The 5.1 Migration
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Sound placement became a storytelling element in this Jack Daniel's spot mixed at POP Sound. |
Mixer Peter Rincon at POP Sound in Santa Monica recently did a Jack Daniels spot whose initial application was cinema but will shortly migrate to television (now that liquor ads are allowed on television again). “You only get 30 or 60 seconds to get the message across, and multichannel sound now becomes an important tool to accomplish that because it can convey critical story points,” he says. “On a per-second basis, a commercial is going to have a lot less dialog to use to tell the story. The sound — where you put and how you move the sound — becomes more important.”
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The spot has a couple trying to get backstage at a rock concert. As they move farther into the venue, Rincon, working on an AMS Neve MMC console, adjusted the crowd and music placements, moving them together from the left and right Quested speakers into the surrounds, conveying the sense that the perspective was now from the sides and back of the stage instead of in front of it.
Rincon notes a cinematic touch where sound placement was crucial: “There’s a moment where a bouncer looks them over and considers letting them in. Offscreen, we put a crowd reaction effect in which the volume went up with a cheer and that motivates the bouncer’s eyes to look offscreen. It was an important point in the narrative, but you never saw what caused him to look away. It was purely sound and sound placement.”
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| POP Sound mixer Peter Rincon |
Rincon has been using another mixing technique that is becoming more common in television and cinema, and is making its way into commercials. It’s dependent on the low-frequency effects, or LFE channel (the .1 in 5.1). “When the point of view shifts to outside the venue, you can identify the building by using the subwoofer to shake its walls,” he explains.
Rincon virtually removes the high and mid-range frequencies by rolling them off at the console, boosting the bass frequencies and moving the lowest of them into the LFE channel. “How much you roll off depends on the music program,” he says,“but it’s similar to the old trick of boosting the mid-range to establish that a voice is on the telephone.” On a Mazda spot that uses the same approach, Rincon set up two sets of EQ for the music bed — one from the interior of a club and one from outside it. Toggling between the two produces a striking aural effect. “You can change the environment and point of view in a flash,” he says. “It’s a very dramatic effect.”
From LCRS to Stereo
Dolby Pro Logic’s LCRS matrixed surround format can be equally effective. While it lacks an LFE channel and the surrounds are monaural, it brings sonic envelopment to television spots.
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| Martell Sound rerecording mixer Pedro Jimenez |
“We started with the LCRS version and made it sound as good as possible in that format,” Jimenez says. “Then we went back and listened to it in stereo. What you have to be careful of is ‘steering’ — the tendency of the [program material] to go to far into the left or right when you go from LCRS to stereo. It seems to be more of an issue when you’re going from LCRS to stereo than from discrete 5.1. The solution is to go back and re-pan the elements, looking for a happy medium. That’s going to be the way to approach commercials during this transition period when we have three distinct formats to mix audio in.”
Jimenez makes another critical point: “Mix the audio through the decoder,” he says, noting that the Dolby Pro Logic decoder has several effects on the pan. “It will tend to take a very wide stereo music mix and move it towards the center. The solution to that is often to put some delays on the music cues and/or to put one side of the music cue slightly out of phase. What that does is essentially fool the decoder box because it will then see the left and right sides of the stereo as two completely different elements. If it sees two mostly identical programs on each side, it will want to sum them; if it sees different programs, it’ll leave them alone. It’s kind of a dumb box, but it’s the one the industry uses.”
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