Trailers & Comms Cinema Voiceovers

[paulo m]

Hi,

regarding trailer and commercials voice overs for cinema presentation, what are your experiences regarding channel assignment and level? Are you using compression or other effects to bring the voice over to a really in your face kind of sound or not? Where do you usually pan, to the center only or try to have divergence to front left and right also? I recently read a book from T. Holman were he refers that in some movie, they placed the voice over on the main three front channels to give it a closer and more intimate sound that could easily be diferentiated in timbre to the film dialogues.

What average level do you mix to, considering for example the meter bridge scale on the Dolby DMU? In TV, I usually set my voice over levels around -20 dbfs, as I start to add music and effects the meters would easily go above -10 dbfs.Then I mix by hear, just taking control of mix elements by compressing individual elements if needed and then applying a gentle compression on main bus. This way I can achieve a good degree of loudness without smashing the signal and during the years, this has proved more than adequate.

But in TV, dynamic range is short, compared to the cinema, so I really want to take advantage of that, in order to provide a cleaner sound and definition.

I come from TV business but starting doing trailer and add sound for the cinema at the moment, so any experiences welcome.Thanks

Paulo M

[danijel]

Since this hasn't developed into a discussion, and we rarely ever talk about sound for trailers as it is, I wonder:
do you (as a sound editor or re-recording mixer) usually do the trailers for your films as well, or is this task often outsourced to a different team/facility?

I ask this because I think I've read somewhere that picture editing and music composing/supervising for movie trailers for big studios are sometimes (or usually?) not done by the same people working on the film itself. AFAIR the discussion was about The New World by Terrence Malick and how the trailer was completely opposite to the film in terms of style and genre.
If trailers are outsourced, what are the reasons for this? Not enough time to do it in the same place? Some teams are specialized (thus, 'better') for this task? Studios not wanting the director to have control over the trailer?

In my region, all films being low budget, I guess 99% of the trailers are done by the same sound supervisor who does the film, while the mixing is usually not even done on a proper stage, because we rarely have cinema-trailers for domestic movies anymore - they go to youtube and the DVDs nowadays.

[Kuba_Pietrzak]

I did lots of localization work for big Hollywood studios' trailers.

All materials, which were provided, had a trailers' company logo (e.g. Idea Place).

I do not know, if the actual supervising sound editors are involved into doing such stuff, but for higher budgets, I would not expect them to do so...

The same goes for mixing.

What is more, in many cases, the movie itself sounded excellent, but trailers were badly mixed and contained lots of sound editing mistakes.


It seems, that the specialized companies are hired to prepare trailers, but I do not know, if those companies hire the people, who work on the movie, or perhaps they hire another team to work on trailers.

Maybe someone from L.A. would chime in...

regards,
Kuba

[jraabe]

I would venture to say that most of the time the supervising sound editors/re-recording mixers on a film do NOT mix the trailer also.

A lot of times the trailers are cut much closer to the cinematic release date and the lead mixers are already on to other projects. Though I suspect the larger studios all have their own trailer divisions, a lot of times the trailer editing/post-production is farmed out to a third party trailer editing company... who handles their post mixing with their own favorites.

I can only really speak from my experience, which has been mixing trailers for indie films and foreign films that get redistributed here. The trailer company we do work for gets elements/stems from the post mixing facility, does their thing, then gives us an OMF to mix from.

The audio elements we get vary greatly in quality as far as dialogue goes - some stuff sounds great, other stuff needs a LOT of help.

Paulo, I don't usually deal with much VO in the trailers I've mixed, but I use very little/no compression on the dialogue and no master compression on my print bus except a hard limiter to catch an occasional peak for some loud SFX hit.

I've experimented with a little divergence to the L/R, but lately have been mixing it straight up the center...

As for overall dialogue levels, that can depend on the type of film... We don't have an official dub stage for mixing, so we tend to tweak a little bit when we get to the printmastering stage at an approved facility. Gotta make sure it not only passes Dolby DMU specs, but also feels comfortable for the listener.

Interested to hear others' inputs on this as I'm still pretty new to the trailer game!

[robwaz]

Hi, I work on theatrical trailers and from my experience it is almost always a different audio team doing the trailer. There are sound designers / editors and mixers that specialize in marketing work and have relationships with the marketing teams at the major hollywood studios. They do most of the trailer work. On most films the trailer sound editor / designer(s) will interface with the feature sound department to obtain feature sound design elements and dialogue but the actual prep and mix is done by a separate team.

