Basic Rules of Production Sound
 

I'm working up a quick one-day, hands-on practical class for production sound, mainly to get a few people trained up to where I can trust them with my sound gear for those times I'm busy either directing or DP'ing. Hopefully, it will let them move on to other things as well.

Anyhow, while mapping out the materials, I developed a sort of list of Basic Truths and Advice, those things that I wish somebody had told me up-front when I got started. Thought I'd post them here and get your comments.

Basic Rules of Production Sound:

1. If you can’t see something in the camera’s viewfinder, it doesn’t exist.

2. Corollary to Rule 1: It doesn’t matter if your equipment is butt-ugly and held together with gaff tape, just as long as it sounds good. It doesn't matter if you're an Audio Wizard or an Oddeo Wizurd: it sounds the same.

3. Directional microphones ARE NOT telescopes for sound. At best, they will just make off-axis sounds a little fuzzier.

4. If you can hear it with your ears on location, the microphones will pick it up as well.

5. Record about thirty seconds of sound at each location with some dialog BEFORE the actual shooting begins, then play it back for the director. It’s amazing how easy it becomes to convince them they need to unplug that refrigerator and shut down the air conditioner for each take once they’ve heard your test.

6. First Corollary to Rule 5: people filter out live background noise; sound recorders DON’T.

7. Second Corollary to Rule 5: people CAN NOT filter out background noise when listening to pre-recorded sound. That guy with the leaf blower five blocks over from where you were shooting (and everybody ignored while you were shooting) will sound like a freight train passing through your love scene when played back.

8. Recording three minutes of ambient sound for each location will bail your butt out of a lot of bad situations.

9. There is NO SUBSTITUTE for monitoring the recorded sound over a pair of quality, OVER-THE-EAR headphones.

10. If you show up with earbuds or on-the-ear headphones, expect to be sent over to the childrens’ table.

11. Forget what the level meters tell you – they lie like a cheap rug. Rely on your ears instead. If it doesn’t sound good in the headphones, it won’t sound good on playback.

12. Monitor the sound coming out of the recording device, NOT the mixer. No one cares what it sounded like from the mixer; they only care what it sounds like when played back.

13. Expect to see the boom mic in at least one out of ten shots. If the boom doesn’t show up in ANY shots, then the boompole operator isn’t getting the mic close enough.

14. Cables are your friend. Learn to love and use them. Wireless mics are cranky, irritable, hi-maintenance bitches that will let you down at the most critical moments.

15. Shotgun mics are like shotguns in general: they are for outdoor use only. The echoes will kill you indoors. For indoor recording, use a hypercardioid or cardioid mic.

16. Plan for the worst when editing. If there is a lawn mower heard in the background of one shot in a scene, then make sure the audience hears that lawn mower in every shot of that scene. While it might be a sin to have noise in the background, it’s a bigger sin to have that noise in some of the shots and not in others.

17. Bitching about the sound guy’s gear doesn’t help matters. Telling them about the wonderful mega-$$$$ gear you used on your last shoot, or wondering why they haven’t invested four-to-six figures in the latest hi-end gear is like poking a grizzly bear with a short stick, especially if you’re paying them little or next to nothing. If you want them to use better gear, either budget for it and rent it, or pay them more so they can get it themselves.


Regards;
Martin

Nice, I think I'm going to pass this thread on to my guys as well.

All very good stuff and really well put. I would add

18. A rule about reminding everybody to turn their cell phone off before shooting starts.
19. Oh, and the one about not taking the live wireless mic with them when they go to the Restroom...

A $2000 radio microphone works nearly as well as a $10 cable

Paul:
Never heard it put quite so succinctly.

Martin

20. Control your Fu#@ing set!

If you have actors walking around in the background while you record dialogue, have them step lightly or remove their shoes.

If you have a restaurant scene with people in the background, have them pretend to speak, then make a "Walla" later.

Moving blankets are your friend and they are cheap. They can help with floor/wall reflections, or even quiet crunchy dry grass.

If a chair squeaks, WD-40 it.

#1 should be : You generally can't place the mic close enough - either by booming a 1/2" above frame line or lavs up high and close

#2 wind protection is safe sound ;) use a blimp with proper suspension

#3 rechargeable batteries will always die during the hardest you only have one take shots, have spares always ready

#4 directional ( shotgun ) mics do you no good if they aren't aimed at the sound source, the speaking person's mouth, not the top of their heads. mic'ing someone's head results in a major loss of HF / detail, as well as creating eq / tone problems in post between takes.

actually there should be a rule #0

IF ITS WRONG, STOP AND FIX IT IMMEDIATELY ! a take with bad audio is worthless.

and the last rule

Audio is really really simple : to screw up !

