I’m talking about actual fully fledged dubs where the original voices are completely gone and replaced with matching voice actors, NOT voice-over dubs where they lower the volume of the original audio and have someone speak over the video in a different language.
I’ve always wondered how the original voices were removed and separated from the rest of the ambient sounds. I know for animated shows, everything is recorded on separate tracks, for example for a scene where two characters are having lunch in a busy restaurant,
the conversation would be recorded on its own track,
the sound effects the characters make ( picking up forks and knives, glasses, drinks being poured, footsteps etc…) would be on a separate track
and the ambient noises (other customers talking, distant traffic sounds from the road etc…) would be on a separate track.
Now for the same scene being filmed instead of animated, wouldn’t all of these end up on the same track? The actors would be talking while creating their own sound effects by moving plates, pouring drinks and all that, the background actors would be talking in real time around them and everything so wouldn’t the microphones pick all the sounds up at the same time?
I’m rambling but I guess my question is, how are they able to isolate and remove ONLY the voices of the actors talking and leave the sounds of everything else around them intact?
Again sorry for rambling but I’m terrible at explaining
In: Technology
>Now for the same scene being filmed instead of animated, wouldn’t all of these end up on the same track?
Generally speaking, no. Special microphones are used to capture the vocals, and those mics are designed to capture very little else. There might be _some_ ambient noise in the background, but they try to keep that to an absolute minimum. Ambient noise is captured separately using different mics or added after the fact in post-production.
They do this because they want to be able to control the volume of everything independently. Voices need to be crisp and clear, which means you need a clean recording of the voices you can adjust separately from other noises; if everything was on one track, increasing the vocal volume would _also_ increase the volume of the stuff you don’t want.
Because believe it or not those ambient sounds in most media are recorded separately from the dialog. There’s a whole entire art to sound design. Recording artists will get a “room tone” in the location of recording to base their background sounds on, to give them authenticity with the actor’s dialog that is being recorded in the location but then they either record them separately or mix them from stock sounds.
In some cases, this isn’t done but there are still artists who can fake it and create background sound profiles from scratch to match scenes – and in many cases the opposite is true and actors’ dialog is re-recorded later and just synced up with the film/video they shot on location.
Professional video production is complex.
When filming they will install a lot of microphones and record their sounds individually. Things like two microphones per lead actor, microphones placed in tables and decoration that the actors will be close to, directional microphones aimed at specific things at a distance and ambient microphones that captures the entire sound picture. The clapper they use is to sync the sound from all of these different recordings. This means that they have different recordings of each actor as well as recordings of all the other sounds in the room.
But in general movie and tv editors prefer a silent set with no ambient sounds. You can always add ambient sounds from a folly artist but it is hard to remove. Even dialog can be remade by calling the actors back into the studio to record their lines again. So all the props used in the scene are made to be as silent as possible. Paper bags are actually made of cloth that looks like paper, ice cubes are actually rubber resin cubes, shoes have felt pads under them making them silent, etc. Most of the sound is added after the scene is recorded. This does also mean that they can provide a clean sound without any dialog and only ambient sounds for dubbing.
But this is not true for all movies and tv series. There are dubbed shows where they just lower the volume of the original sound during the dialogs and dub over it. Sometimes they make it very obvious as well. You can still hear the original dialog in the background and the original ambient sounds are harder to hear during the dialog. This is what they are doing for news interviews but I have seen entire movies done the same way, some are done better then others.
Czech school of dubbing school used to be most famous in the world. In Czechoslovakia foreign movies were dubbed into Czech and Slovak “from the scratch” for like 90 years. The complete soundtrack used to be re-created and actors tried to synchronize words with the movie. All the sounds were created in studio or recorded in nature, on the road, … There are many documentaries from the “Inverted pyramid” building in Bratislava (capital of Slovakia) that was specifically built for dubbing and the creation of audio programs. You have rooms there with many kinds of windows, stairs, creaky floors and other features. Running horses, for example were dubbed using coconut shells.
I think nowadays you can record speech separately from other sound making it easier for dubbing the movie into other languages, but it used to be done from scratch for decades.
I am an amateur film actor, and our production usually films our lines at least twice – once on set to get video of our mouth movements, and once in a dedicated audio recording area to record the actual words. The sound effects are usually recorded separately or pulled from an existing catalog. The tracks are all merged in post-production.
Anyone with enough of a budget to do multiple languages will do something similar, adding a different dialogue track depending on where that version is going.
Everyone else has explained it pretty well.
Basically every sound you hear is added in post. The fork hitting the table, the water being poured, the car engine, the footsteps… all added in post, either by a sound designer or by a dedicated “foley” artist. It’s mind boggling and literally insane.
Check this out for a little explainer: https://youtu.be/0GPGfDCZ1EE
A lot of the dialogue is also re-recorded in a studio, for various reasons – cleaner recording, wrong intonation, etc.
Distributors such as Netflix request all the music, effects, ambience, etc to be delivered separately so they have flexibility when dubbing. They can mute just the voices, and leave all other sounds in.
Source: work in post production on tv shows and films.
Here’s my take, as I feel a few others are slightly off or missing it:
Each actor is wired with a lavalier mic usually. This allows each actor to be recorded separately, this allows the On-Set Sound Mixer to control the volume levels of each person. Now, if possible Sound will also use a Boom mic as well which allows for a more well-rounded sounds but means you’ll pick up anything that makes noise. This means that when we’re filming on set it has to be QUIET, for EXT scenes this means trying to mitigate as much as possible, or sometimes recording what is referred to as “Room Tone”. Not 100% sure but I believe that allows Post-Sound to cancel out the ambient noise.
As others have said the ambient noise (sometimes also Foley) is added in post later, so the most important thing for Sound is that the initial voices of each cast member are captured as free of other sounds as possible.
Bit of a mess explaining it but I hope it makes sense.
Source: Work in film, have to provide Props that are quiet for the Sound Dept, and my cousin does post sound mixing.
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