Best,
Rob

[paulo m]

I did a lot of film trailers for TV over the last 18 years and often I had to replace a lot of sounds and re-edit music, often by checking through the entire Digi Beta tape of the movie.

This was mainly caused by poor sound on the original trailers due to tape generation and improper procedures and also due to the fact that TV stations often have their own on air promo department. As 99% of the original trailers were being delivered without M&E tracks, getting rid of the original VO language to replace it with a native language VO was imperative, so the trailer had to be created from scratch, with scenes taken from the original movie. The advantage of this is that you can adapt the contents to the desired target audience and specific culture, the disadvantage is that you´re asking a sound editor to replace sounds and create atmos in a fraction of the time and resources that took the original movie team to do it. Not to mention the complicated editing that most of the times is needed in order to bridge the original edits with your own.

Now things are easier as most everything is file based in TV, but the skills to proper trailer editing and mixing are still in demand.

I find that mixing in 5.1 is much easier and obviously you have a lot of headroom compared to TV. I´m just curious to see if there is any loudness war going on as on TV(sad) or if everything is handled by respecting the Leq values established by Dolby for Comms and Trailers.

Regards,

Paulo M

[Brent Hahn]

It might be different in the rest of the world, but in the US I'm pretty sure that trailers are rarely conceived or edited or mixed by the same people who make the actual movie. None of the ones I've worked on, anyway. Two reasons: 1.) Different timeline -- trailers are released weeks if not months before the movie, and often before the movie's ADR, CGI and music are finished, and 2.) The folks who are hired to make the movie aren't the ones who are hired to market it.

[TiagoJSilva]

Hi.

Usually it's not the producer that creates the "promotional pack", it's the distributor. Therefore, a distributor, when it buys the film, usually requires certain materials that will be needed for the distribution and promotion of the film, along with the film itself. These are the "deliverables", and they can be:

Internegative(s) and sound negative(s) (or Interpositive and Printmaster)
A sync'ed telecine on Digibeta
Mix Stems
Mono Dialog Track
Dialogue list
Location stills
Making-of and making-of photos

It is the distributor that directs the promotion "angle" for the desired markets (basically, how to "sell" the film), hires editorial, sound editor, voice-over and mixing for cinema, TV, and radio promos, and organizes the "press kit".

However, many distributors in Europe are that in name only because they deal mainly or mostly with films from the American majors, who have already done all the work (lacking only translation and repacking), and they have no idea how to do this stuff, forcing the producers to get involved.

In my country, this has meant that the producers are not forced to build these materials as an usual step in the process and forget how to do it or even what they are for. Imagine having trailers for cinema made out of the TV master, with two musics (the trailer music and the main mix music of a given shot) playing at the same time; posters made of Digibeta frame captures (720x576) blown-up; dialogue lists taken from the last script version, which was compiled before shooting; etc.

[paulo m]

In my country, this has meant that the producers are not forced to build these materials as an usual step in the process and forget how to do it or even what they are for. Imagine having trailers for cinema made out of the TV master, with two musics (the trailer music and the main mix music of a given shot) playing at the same time; posters made of Digibeta frame captures (720x576) blown-up; dialogue lists taken from the last script version, which was compiled before shooting; etc.

Hummm, your country seems familiar to me...

[Rick Sanchez]

With the exception of indie films without studio distribution, almost all theatrical trailers are done with the studio marketing team working with an independent or in house trailer team.

The trailer house will have their own creative team (writers/producers), picture editors, sound editors/mixers (sometimes the editor(s) will also mix) and depending on the place, they may or may not have a music supervisor/editor.

When the finish comes up, they will have their own colorist, finishing editor and audio team (many times a team of 1). Sometimes the director/producer has a lot of input..sometimes very little.

They are generally mixed in a theatrical mix room, and much to the dismay of most mixers.. required to mix them at "maximum" volume.

TV trailers for theatrical releases can sometimes be done by the same trailer house or a different one specializing in broadcast trailers. These can be mixed anywhere from a small office to a dub stage or anywhere in between. Believe it or not...many times all of the sound effects for the DVD release are edited by the picture editor. The way of the world today.

[TiagoJSilva]

Originally Posted by paulo m

Hummm, your country seems familiar to me...

I'm sure it does.