Post-Production : Have a Post production question? Ask me! by Georgia Hilton

How long should it take to do post-sound for a 15 min short?

that all depends... break it down a little. 20 minutes of straight dialogue that needs a lot of cleanup might take a day or 2... if the dialogue is light and only needs a little cleanup, a few hours for that. Then sound design.... again if it's a heavy duty SciFI or action etc maybe 3 to 5 days of Sound design to put together a full ambience, sound effects, Foley recording and editing... or if its simple drama or talking head type film... it might only take a day or 2 to so all the sound design. Then, is there any ADR work that needs to be done? ADR can burn an hour or a day for 20 minutes. Then the music. Is it all set to go, or are you doing some music editorial? or even composition? Assuming your handed music and all you have to do is a little music editorial... that's maybe an hour or 2. Then sitting with the director and mucking about with the session... another day. Then the mix. 1 day in the dub-stage for a 20 min short theatrical delivery. so, this 20 min short could be done in 2 days or 2 weeks... depending on the amount of work required. I've done sound design and mix for a bunch of shorts... They normally take me an average of about 1 week. assuming the following: so an average guess.... 0.5 days Music is handed to me. all I have to do is edit and muck about. 0.5 days Foley is light, simple things 2.0 days Sound design is straight forward, mostly ambience and standard things like cars, doors, real sounds.... no creation of monsters and magic and big action explosion gun chase moments... 1.0 days ADR / Dialogue cleanup ( almost all indie films have these issues) 1.0 days Review day with Director 0.5 days Pre-mix 1.0 days MIX for stereo or 5.1 0.5 days Deliveries ( basic stems and mix in 5.1 ) 7 Days.... hope this helps cheers geo

Georgia, this is an amazing response. I thank you as this is the first film I am producing and I am not familiar with this aspect of Post. I am working with a very good Director, but I like to have an understanding of what goes into each aspect of the post production. You are clearly very skilled at this.

if this is your first film... here are some gotchas ! that have already got ya... If you are mixing for a theater playback. You must mix in a calibrated dub stage... a good dub stage will run around $2000 - 3500 / day to mix in not counting the re-recording engineer. and trust me. Just because someone can do sound design, it doesn't make them a mix engineer for film. So add in another $1000 for the day for the re-recording engineer ( for example I charge $1500 / day when I mix).... Then there is DOLBY. If you want to do a Dolby Digital 5.1 format for 35mm you need to do a print-master, that will cost you around $1000 for Dolby to come to the dub-stage and do the print-master at the end of the day. If you are doing a digital playback or DVD, bluray anything else, you just need to encode the 5.1 track accordingly... this could be free or could cost you another $250 for the Digital tape, and an hour for layback and QC at close to $400 / hour. (Dolby in NYC charges $450/hr) and don't forget DTS for BluRay... a few other random areas.... If you need to do color correction to your film it will cost you a day at from $150/hr to $450/hr depending if you are doing color with FCP COLOR or using a professional colorist... Don't forget the composer will want to get paid.. and he/she will probably need a couple weeks to do a score once you have a locked ( or at least semi-locked) picture Then there is the editor... 20 minutes with a 10:1 or 5:1 shooting ratio should only take about 7 to 10 days to cut. Don't let your Director go crazy on you... Manage the Edit... make sure that its going in the right direction early on. Also I hope you got good audio on set, because dialogue cleanup can be very expensive and time consuming... ( we charge around $1000/day to do dialogue cleanup...and we aren't expensive but we do use CEDAR, TC ELECTRONIC 6000 backdrop and WAVE / ISOTOPE all the top of the line hardware and software... Then there's ADR.... ADR in NYC can cost $400/hour in a good studio. Or you could rough it out at home or a smaller studio if it's not hyper critical. I also hope your scriptie is on the ball, as it will cost you a lot more than the cost of a great script supervisor, if the As-Shot script is a disaster... The editor will be ready to kill you in a day or too, if they have to go thru all the material to find that missing line... or if all the shots aren't documented well and they have to spend hours hunting for the correct angle... Also, make damn sure the editor is utilize 100%... yes 100% of the audio material in FCP or AVID at 48KHZ aiff... DO NOT allow them to drop in any other fromats like MP3 or crap like that... It'll bite you in the ass on the way to Protools or Logic, when you have to do OMF exports or other exports. Make sure the editor and sound editor both use 2-pop and tail pops on ALL tracks... Make sure the timelines for all the systems , both picture and sound, are the correct sample rate, bit depth, frame rate, formats.... if you shot on 2K or 4K , make sure you have accurate EDL's so you can conform the final edit back to 2K and/or 4K if you are editing in 1080pHD 23.976..... If you are shooting on film and editing in digital video make sure you track the conversion properly and that on the back end, if you are going back to FILM... make sure that is handled correctly... from the start so you don't end up with a serious sync issue on the sound post. GET A GOOD POST PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR ON YOUR TEAM! cheers geo

After you do all that and you put your short film up on the web, you'll get maybe 200 viewings while the teen next door video of his dog taking a crap will go viral.......

2-pop - one frame visual and audio mark 2 seconds before first frame of action. the audio is normally a -20 1khz tone. The visual can be a number of things from a white frame, bars, or a text card. The white frame or bars are my choice for visual reference to audio on playback. The tail pop is the same, except that is can be placed anywhere at the end of the project, after last frame of action, it does not have to be 2 seconds after. But where ever it is place, it should be noted correctly in corresponding documentation. Placing sync pops is still highly recommended and can help in both maintaing sync across editing platforms and transfers of material in a project path. It can also help to troubleshoot any sync issues that may arise. cheers geo