Will digital (motion picture) film have an impact on sound recording for film?

[Jules]

It has been predicted that that "the film industry is going through a huge polarisation process caused by the rush to shoot movies with cheap video formats."

Discuss...

[audiothings]

Some rather disconnected thoughts:

I'd guess that Bloakbuster Films will not lose their place easily. While, say, punk and rock and roll questioned the merits of 'high fidelity' and 'polished' music forever, I doubt we'll see a similar change in the film industry. People go to the movies for the larger than life BIG SCREEN EXPERIENCE, which is simply not going to be possible, now or in our lifetimes, for small budget 'DV Cam' productions. 'Special' effects based films, I would imagine already use a lot of digital footage. If Comrade Spielberg makes a film , he may go digital, but he will retain or better current standards of visual richness that still won't be anywhere near possible on the budget to of your average independent production. And when Comrade Spielberg is spending several million dollars on other aspects of his film, I don't think he will mind paying a slight premium for a pro audio post production facility.

As for sound recording for films, orchestral music still plays a frequently important part. As long as this is the case, the big scoring stages will still be in the game. When it comes to movies that don't feature an orchestral score, I would guess that lots of work is already being done in smaller rooms irrespective of the budget of the film, moving the data to the big scoring and mix stages only when necessary. Dubbing stages (atleast where I am) are shrinking in size, by the day. And as sound effects libraries get ever wider, foley work is going to suffer. The need for pro mix stages however, is not about to dwindle too much. These things, however have little to do with changes due to advent of digital film making, and have more to do with changes within audio technology.

Independent films, 'art' films, documentaries and to an extent, films primarily intended for TV are most likely to benefit(?) immediately from the new technology. And the technology is still nascent. And people will learn the tricks, possibilities, pitfalls and workarounds and get better at digital film making over time. Still, indie movies are not, in my opinion, going to take too much away from the blockbusters. Audio post production for the emerging genre is however going to be an interesting game to watch. Whether 'project' audio/video post production facilities can deliver the required quality AND survive in the business is what we'll be waiting to see.

I think film production is very much a deliberate art. I am optimistic about the flexibility and fidelity it will bring to audio as more and more stages in film production and reproduction go digital. The problem will however probably be that the new technology will be used to create short cuts and compromises, rather than as tools of an evolving art.

.02,
self.

[seriousfun]

Originally Posted by Jules

It has been predicted that that "the film industry is going through a huge polarisation process caused by the rush to shoot movies with cheap video formats."

Discuss...

No.

Acquisition, whether on-set or in post-production, is already an established technology and will remain the same.

Post-production already works well, and won't change. Digital cinema may have up to 12 channels, but any channels above eight will be for descriptive listening, etc., not improved audio.

Delivery to the theater will remain the same - they already have up to eight full-range channels to play, and how this gets to their amplifiers is really irrelevant. Same with home theater - the speakers, amps, etc. won't change, and for the forseeable future the player will spit out six audio channels derived from whatever disc or file is being played.

Remember, Sound Follows Picture .

[pkautzsch]

Originally Posted by seriousfun

Remember, Sound Follows Picture .

Exactly. And this is why lots of small indie productions - at least in Germany - think "why should we use a $10,000 audio recorder when our cam cost just 4,000? Why should we pay for a mixing stage when we edit at home on our laptop? Can't we just do the sound there as well, in Final Cut Pro?" (NO WE CAN'T). It's hard to explain to some people in the business that technically bad pictures can be a stylistic device, whereas technically bad sound will just destroy the experience of the viewer. This makes the sound job harder, since one must always argue.
Also, on budget productions shot on film, you have many rehearsals and seldom more than 4 takes (in Germany...), whereas on DV shots..."let's record the first rehearsal too, maybe it's cool" (of course it isn't). Seldom less than 10 takes.
Or "can't we just record the sound directly to the cam?" when the cam is the Canon XL-1 (NO WE CAN'T).
People like my sound for their DV shots. Guess why? I use Nagra 4.2. And when budget is really low, I do some tape compression on location, knowing that there won't be anything worth being called audio post.

[Pascal Sijen]

Version 1 of the Digital Cinema System Specification is available on the Digital Cinema Initiatives website. It includes a lot of information regarding audio.

http://www.dcimovies.com/specification/index.tt2

"Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI) was created in March, 2002, and is a joint venture of Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios. DCI's primary purpose is to establish and document voluntary specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that ensures a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability and quality control."

Enjoy...

[starcrash13]

The digital revolution certainly has had it's effects on audio post as far as the sheer amount of films that are being produced on very small budgets. This is good. More stuff to work on. However, the schedules are getting shorter and shorter and we're expected to do more in less time. This is not so good. My last two projects were both digital. One was David Fincher's Zodiac which was a huge budget and I got 18 weeks work out of it. It was shot digitally on a Viper Cam and edited in Final Cut Pro. The next was an animated feature that we had to do in nine days! These are the two extremes.

I wouldn't necessarily blame the digital medium itself for changes in our post workflow, though. The digital revolution within the audio world itself has much more to do with it. With DAWs, Soundminer, digital field recorders, etc our job has become a lot easier and more efficient. It used to be that an apprentice would spend months or even years learning to cut mag before they could move to assistant or full editor. Now, anyone with an MBox can hang his or her shingle as a "sound designer" and be fully trained on the equipment before he walks in the door. I'm not saying this as an old curmudgeon, I AM that guy who learned Pro Tools inside and out before I got hired.

The biggest change that we're starting to see is the way films are mixed. Many facilites are moving away from the large-format consoles and huge dub stages in favor of cheap alternatives like Digidesign Icon systems and smaller 5.1 sound design rooms for premixing. This is really just a matter of economics, unfortunately. In order for post-houses to stay competitive and be able to work with smaller budgets, something has to be sacrificed. The role of sound editor is slowly morphing into mixer, except we don't get paid as much.

As far as recent changes in digital projection formats, this has had very little effect on what we do. We still deliver a Dolby printmaster and all the usual stuff. Film soundtracks have already been digital for decades now. Picture follows sound!

[starcrash13]

Hey Pascal, it's me, Pascal! I'm sitting in front of a System One 2.1 as we speak. Sounds great!

[Pascal Sijen]

Originally Posted by starcrash13

Hey Pascal, it's me, Pascal! I'm sitting in front of a System One 2.1 as we speak. Sounds great!

[starcrash13]

On the production side, location sound mixers have been recording digitally now for ages, too. The difference is that these days they are using hard disk recorders, rather than DATs, that are able to take advantage of the metadata in BWF files to embed timecode and other pertinent info that helps in post (scene, take, etc). Evidently, Pro Tools is getting more savvy about utilizing this info in their recent versions as well . This is a subject for which I have quite a bit of interest, but little experience. I mostly cut FX and Foley so I haven't a chance to sort out any production sound in Pro Tools 7.2+ yet.

[jayfrigo]

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.

[TEMAS]

I'm excited about the prospect of more lower budget HD movies going into production, as these are the kind of opportunities up and coming artists and studios want to get into.

I think film will remain most big budget directors' first choice for some time to come. Its really not that much cheaper to go HD; granted you have no stock to buy, but what you save in tele-cine costs you spend in post using effects to attain the levels of contrast and grain that are naturally attainable with film.

Off topic, the two films that have 'wowed' me for their cinematography more than any others in the last few years I later learnt were shot on HD - Collateral (Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx) and Sin City. The crystal clear detail of the imagery in Collateral even when shooting fast motion in extreme low lighting conditions was deserved of the Bafta it won.