Preping a Cinema Documentary for TV?

[philper]

Originally Posted by cocamycola89

Sup Slutz,

I mixed a documentary a while back that screened well at festivals and now its gonna be aired on one of Norway's more popular tv channels. ... The director is gonna be coming back to us for his TV edit which will include 1 or 2 new scenes and will be 15min shorter than the original. We have to be quick about this so I was wondering what the wisest coarse of action would be?

I was thinking that I would like to chop up the final mix (5.1) too fit the new edit and then mix the new stuff in the gaps and get that to sit first before moving onto the TV specifications with limiting and what not... I was thinking of doing it this way so that I don´t have to waste time cutting up all the individual tracks if I don´t need to. I think I have my bases covered when it comes to this particular TV stations audio specifications but any input would be more than welcome as I have never mixed anything for TV before.

Thanks!

Did you give NDME etc stems to the editor to use to make the cuts in the director's version? If so, they can OMF you out the edit of those stems and you can start with those,as you say. Cutting up your full mix will possibly make for some ugly sound edits unless you're very lucky. If they don't do a lot of frame-fiddling type edits--just lift out some whole scenes and put in whole new ones you could probably do a manual conform of your original project pretty easily, which would allow you the most flexibility in finessing the edits made to make the new version. As to getting the mix to meet network spec, (as well as making the deliverables they may require), I would get those in writing before agreeing on a price for your work: you may find that meeting them entails more work than you expected, depending on what they are asking for.

phil p

[Smallbudgetguru]

Id also check it with bass management while you reversion for home playback

[BIGBANGBUZZ]

Check to make sure they broadcast in 5.1.
Make sure your mix sounds great in a crappy stereo TV speaker.
99 percent of people will listen to it in stereo.
Even most HD channels still broadcast stereo.


Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk

[nzl62]

Just done this very thing. My work flow was as follows

1. Create new PT session with all the stems. final mix and M+E. I put these down the time line at a later hour code, in this case 10hrs.
2. Conformed it using edl and Virtual Katy ( actually a friend did it for me - charges 100NZD pm me if you want details)
3. Loaded new omf, pixx and guide.
4. Went through cut by cut checking edits, smoothing if necessary, extending or changing music edits. I actually duplicated the 6 track stems tracks so that I could chequerboard the edits - made it much easier.
5. As I went through the edit I muted items from the omf that I had and put things that I didn't on new dialogue/pfx/fx/vo tracks.
6. Once the Doc was in good shape edit wise I bussed the stems into sub group compressor/ limiters then into master mix minus com/stems busses as appropriate
7. Mix pass, went through and rode the stems to keep dialogue in the pocket, lift music / effects as needed then printed.
8. From that same session I created new busses and used the down mixer and ran another pass for stereo
all in all 95 mins down to 56 took about 20 hours inc vo pickups/ review and layback

Did another which was 6 track to stereo ownly and I did pretty much the same thing except that I added an eq to each six track stem,then the downmixers and the resultant stereo downmixers got bussed to DX/FX/MX subs. Those subs fed a Mix Minus com aux and a prefade stem fed the Mix minus record. Vo went straight to the master along with the post fader output of the mixminus bus out.

The three conform packages that I know of are:
Virtual Katy (prob the best)
Conformalizer from Maggot software (less expensive)
and Edi Trace (not used this)

Easy

[Smallbudgetguru]

There is also Titan

[nzl62]

Does Titan conform? ie feed in edl spit out cut tracks?
Any for what its worth I have used VK and Confomalizer and they are both awesome products. On the project above they saved me a min of 8hrs