Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1152338
32 The other side of the ¼-inch tape is that sometimes (okay, rarely), the re-recoding mixers will mess up my tracks. To help guard against this, I have found that if I ride the gain properly, they will tend to leave my tracks alone and pay more attention to the music and effects tracks instead. The two areas to which I pay special attention are: 1, matching background ambience from take to take and between different angles of a scene, and 2, limiting the total dynamic range of the dialog. Having the ambience not jump on picture cuts follows another one of my 10 Holy Truths: Sound that calls attention to itself has failed. Raising low-level dialog and reducing high-level dialog (manually—I don't like the sound of limiters or compressors) means that the re-recording mixers won't have to do it themselves. However, these two factors are i n t e r r e l a t e d — simply raising or lowering the recording-channel gain to adjust dialog levels will affect the ambience the same way. Describing all the various methods to control dialog levels without changing the ambience is beyond the scope of this article, but a very common one is to simply move the mike closer or farther from the actor without changing its orientation. On a soundstage or non- Comtek to the director, but he waved him away. After the sun set, the director went to video village to review the takes, and I stood quietly behind him. The clients were happy, and thus so was he. A few minutes later, I approached him to offer an explanation. He smiled and said, "Nimoy f'd up your mike in his motor home, didn't he." It wasn't a question. Here is the flowchart I use to deal with problems on the set: