[Tech1] "Film" sound

[Chris Woolf]

Glad you feel the same;}

Yes, I think your analysis is close to the mark, but I fear that they do 
the ADR (which is credited) in much the same way - they've lost the idea 
of acoustic perspective, and that is very much involved in intelligibility.

Poor home speakers don't help, but watched a Vera last night, and that 
was no problem at all, despite hefty Northern accents.

Chris Woolf


On 16/01/2023 12:06, Alan Taylor via Tech1 wrote:
> I don’t know anything of the making of this movie, but IMDB shows that far more sound people were involved in the post production than on location.  Maybe it was one of those movies where every actor had individual radio microphones and were recorded in a noisy environment?  I see that the locations were mostly in the West Country and also Ealing Studios.
>
> I was lined up to do a drama a few years ago and then pulled out when the production team asked if I had a rack of twelve radio mics.  I didn’t have that many and could have hired them in, but I could see what sort of production it was going to be and didn’t want to get involved.
>
> Directors like the idea of radio microphones because it reduces the need for those pesky boom microphones and also allows shooting simultaneous wide shots and close ups ( not to be confused with true multi camera shooting in a TV studio ).
>
> Poor sound quality is often blamed on small loudspeakers, but for about forty years, I’ve fed my TV sound to my HiFi.  I still experience muffled dialogue which magically stops being a problem when the next show or movie starts.
>
> Alan
>
>
>> On 16 Jan 2023, at 11:44, Chris Woolf via Tech1 <tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> Watched the "Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society" the other evening - on a friend's recommendation.
>>
>> Besides the story being rather poorly put together - weak direction/writing - the sound was atrocious.
>>
>> Almost no acoustic for the spaces the actors were in - everything very close-miked - and gated to death. With modern actors the diction is often weak, but with decent sound pick-up one can get sufficient to grasp what is going on. However this suffered some gritty distortion on top of the other problems, and rendered most of the dialogue all-but unintelligible.
>>
>> You begin to wonder if it is your sound equipment (or your own hearing) and then you watch something else that is perfectly clean and clear - so it isn't - just incompetence somewhere in the sound chain of that programme.
>>
>> Chris Woolf
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Tech1 mailing list
>> Tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk
>> http://tech-ops.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/tech1_tech-ops.co.uk