer / producer.

[crna59]

I've done 6 games now. My step-son does annimation for a major company and they outsource all the music/sfx.
He got me into the game scene. At first it was just porting to other platforms and then it got into more elaborate sound design and then ADR.
Since I am a ME, I carried it to the next level and tried to incorporate my normal workflow into gaming soundtracks. It's a whole different world but I tried to pretend each scene/section as a track in an album and get everything to just flow. It's not about the loudness in games, except for sfx. The music is in the BG. The only drawback that I see before we get into HD and Blu-ray are that some of the music and sfx are really lo-fi because of storage. The graphics come first and the music is almost an afterthought. JMHO....

Regards,
Bruce

[chrisj]

Technically, you could do some very neat things with video game mastering. I haven't had the chance (yet!) but I've seen the audio files that go with games, particularly older ones.

I notice many different classes of sound, all with their own requirements. You have ambiences, these need to splice seamlessly and they should really be very deep background, something a really good ME could do. You can't simply put on reverb, the actual texture of the sound has to be coming out of a deep soundstage to do this. You might have dramatic narratives, which are more of a normal task- make them sound dramatic, obvious. You might have sound effects that should be anything from big to small, coming from close or far, and of course there could be extra-dramatic sound effects where you'd whip out the limiters and make it brutally loud relative to the other sounds. Some games I've read about get a LOT of mileage out of sound presentation, particularly if they are supposed to be scary or spooky.

Hell yeah game audio should be mastered, it's just so far over into 'sound designer' territory that the idea of hiring just a pop/rock ME is crazy. You're sort of looking for post-production as if you were running sound for a movie.

[ty604]

I'm getting into sound design and composing for games myself. That's why I posted. I'm traditionally a composer & sound editor with limited mixing skills.

I rip all platforms of video games to look into the different file formats and compression techniques. Really bizzare. Bink files, Ogg files, SSO files, AFS files and many many more. I am always investigating ways to extract the audio most of the time. I can open and read ANY platform's audio now. PS2, XBOX, Sega etc. I end up with the full catalog tree of how the sound designer organized everything. It's really neat.

Most of the audio is about 1GB in size uncompressed here in 2006/7. I remember when it had to be under 22mb. Actually a lot of games I've looked inside have pretty nice quality fx. 44.1 / 16 / stereo. A lot of fx are mono still but most on the newer games are stereo. When games start coming on BlueRay and HD I'm sure the audio budgets will increase to a few GB's.

I've always wanted to try techniques borrowed from ME's and MixE's to improve the audio without increasing filesize. Like you said I think guys like us could add a much needed dimension to video game sound design that most people aren't considering. I know most guys are just designing and compressing.

Hopefully when I get my first gig with a game developer I can do it.

Cheers

[z'Alai]

It's like film—they get the post-production treament. The bigger franchises like FINAL FANTASY get the whole treatment. For example, the audio for FINAL FANTASY XII ended up at http://www.pcl.sony.co.jp/service/vpw_408.html which is THX pm3'd out. SQUARE ENIX do have their own sound design studio, and most of the bigger companies have nifty recording studios (SEGA's comes to mind). The soundtracks to the games are, of course, mastered. The soundtrack for CHRONO CROSS was mastered at Bernie Grundman. FLAIR (JVC Victor), Onkio HAUS, and Waner Music Mastering are up there as far as mastering studios in Japan go.

[ty604]

Ah I guess everything is just mixed together and obviously mastered at the last stage just like any album or film like you said.