Post-production: Audio
Update: Audio!
We always begin with the following disclaimer: It is impossible for you to know less about filmmaking than what we knew when we began the Salted Christmas journey. This series of articles is not designed to teach anyone in the industry anything. The series is simply intended to share with our friends some of what we’ve learned about the art, the skill, and the business of filmmaking.
Many movie watchers, impressed with visual beauty and unusual sights, believe that the picture makes the movie. This is completely understandable and we all enjoy a beautifully shot film. However, an argument can be made that audio is even more important than video. When the video is degraded through poor cinematography or a bad signal, if you are enjoying the movie, you will keep watching. This is not the case with bad audio. Audio quality determines whether an audience is able to engage with a film and poor audio will cause them to change the channel very quickly. Think about the last phone conversation you had where the other party had a nice wind blowing across the phone. Audio problems are so distracting to the mind that they can easily make a production unwatchable. So what to do?
Unfortunately, no easy path exists to quality audio. The right equipment an the necessary skill combine to capture and process audio in a way that the audience expects. For Salted Christmas, we were blessed to be joined on the project by industry professionals who possessed both the equipment and the skill.
Luis Marin and Bute Marquez at TECHNICALLINK, LLC agreed to join our project for post-production. Their studio in Doral allowed us to carefully work our way through 94 minutes on a second-by-second basis to equalize dialogue levels, correct dialogue problems, add songs, add score, fade music in and out, add sound effects, and ensure that final audio levels were confined to a desirable range. Of course, the entire effort would not have been possible without a software such as AVID Pro Tools. Their industry experience, mixing studio, and software were indispensable. Also, they’re great guys.
We have no idea how many hours they spend on our project total, but we know that we spent 10 hours in the studio with them picking through the final mix and making decisions on a host of different issues and situations. We are ecstatic about the final product and we hope you will be, too.
