mixing: adding the space to dubbing/ADR

[vandahl]

Good day folks, here's my query for today: when given a 5.1 M&E and freshly recorded dialogue dubs, some mixers rarely stray away from the centre channel. Even when using stereo spatialization (verbs, delays, whatever) so the result is the original voice with the space of the room bundled into mono, C, and it sounds less than realistic although it might be an exact emulation of the original mix where much of the dialogue will have come from the set, recorded in mono. But there are no rigid rules as far as I know, about letting the vocal ambience spill into the L-R, and even into the surrounds if the situation justifies that. How would you treat space in a DIA surround mix?

And on a related note, is it common practise these days to use stereo walla, or is that just my personal preference?

[danijel]

What do you mean by 'vocal ambience'?

If you mean 'reverb', then, yes, there are no rigid rules, but more often than not, in interior scenes, there will be reverb in all five channels (or four.)

With dubbed dialogue, it is easier to spread it out of the C channel, but I guess mixers job in that case is to make the dub as close to the original as possible without foolin' around

[Geert van den Berg]

Well there's a difference if all the dialogue has been replaced or if it's an animated film.

If it's ADR, it has to fit with the original sound, if there is no original sound, there's freedom to choose any kind of reverb/ambience.

[subbasshead]

& surely it depends scene by scene & shot by shot on the context, perspective & directors intent... which you may not easily be able to ascertain after the fact...

[vandahl]

in our case we get a 6 + 2 where the 2 is a guide track and an optional track. The 5.1 is M&E, (hopefully) undipped and does not contain any traces of recogniseable language, so that it can be dubbed more effectively. Now, we rarely get the full mix as done by the film's chief sound mixer, and sometimes we get an LtRt of the full mix. But mostly we only have the 5.1 M&E + guide track to give us an idea of where to go.

Certain mixers around here will stick to that, and mix to match the guide - thus restricting themselves to mono. While I think this practice is not ideal and is in fact detrimental to intelligibility among others (mono reverb? come on!..), I was wondering if that is a common practice. Since all of those who dub the same Hollywood stuff in other languages have to mix the dialogue portion, how do you gals and guys approach reverb, echo, etc. (aka spatial effects) in terms of multichannel mixing?