Time estimates

[All Ears]

Sorry for all the questions. For an 80 min feature in which you will be doing all of the mixing, some sound design, and some foley what type of time estimate would you give your client? A good portion of the foley is already recorded, but is not all in place and some additional recording will be needed. It is a fairly dialog driven piece, so the sound design is not incredibly intensive. But the mix will be tough (not great production sound).
This is a problem that I run into all the time. Client's on a tight budget and they want to hear that I can do it in 2 days I figured if I got some of your opinions with this scenario I would have a better idea of what to tell them in the future. Thanks.

[slinky]

2 days seems to be pushing it to me. Of course, I am working in cable programming land, so sometimes I get 2 days for 22 minutes.

[Richard Fairbanks]

2 days? Not gonna happen unless you simply view it as a "temp" mix. Unless the tracks are perfectly prepped (when is the last time that happened?) it is going to take a week. It takes time to work through production track problems, and you will be flying around foleys and sound effects. If the film is driven by production sound (as reality films and non-VO documentaries are) then there is nowhere to hide the problems behind and they must be dealt with. 80 minutes is a lot of time.

There is a current flock of potential clients who come in telling us how long we have (as opposed to how long it will take). They often are showing their inexperience when they do that, so they have to be gently persuaded to see what it will actually take and why.

[georgia]

I prefer 2 hours of work time (quick sound design, a bit of ADR, music and dialogue editing, mix and printmastering) for every 1 min of finished mix. But, we do things in parallel here, so we've gone as little as mixing ( no sound design time included , just mix ) a 90 minute feature in 24 straight non-stop hours.
Most projects end up around 1 hour of worktime for every 1 minute of finished picture. It soooooo depends though. ADR, Dialogue Editing, Ambience fixes and /or replacement, sound effects, foley, pre-mixing stems, re-recording, straight mix, 5.1, LCRS, Dolby and/or DTS or straight printmastering, review time.... etc etc etc....

hmm... I think I didn't really answer you're question...



cheers
georgia

[Branko]

Ears,
I'd ask for a day per AB reel (20min) for editing and 3 days for mix (2 reels per day and 1/2 day for print mastering).
Faster than that doesn't make sense.
Branko

[tomcat]

This is a funny topic. The big films can take from two to ten months for sound editing and one to three months or more for mixing. We mixed a film last year for 10 weeks after a 10 week edit, and we were busy the whole time. On the other side, I just finished a film where one editor worked for a month and we mixed it in 6 days, plus a 2-day 5.1 music premix. It sounded good. Further on the other side, I did a two-day temp mix the other day of a feature for sundance submission. A couple of days had been spent prepping dialog tracks and putting a few critical fx and bgs. It is watchable. Nothing blaringly wrong with the sound, just a lot of missed opportunities to make it great. BTW, the production sound on this film was great, so i barely had to touch an eq. So, you see, almost anything is possible. If the production sound is bad though, you could easily require 5 days just to make it ok. there isn't really a way to speed that part up if everything needs a tweak.
Be careful not to make a promise that will end up costing you more than you make in terms of your health and money. Good luck!

[All Ears]

I ended up estimating 2 weeks. I would love to have asked for more time, but I was afraid that if I had they may have looked elsewhere. This too is a sundance submission, and as most indies go, they are almost out of $$. Getting the best mix at the best price is what they want, which sometimes means that I either have to lower my rates or work faster than I would like to. To have 10 weeks to edit and 10 weeks to mix would be a dream come true, but here in TV and Indie feature land it just ain't gonna happen. Thanks for all the replies.

[dr sound]

I would love to have asked for more time, but I was afraid that if I had they may have looked elsewhere. This too is a sundance submission, and as most indies go, they are almost out of $$. Getting the best mix at the best price is what they want, which sometimes means that I either have to lower my rates or work faster than I would like to

Dr sound replies:
Remember no matter what the show, by the time they get to Post Sound, they are over budget and out of time! As for how long it should take, well.....

[douglas roberts]

I ended up estimating 2 weeks. I would love to have asked for more time, but I was afraid that if I had they may have looked elsewhere. This too is a sundance submission, and as most indies go, they are almost out of $$. Getting the best mix at the best price is what they want, which sometimes means that I either have to lower my rates or work faster than I would like to. To have 10 weeks to edit and 10 weeks to mix would be a dream come true, but here in TV and Indie feature land it just ain't gonna happen. Thanks for all the replies.

This might sound a bit harsh but if they aren't willing to pay your full rate for a rush job done under the worst conditions then I would pass. They found the money to do the picture edit, to pay the composer, (and believe me they'll find the dough to go to Sundance and hang out), and they only just realized they need sound!? They have to understand what is possible in 2 days...really not much...if they want you because they value your work then let them find the money to pay you your rate...stand up for your talents, don't sell yourself cheap and they'll respect you more, doing the "demo" won't guarantee you'll get the gig if they get accepted, they're more likely to come back to you later if you pass now, I played this game more than once when I was working on indies in NYC and I usually came out with the big gig in the end