This past Saturday was the LAPPG seminar on production and post-production audio held at the ShowBiz Store & Cafe in Los Angeles. I instructed the production side of sound, and Woody Woodhall CAS covered the post side. Attendance was smaller than we had hoped for, probably due to the coincidence of a few other industry events that took place on that same day, such as the CAS Parade of Soundcarts.

But for those who did attend, they certainly got their money's worth! We went from 10am until nearly 5pm, when the ShowBiz Store kicked us out on account of having to close for the night.

Fred was on deck first, beginning with a brief overview of the multi-track workflow for production sound. Hollywood began with a live mix, recorded as one track (monaural) on the Nagra 4.2. It was all done "live", and this production track served for dailies, picture edit, and most of the final soundtrack. I then went on to cover how two-track gave us more options; and then with four-track -- Hollywood went back to the monaural live mix, along with three ISO or backup tracks (although some mixers just broke out the live mix over the four tracks, much to the disdain of many editors, who then had to perform a temp mix in order to show dailies and for the picture cut). Fred then went on to describe how we use 8-12 tracks today on our multi-track field recorders.

Discussion also went on to review the use of boom and plant mics, along with the deployment of wireless.

Woody began his lecture with an overview of breaking down the soundtrack in ProTools in order to prepare for the mix. He talked about splitting out the dialogue tracks, the P-FX (production sound effects) track; the futz track for special EQ, such as phone perspective; and the X-track for re-locating soundtrack elements that might need special attention later on, if their respective scenes end up in the final picture version.

Lunch was a healthy and tasty sandwich, salad, or panini from our hosts, the ShowBiz Cafe. Instructors and participants shared a table, so that an informal Q&A discourse could continue while we all ate.

After lunch, Fred picked up on a few points that Woody had mentioned, and covered the Priorities of the Mixer and explained things like the difference between room tone versus background ambiance sound effects. The art of rigging lavaliers outside of clothing, as well as hidden under wardrobe, was then demonstrated in detail.

Woody's second session went into routing the tracks in order to create stems and fulfill the requirements for surround formats (monaural, stereo, and 5.1 -- all at the same time). He also showed examples of how the delivered soundtracks had to meet very tight and very network specific calibrations.

Even after we got kicked out of the building, I had people out in the parking lot; as did Woody!

Next time we do one of these, we are going to try and make it at least a two-day event. So much to cover, and so little time. It is hard to take a lifetime's amount of knowledge & experience, and pare it down to just a couple hours apiece.

Let me know if you would be interested in attending one of our future events. Use the comment link below.