Deja VU guys ..

21. Always play the first take back to check ALL the gear is working.

22. The wrong mic is the best position is always better than the right mic in the worst position.

23. Never leave it saying .. 'we'll fix it in the mix'

24. No Blimp?, try and work a shotgun at 90degress to the direction the wind is coming from.

25. Whenever you're able, run a cable.

Cheers.

26: Take time to attend a sound dub, you will learn more about what is really needed at the post prod end.

As a sub-heading: 20.1 Get the AD on your side whenever possible early on. They can be a great help getting the set quiet.

Personally, I think you've got too many rules here. To be more succinct, I suggest you kill items 1, 2, 6, 7, 8 (three minutes? Seriously? You're lucky to get 30 seconds), 10, and 17. Also, regarding item 15: while this is no doubt true, many (most?) real live working sound people rely exclusively on a shotgun. I know. I don't get it either, but there it is.

Marco:
These are not rules as such as you are --required-- to follow them; more like they are rules than can be bent or broken as long as you understand the possible consequences. I don't expect everyone to memorize them or carry them on a card taped inside their sound box (though it would be nice), but these are points I think every sound person should have at least been exposed to at some time.

I've run into several sound people who didn't understand the basics of sound recording. Everyone has to start SOMEWHERE, I know. The Rules as I've listed them cover a base set of considerations to develop the correct mind-set for good sound, which boils down to the simple sentence: "No one cares how you did it as long as it sounds good and nothing intrudes into the camera's field of view." ;)

Can't get three minutes room tone? Barter your way down to one or two minutes, but get SOMETHING. Only got a shotgun for indoors? Fine: hang a couple moving blankets behind it to kill the echoes as best as you can, and start saving for a good, plain-vanilla hypercardioid (they aren't that expensive). You wouldn't play golf with just a putter (unless it's miniature golf); why would you go into a production with just one mic?

Martin

I'm not necessarily challenging the points on your list. It's just that for your stated purpose it seems like it's loaded down with non-essential stuff.

"I've run into several sound people who didn't understand the basics of sound recording"

Then I wouldn't refer to them as "sound people". At least not in professional sense.
Some of the above 'rules' only apply when you have time to spare.
I hear ya Marco, "3 minutes of room tone," how ridiculous, unless it's S/FX and your on your own. How is one going to keep a caffeinated cast and crew quiet for three minutes after a take.

I agree that 3 minutes is longer than needed. You can cut and loop a much shorter segment in most scenes.

The one exception would be for a long scene with long pauses between lines - especially if there is to be no music or action. Personally, I have yet to film any scenes like that.

Well like he said, he is just outlining some things that will really effect the production if not taken into consideration.. Yeah three minutes is kinda long..but if you try to hit that mark, you'll have plenty with whatever you get....which is all we can hope to expect out of any production.

30 seconds room tone will mean you get to do it again. Otherwise the producers will find it too intrusive a process and the director wont probably keep supporting your requests for silence.

Somethings you can hear the mic actually wont hear, or can be filtered such as low end rumble which wont come through on a lav with high pass filter engaged. Also distant chat in tv studios can be lost below the noise floor.

It is important to not over react to 'noises off' or you may find it hard to shoot anything in some locations. For example this shot, part of the script etc may have music over it and said interview might be heavily edited. This is where experience comes in. On a drama it's different from a doco etc..

Well the need for recording this ambient sound is as a filler for a section that might be missing sound in post or an extension on a scene...maybe to patch up someone's cell phone going off during the quiet part of a scene.... Correct?

Maybe it would be best if the sound man shows up early, or perhaps comes back after everything is packed up and gone..

When the director and the producers have declared them "the sound person," you'd pretty much better refer to them the same way, regardless of their capabilities and your personal opinion.

I've strung together blank stretches of audio to "fake" a missing room tone (somebody else did the audio and handed it off to me), and it worked, sorta. The problem was that there were certain "periodicities" in the room tone, caused by having to use chunks of the same dead sound over and over. Sixty seconds would have been better; two minutes would have been better.

I suppose it helps to have a good working relationship with the director and producers. If you can make the case for quality, I've been able to make reasonable requests and get them granted. Like everything else on the set, you've got to read the situation carefully and pick your battles just as carefully.

I don't mean to give the impression that the "Rules" are a set of inflexible demands. You HAVE to work within the current situation you find yourself in.

The topic seems to have taken a turn into the realm of discussing chili recipes or your favorite beer. Everyone puts their own "fingerprints" on their audio work, and has their own approach to doing so. It comes down the: "it doesn't matter if you're an Audio Wizard or Oddeo Wizurd as long as it sounds good."

Keep that in mind.

