Mastering in Post?

[SeanPheonix]

Sorry for the newbie question but I thought that someone here would know...

Is there a "mastering" process in large budget films? Obviously there's more dynamics in film than music, but is there ever someone who acts as a mastering engineer? If not, is there ever master bus limiting or something like that, in the mix stage?

Thanks!

[thermisonic]

Short answer:No.

There's a few fundamental differences between films and music. Films don't need to be balanced against other films for presentation in a program in the way that songs on an album do. The nearest equivalent is balancing scenes within a film, and the mixer does that as part of the mixing process, not as a separate "post-post-production" process.

Another important difference is that music consumers set their own levels for playback to their own taste and environment, whereas theatrical film mixes have one volume the audience has no control over. This is why you will see a lot of reference to calibration of mixing environments on this forum, so that there is a consistency of quality and loudness/volume in film mixes. This also means most mixing will be done into any dynamics processing being used. It would be very dangerous (which is why people don't do it) to apply a global dynamics effect to a 2 hour feature which has a much more varied dynamic range, even scene to scene, than a 4 minute song. If you think of each scene like a song, applying one process to 40 songs would be madness. There are around 40 scenes in a feature film. A lot of mixers for feature films may not use any global dynamics or EQ, preferring to apply this kind of 'music mastering' style processing to the tracks or stems to avoid a loud impact in the FX pulling the music down too etc.

This is a massive oversimplification of what mastering engineers and re-recording mixers do but those are a few starters.

Rob Walker

[mostlypost]

Features do go through a stage called print mastering where the individual stems (dialog, fx, music, foley, bgs etc.) are combined into one mix. It is possible at this stage to make corrections to overall dynamics (the digital encoding has firm ceilings which can be addressed by Dolby's limiting, board compression or simply lowering the elements manually) as well as modify relative balances (e.g. lower or raise music).

This is a much less active process than it used to be when setup, matching and punching in to stems was a much dicier affair and the printmaster was often a chance to remix the movie properly without interference from pesky directors . With current levels of automation and virtual mixing, balance and overall dynamics correction is usually printed back to the stems so that any subsequent use reflects those changes. Most mixers I know want the printmaster to be as much of a straight transfer as possible.

Directly to your question, control is in the hands of the original mixers, not a specialist. A Dolby rep is usually present to insure everything is street legal.

A brief brag on the chops of the journeyman mixers: Often when lowering an action scene where the combination of full orchestra and stuff blowing up was a bit out of hand, I would look down the board past dialog to the fx side of a three-person crew and the mixer would hold up 2 or 3 fingers to indicate how many dbs he was pulling to accommodate levels. We were invariably independently spot-on in preserving the balances we liked. I enjoyed that.

Bob Schaper

[SeanPheonix]

Thanks Bob! Thanks Rob!!

Those were amazingly poignant responses. Really, really insightful.

Thanks again.

Sean.