Pro Techniques 3.2004

 

C5 Sound Editing

By Randy Alberts

    
   
"There's a wonderful blur happening now in post-production between editorial and mixing," says sound design and effects supervisor Ron Bochar, cofounder of C5 Sound Editing, Inc., in New York. Bochar is describing Pro Tools' evolving role in today's top film, documentary, and television productions, including HBO's new Angels in America miniseries. "I was able to have it all pre-dubbed before we went to stage, with Lee Dichter at Sound One, for the mix. That saved lots of time, but more importantly it allowed Lee to mix against the whole effects pre-dub, instead of just imagining what it was going to eventually sound like once the ambience of Heaven was in there."

Bochar says he particularly noticed this blur during the dubs for the critically acclaimed Angels in America, featuring a mega-star cast including Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, as well as on HBO Films' American Splendor. The latter, a look into the quirky life of cartoonist/animator Harvey Pekar, was the first HBO-produced movie to see general theatrical release.

"This blending and blurring of the creative process is the way things are moving," Bochar says. "But this change doesn't get rid of mixers — in fact, it's just the opposite. Their decisions and opinions are now more important than ever. But I do see things changing, and I feel very, very positive about how Pro Tools is integrating that change into what I do for a living, which is editing and mixing sound for film."

Pro Tools and Foley
C5 Sound, led by Bochar and partner/cofounder Phil Stockton, has provided world-class Foley recording and editing, ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement), and sound design/editing for the past 15 years for such directors as Mike Nichols, Milos Foreman, Sidney Lumet, and Nora Ephron. Though headquartered in Manhattan, C5 recently had to expand its real estate to keep up with all the facility's new projects. Once they had The Silence Of The Lambs, Goodfellas, The Score, Man On The Moon, You've Got Mail, Ice Age, and The Truth About Charlie under their belts, Bochar and Stockton realized they needed more room. Looking northwest to New Jersey, in 2001 they built the largest Foley complex on the east coast. In its current form, C5 Sound has a total of seven surround rooms, and can handle the most ambitious projects.

    

Ron Bocar in his edit suite

  

When they opened C5 in 1989, Bochar and Stockton used Synclaviers and Post Pros to record, edit, and present their sounds as completed "packets." Bochar says working with these standalone hardware tools gave them the idea of creating and presenting their sounds to the mix stage as separate, uneditable packages, which they hoped wouldn't get entirely lost at the mix stage.

"We got used to this whole idea of creating and spitting out ‘the sound,' or our presentation of each of those sounds," says Bochar. He's not taking a thing away from the mixer's role in saying so — in fact, he says, he's now able to make the mixer's job easier. "It's a presentation of how we want a very specific sound to come across. For me, it's also about combining stuff in order to have less material show up at the mix stage, because the budgets and deadlines are getting tighter and tighter these days."

For Bochar, Pro Tools streamlines the process of getting "the sound." "Today, every edit we make is already a pre-mix," he says. "Those pre-mix decisions are being made earlier and earlier, even as early as the actual moment we pick which sound file to begin with. The budgets for American Splendor and Angels In America were restrictive, so I suggested we do as much as we could within Pro Tools. They insisted on eventually taking it out of the editing room to mix it in a bigger space, which I appreciate when mixing for movies, so I made all the pre-mixes happen within Pro Tools, using my little HUI and my ProControl at C5. I had all the pans, the mixes, the effects, and everything else right where I wanted them. Both movies were produced on tightly constrained budgets, but Pro Tools allowed us to work within that in a good way. And Pro Tools sounds great, too."

 

Pro Technique 1 — Pro Tools session template tips for sound design
Every audio post-production job has to start somewhere, and having a good template can save lots of frustrating time at the beginning of a session. If you use multiple I/O setups, depending on scheduling, creative, and equipment needs, this becomes especially helpful. Bochar commonly loads sounds and FX from a variety of sources — CDs, DATs, his Synclavier, and the software synths on his Apple PowerBook — so in the C5 edit room, most of these pieces are set up to be accessible in Pro Tools via Ron's template session.

    
 

Angels in America
"I have a set I/O that is room-specific, and there's a set way I like to load SFX into my machine," says Bochar. "So I've created a room template session with inputs clearly labeled to receive input from my Lexicon PCMs, the Synclavier, VHS audio, DAT, and CD. Plus I can always take the output of my PowerBook and feed it right into any of these inputs from my patchbay."

Bochar creates a Pro Tools Record-in session with a "Source" stereo aux, so he can change the inputs as he chooses. He also creates two other stereo auxes with his hardware PCMs set up in "Inserts," and the outputs of everything going to another stereo "Record" audio track pair.

"Like I said, it's a simple tip, but every job has to start from something," he says. "With a template like this, each new reel has one less thing I need to do in order to get things rolling. You can take this step further, too — for instance, by creating tracks and auxes for the track's inputs, or setting up all your monitor settings for each specific job ahead of time. You can even load in and sync pop all the tracks ahead of time: Just save a template session as a blank job EDL [event decision list] and use that each time you start a new reel."

Pro Technique 2 — Using Edit and Mix groups for "live" dialog explorations
Here's a tip from C5's Paul Hsu, an editor and sound designer Bochar brought in for a particularly mercurial character voicing in Angels In America. The Angel's demeanor, as portrayed by Emma Thompson, is sometimes ethereal and sometimes wrathful, so it wasn't a simple voicing challenge for Hsu.

    

Paul Hsu
  

"My task was essentially to find the sound which would represent the voice of the Angel," Hsu explains. "Ron Bochar and Mike Nichols knew they wanted something organic sounding, something that would give the Angel an otherworldly presence without making it sound too robotic or synthesized. I began by making a whole array of sounds derived from Emma Thompson's natural dialog. Then, using the Edit and Mix groups in Pro Tools, I was able to explore many different potential directions, while keeping the option to have any or all of the tracks ‘live' at any moment."

For example, Hsu explains, for a single scene in Angels In America he created a complex group of "A" tracks consisting of numerous plug-ins and automation moves. This intricate process, often involving extensive yet subtle vocoding and various audio triggerings, results in good single-tone A-track sounds, so he then bounces the A tracks down to stereo pairs and places these A files back into the session while experimenting with the overall feel of the voicings.

"Then, using the Edit Groups list, I select all the tracks of my group A, make them inactive, and hide them from the Edit window," Hsu says. "Holding Shift + Control while clicking on the group name is a great way to show/hide the track groups, too, as you sort through groups B, C, D, etc. in this fashion. I then experiment with levels and panning in surround, to find which sounds work best in which locations and combinations. Once I find a combination that works, I go back to the appropriate groups, make them active, and tweak the parameters or apply those same conditions to some other scenes."

www.C5Sound.com

 

Click here to read previous columns.