What is the difference between a sound designer, sound editor, audio engineer, and mixing engineer?
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“Audio engineer” is pretty much a catchall term for the other three, and many more sub-disciplines. They’re the people who handle the technical aspects of audio production in general.
For the other terms, let’s look at [this scene from Jurassic Park](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc_i5TKdmhs). How do you get it to sound the way it does?
They obviously didn’t have a T-Rex at hand to make noises for them. What does she sound like? Her roars, her stomping around, everything. The job of the sound designer is to come up with this sort of thing and more. Some of this work can easily be done well ahead of time, before the filming starts, other parts might need to happen later when you need something bespoke for a particular bit.
Now you’re done filming, and somebody’s gotta build a timeline out of all the audio recordings. When Tim closes the car door, there won’t have been one single T-Rex sound for the whole sequence of noises she makes when she reacts. Somebody needs to know the sound library for the T-Rex effects well enough to build that sequence out of the chunks you have. This scene has no music, but, if it did, somebody would need to line it up with the dialogue and sound effects. All these things are the job of the sound editor.
At long last, you now have a fully-assembled scene, but things are not quite right, still. Just before the T-Rex smashes the car roof, Lex and Time go from laboured breathing to screaming, and then you have the loud trumpeting that makes the kids covers their ears. Somebody needs to make sure the relative volumes all work together. When the T-Rex flips the car over, you can distinctly hear some piece of metal rolling off to the left, and the tyre deflating panned to the right when she bites into it. Those sounds were obviously not recorded at a specific position (first, it’s annoying to do it that way, second what happens when the editor decides to use the camera that was off to the other side?) This sort of positioning and volume adjustment is the job of the mixing engineer.
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