Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1492834
54 C I N E M O N T A G E health insurance, as well as a pension. While at Fox, I finally had success selling a few screenplays, including, "Jingle All The Way" and "Eight-Legged Freaks." But by then, I knew giving up my day job as a story analyst would be foolish. So, I subse- quently spent some 30-odd years working Union Made CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20 Tech CONTINUED FROM PAGE 45 as a staff analyst on top-level features, including Marvel movies, comedies and horror films, before retiring — reading and analyzing thousands of scripts and books in all that time. Looking back, the irony that I resisted reading as a child, only to spend decades reading and writing professionally, dogged by school-like deadlines, isn't lost on me. More importantly, I'm proud of the modest contributions I made to the movies over the years. My family, those memories, and mentoring young writers are part of what keeps me warm at night. ■ Randy Kornfield is a recently retired story analyst and screenwriter who is still doing script analyses for indie producers while providing daycare and reading to his beloved grandson. Now thriving in Portland, Oregon, he can be reached at randyjay54@aol.com. the clients sitting behind their shoulders. And a lot of times, dialogue editors are already on headphones. So why not have a system where they can play the dialogue through a TV and check the intelligibility? And if the dialogue editor hears any prob- lems, then they fix it there." Stateman clarified, "The separation between editor and mixer is something well worth discussing in the coming years. The creative issues are solvable by examining and refining the process. In terms of the union classifications, we really have to think about the future of editor-mixer. So rather than saying 'the dialogue editor is now responsible for clarity,' it's really, 'the dialogue editor keeps the chain of custody through the pre-mixing process' and either becomes a mixer or works with a more qualified mixer." Hoehn pointed out that current Pro Tools workflows and technologies support this approach. The dialogue editor and the mixer are oftentimes dealing with the same Pro Tools session. "Gone are the days when we have a playback session that goes into an outboard console, like a DFC or System 5. It's really a question of whether the union can rally behind this issue. These are problems and challenges that are show-specific or studio-specific, and there's a lot of nuance to navigating them. But what we can do within the union and the Editor's Guild is start to look at those roles and responsibili- ties in more of a classification kind of way," he said. NOT SO SPEC-TACULAR Creating an assortment of mixes that hit different specs for different digital distri- bution platforms is another huge problem. Re-recording mixer Onnalee Blank , CAS, at WB Post Production Creative Services in Burbank, CA, has won five Emmys and six CAS Awards for her work on HBO's "Game of Thrones." She said, "The reason that content sounds so bad on TV has nothing to do with mixing. It's not at all about the mix. The mix sounds good when it leaves the stage. It has to do with the distribution companies." Blank explained that since different platforms have different specs, once a company acquires another and brings that content (which had a different audio spec) onto their platform, "they compress it and normalize it and that's what you hear. They come up with some spec that all the content needs to fit. They have engineers who don't necessarily know what it is that we do and how things should sound, and they don't talk to us. They use an overall loudness spec so if one scene has really loud music then the dialogue in the next scene is quiet in order to hit this spec, and so you're reaching for the remote to turn down the music and turn up the dialogue. Or, you're watching with subtitles on. It wasn't a huge deal when streaming was new, but now it is," she said. Hitting an overall loudness spec is particularly frustrating when mixing ac- tion-packed content, as Urban experienced on shows like "For All Mankind." She said, "Having the earth implode in an apocalypse (or whatever needs to sound super-big and massive) uses a lot of energy. That is going to cause your overall loudness to increase. You may need to average the show as a whole in order to hit a spec, and still express the filmmaker's desire to have that massive sound moment, so your dialogue ends up being pushed down." Urban is hopeful that more platforms will introduce Loudness Range (LRA) re- quirements in addition to a loudness spec. According to the European Broadcasting Union, "Loudness Range quantifies the variation in a time-varying loudness mea- surement." Typically, a Loudness Range meter will ignore short but very loud events and short but very quiet events, and cal- culate an average range for the difference between the loud and quiet moments of the entire program. For reference, Netflix recommends an LRA value of between 4 - 18 LU (loudness units) for the full 5.1 program mix, an LRA between 4 - 18 LU for the full stereo program mix, and a Dialogue LRA of 10 LU or less. "With a Loudness Range, in addition to having a specified anchor dialogue level (dialogue is typically the anchor element), you will also have a set dynamic range to play with for the program. The end result is that the level of the dialogue can be closer to the other elements in the mix," Urban said. Adding an intelligibility meter to a post sound workflow can also help to improve dialogue clarity. There are several options available, like iZotope's Insight 2 and Nu- endo 11's built-in intelligibility meter. "If