Background tracks editing for Movies as well as television

How to cut backgrounds of films and Television

On this article I'll explain the way to put together the background sounds tracks for the final mix. The background track are tracks of long sound effect that begin at a beginning of a scene and finish at the end of the scene, for example Wind, birds, traffic, Walla ( crowd voices ) room-tones and so forth.

Editing the background sound effects for any Television show or a film could be a lot of work. I find that in order to be the most efficient, the first thing I should do when I look at a movie is putting markers on each scene change and I also advise naming those markers by the location of a scene. In addition, do not forget that any phone call between 2 people or more will be a place change, even when a two people speaking are practically neighbors, it's essential to create some kind of a distinction in between both places. Following putting down the markers for any location change, we head over to our first scene and begin putting in tracts of background sound effects. Essentially with background sound effects, the more the better, on the other hand when I say more I do not mean putting half a dozen tracks of identical Sounds. If what you added does not make a big difference or only makes the scene noisier you should not place it in. What you need to be really careful about is always to select the proper track to start with rather than trying to build the right sound by adding more and more sound. As an example, if you need to have heavy traffic, look for a great track of heavy city traffic and not bunch of light-weight city traffic tracks layered one on top of the other. In addition, when you are selecting different tracks you can mute or solo to determine which one is adding more substance or which sound is adding more noise than substance. You need to have a very good sound library in order to cut an common movie; we can't can't get away with re-using the same sounds on different locations. As an example, if it's a movie about people going to different bars each and every night, each and every bar has to have its unique sounds. After we establish tracks for a place we can use the "copy and paste" to save time and maintain continuity in our film. Needless to say, we also need to find various things for the same place in order to cover different periods of the day. For example, office can be a lot busier during daytime as opposed to late at the evening once there are only few workers left working.

The way most mixers will prefer to get the sounds is as a checkerboard, by that I mean on each and every location change your next set of tracks needs to be on a different tracks. that can give the mixer adequate time to make volume and effect changes in the event you place your sounds back to back the mixer will not manage to do the changes fast enough unless he uses automation, but that will be allot of effort. I most times arranged my session with three sets of backgrounds, in each set I normally set four mono sound tracks and 4-6 stereo tracks. always try and keep the same location ( in case you can ) on the same set of tracks, which will save the mixer allot of work.

A big argument among background editors ( old timers vs newer editors ) is can we touch the volume of the tracks. The thinking behind not touching is let the mixers do that, they can do it better because they hear every thing together ( music, dialog, sound effects and so on ) they've superior monitors and so forth, I say this is nonsense, you should definitely balance your track volume wise, what you shouldn't do is start adding affects like re-verb and EQ to your Background tracks.

Here is a warning for people who are new to this - if you go to the theater to watch a movie you cut background on, or even worse, check out a TV show you worked on, you will most likely not be happy about that which you hear. You created beautiful ambiances but in most scenes, you will not be able to hear a lot of what you did. Do not feel you wasted your time. You still added a great deal to the film.