Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterMurch on Mixing
Dec 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Among other duties while editing Sam Mendes' Jarhead, Walter Murch earned credit as a re-recording sound mixer, along with Scott Millan and Dave Parker. Murch, of course, owns Oscars for sound mixing, as well as picture editing, but he recently emphasized to Millimeter that, under normal circumstances, he doesn't have time to cut sound effects on movies he's editing. Improvements within Final Cut Pro (version 5), however, which he used on Jarhead, permitted him to essentially offer the sound department the equivalent of a final mix directly from his cutting room.
Walter Murch says the final mix for Jarhead was essentially completed in Final Cut Pro during the offline editing stage.
Those capabilities represent, in Murch's view, “the most significant operational improvement” in FCP from his experience a few years ago on Cold Mountain.
“This time, we had 24-bit, 48k sound to work with,” Murch says. “That's the quality of the sound as it was originally recorded. That meant that once we did a temp mix, I was able to bring stems from that mix into Final Cut Pro so that [Mendes] and I could hear all 32 individual tracks [eight dialogue, eight music, 16 sound effects] while we re-cut the movie. As we made changes, I could patch up the track up using dissolves and equalization in Final Cut Pro, changing all 32 tracks to smooth out the edits. [Sean Cullen, Murch's assistant] would then take the 32 tracks and redirect them to a six-track master, load them into a hard drive, and we could instantly preview them again with the re-cut workprint.
“That made it an online situation as far as sound was concerned. This way, there was no reason to go back to the mixing theater to make changes after previewing the film. We could implement changes within Final Cut Pro and screen the new version the next evening. That completely bypasses a whole loop that we used to travel. Previously, we would have to publish those changes, give change notes to the sound department, have them confirm the corrections to their temp mix tracks, and then go into the mixing theater and remix the changes. We avoided all that, saving at least five days of work, as well as not interrupting the sound department's preparation for the final mix.”
“It eventually dawned on me that what was in Final Cut Pro was not a template for the mix — it was the mix. My editing room on Jarhead was configured as a 3.1 room. I didn't have surround speakers because I did not think about that going in, but for my next project, I will set up the room as a 5.1 room.”