Regards;
Martin

As engineers, we tend to nit-pick everything.. (At least audio eng's)
A good general list though, just the same Martin.

Most sound I guys I know do about a minute of room tone. It seems endless, but it keeps people happy without annoying them. However, it does tend to run longer if there are sounds that weren't there during the filmed action (motor bikes, cars, aircraft etc), these are surprisingly common.

You're pretty much correct. You need a "bed" of the normal environmental noise to lay down any material you're adding in or replacing. You'd be surprised at some of the audio shenanigans you can get away with AS LONG as the background audio is consistent.

Arriving early or staying late can work in most situations. I usually try to grab room tone immediately after the last take for a given scene, the reason being that in some places, the nature of the sound changes over the day (traffic, people moving about, weather shifts, wind changes, etc.). Grabbing ambient after the last take usually works because everyone has a sense of accomplishment after completing a shot (especially if it's a tough one), so you can grab what you need in the "breather" the cast and crew are taking. They need a chance to wind down, anyway.

I agree that three minutes is a luxury you might not get; however, I like to dream big. I've never got anything I didn't ask for (including a hard time).

Martin

Just for clarity, room tone and atmosphere or ambience are not the same thing. Room tone is the "sound of silence" of a location. It's a combination of the sounds of air movement, people breathing, thermal noise of air molecules hitting the microphone diaphram, a zillion normally inaudible things that let you know a space is alive. Even an empty soundproof recording studio or announce booth has room tone - if you record someone speaking there, the room tone is what is on the track in between syllables. You use it to bridge cuts, etc. Imagine you've recorded the talent saying "My boy is growing up" and now you edit it to read "My .... (pause) .... boy is growing up." You need something to bridge that gap so it's not apparent that it wasn't originally recorded that way so you lay in room tone under it - that way the track doesn't have a hole in it. That room tone needs to match the tone under the speech so it needs to be recorded on the same location with everything and everyone in the same place it was during the speech recording. You even need it when the recording is of silence .... try recording 30 seconds of nothing in as perfectly quiet a location as you can find, drop the clip into your NLE, split it in the middle, slip the second section back 10 seconds to create a gap, and then listen to it play back. The sound of the hole is obvious. Ambience, OTOH, is a track of the way a location sounds or is believed to sound other than the sound of the dialog or Foley. It's essentially an FX track and it can be recorded anywhere and anytime. Imagine the above scene takes place at a table in the corner of a crowded restaurant. The camera angle is a closeup of the speaker's face with the wall behind him so we don't actually see any of the other patrons. We can record that on a soundstage with no other cast or extras present so we get prisitine dialog, then in post, create the illusion it was recorded in a restaurant by laying in underneath it an ambience track of background walla that was actually recorded in a working restaurant during the dinner service. Voila, the scene is believably to have been really shot in a corwded restaurant instead of in a contrived location. In editing we will need BOTH room tone to pull the edited version of his speech together without holes AND ambience to create the sonic atmosphere of a restaurant.

Depending on the level of production, size of crew, attitude of talent and producer/director, you are generally lucky to be able to record :30 of room tone. If you think about it, when recording "air" and just general ambiance, you can easily loop that room tone in any NLE or DAW so I am not sure why you would generally need more than about :30 to :45, unless there are non-repeatable sounds occurring during the room tone recording.

From a directors standpoint, directors are a selfish lot, it is their set and their time so they resent sound mixers taking even 2-3 minutes of it. And yes, some directors are sound savvy but most aren't so you just have to deal with that. They hate having especially high end talent wait around in silence for longer than :30, even at :60 you are pushing your luck. If you are shooting with "real people", usually not as much of a problem to record :60 of tone, but try having a hyperactive A-lister in an interview situation and :60 seems like 60 hours. I am on the side of the sound people but I also have worked in a lot of situations where pushing for even :30 could have resulted in a bad situation. Of course, we want to record tone for every setup, it is a good idea but there are times when you just can't record it.

I was shooting exteriors in a popular shooting neighborhood of LA yesterday. There was a huge Universal feature shooting a car chase right next to us on the street. We were shooting inside a building and just ran out onto the street to steal a shot of our talent entering the building. I had an LAPD officer telling us if we weren't done with our shot within about a minute, he was going to have to boot us back into our building. We went for it, got the shot, but definitely didn't have time to record any ambient room tone outside. It happens.

Dan

I didn't want to jump in because I thought it'd sound stupid, but this is what I've always done -- Looped a short little section of room tone, and a lot less than :45 in some instances :/

Not quite on the room tone topic (and a good stretch of room tone can really save the edit) ....

I find that when recording a conference speaker with a room full of people, a collection of cough lozenges can be very helpful. Not perfect, but the less chunky bronchial coughs you have to manually edit out later, the better.

Someone coughing? Toss over a cough lozenge to them. They coughed again? Throw another cough lozenge at them! :-P

Andrew

Okay, Rule 8 has been "officially" revised to SIXTY SECONDS of ambient or room tone. In hindsight, I went with three minutes originally because a lot of the locations we've been shooting at (outdoors) have lots of "intrusive" sounds (like chainsaws, overhead aircraft, sirens) that need to be cut out to piece together a good ambient sound bed.

Finished up doing sound for a music video last weekend. It was entertaining to watch an adorable four-foot nine-inch young lady wrestle the boompole. To her credit (and mine, I suppose, 'cause I tutored her), everything came out great.

Martin

And if they cough a third time throw THEM at the lozenges???

I guess I'd have to resort to the evil glare method. :-P

Andrew

Yep been there done that. The well endowed young lady hoisting the pole and bunching her assets together to the point where the talent asked our opinion for another op.

He didn't get one we didn't have one anyway and to our dismay she covered up. We didn't have one anyway, oh I said that.

Apologies to the gals here.

Cheers.

A few more for the rule book:

As a boom operator, when choosing a place to stand don't stand on the key light side of the frame. The chances of your boom shadow appearing in the shot increase exponentially.


Not sure if this is in there but when recording split the signal to different channels. Set one channel quieter then you main channel in case an actor gets to quiet.

If you're a production mixer don't bother riding gain during a take. Seriously. When I do audio post it is much easier for me to run noise reduction and then ride the track with software automation then it is for me to change my noise reduction due to the preamp (gain/faders) being adjusted. Set them before the takes, get your room tone and then proceed!

When recording 24-bit audio you can record at lower levels. PEAK at -20dBFS. Average around -30dBFS. 24-bit gives you a ton of headroom above the quantization noise floor. Being able to record at lower levels and still having a usable track is the biggest reason you're recording at 24-bits in the first place!

Bad, bad, bad!!!!

What number are we up to? :)

Don't think this one's been added.

When you're running boom especially indoors, once the mic position has been established and everyone's happy .. fix a direct eyeline from you to the head of the mic to a spot on a wall.

This is so for all retakes you can position the mic in exactly the same position to start the scene.

Cheers.

Quick note
 

I get a tremendous amount out of these forums. Thank you so much to everyone who contributes. Learning at a rapid pace :)

The one thing that hit me was the statement that if your ears can hear it, it will be picked up and recorded (or something like that). When you put a pair of cans on most people with decent mics set right, they are amazed at all the sound they can hear. I'd simply say that if they background contans objectionable noise you can hear with your ears, it will be WORSE when recorded and you need to address it when you hear it with your ears.

Most filmmakers think you can fix anything with ADR or using Soundsoap (for example) or by using a notch filter. It is way easier to fix it on the set in many cases.

One problem is that our senses are so unreliable. We don't hear what we don't want to hear, but even if we want to hear it we hear what our brain makes of the signal, not the signal itself. We'll hear musical notes that aren't there because we infer them from the harmonic series. We think the newly risen full moon close to the horizon is bigger than at zenith when it's exactly the same size to the camera - purely an illusion with no physical basis whatsoever (see Emmert's Law) just because we're misapplying visual clues.

I can't count the number of times something has sounded just fine while listening but was almost inaudible when editing. Headphones are the only answer - what we hear with the naked ear is not what the mic is hearing.

The can's/mics definitely hear more than our ears, that's why the assertion that if you hear it with your ears - it's getting recorded, is so true. The term, "We'll fix it in post." is usually only delivered as a joke on my sets.

OT Digression: during my studio days, the joke on the set of most sitcoms was "It'll get funnier in post" because they would just crank up the laugh track.

I'm not sure the mics hear more than our ears as much as they don't ignore as much as our brains. So even though it's stimulating your ears your brain can tune it out and the net is that we record what we "DON'T hear as well as what we DO hear. Or more accurately we record things we weren't paying attention to so we're always surprised to find out that the recording chain wasn't as selective as our ear/brain combination. In the end it's the samr - if you don't listen through cans you're in for a big surprise after the fact.

It should be no surprise that we perceive recorded sound differently than live sound. After all, we perceive a printed picture differently than the same scene viewed live. As a photographer and DP, it took me years to begin to understand the difference in visual perception between live and photographed images. The true insight for me in doing sound was to realize that similar principles apply to sound.

As with a photographed image, the most important thing in recording sound is TO PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BACKGROUNDS. We can ignore or tune them out in real life, but can't do it with a recorded image.

As with photography, good sound is a matter of cutting things out, NOT what you include. In my experience, the "foreground" sound usually takes care of itself; it's what's behind the object of interest that will make or break you.

Martin