Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535806
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 61 A "Foley Cue" session is when someone goes through the entire show and places frame-accurate blank regions for anything that needs to be recorded during the Foley session, placing cues where they hear production footsteps or props— along with markers that would help us navigate the scene cuts and black commercial breaks easily so we can have a smooth session for when we record those sounds in their specific places. I don't work with sessions that have "markers" as cues instead of blank regions/clips in the session timeline because it's very inefficient, time-consuming, and you don't know when the action ends or if the prop repeats many times during the show. This is especially true when the region cues are also not frame-accurate! Unfortunately, this has become frequent. Sometimes even sound supervisors lack the knowledge or the time to cue accurately, or they have interns who are not trained properly to prepare the cues or make critical decisions. In other words, those are suggestions and not cues! This is a huge time-and-money wasting factor in this profession. So I expect the cues to be very accurate with their start and end, as well as their labeling to be in "ALL CAPS," short and precise in description. I would rather cue the session myself or have someone I trained cue it so it stays consistent and efficient. Please reach out to me if you have questions on how to cue and I'll be happy to provide you with the step-by-step process. After the cues are in the session, I import the guide tracks and the video file that the client sent. I love having guide tracks that are separate tracks of DX, FX, ADR, and MX. That helps me understand the vision and choices of the director and the picture editor and acts as a guide for us to follow. So now I have the picture, guides, and the cues. I double- check my 2-pops, which should exist on every cued track. Unfortunately, I frequently find people neglect this and think it's not important to have them on all tracks. It doesn't have to have the audio signal on the cued tracks, it can just be a blank 1-frame region/clip, but on all the tracks. This is especially important when you receive a lot of messy cues as it's important to know your session is in sync—and not out of sync due to drift but because the cuer made errors. Seeing this, we can confirm that the session was not cued professionally, which often requires a couple hours of your day adjusting those cues that are, in reality, just suggestions. Cloth Now, onto the recording. Normally, Foley artists like to start by doing the cloth movement pass for the entire project first. There are others who don't do it first, which is fine, but I personally prefer to do it first. I like to move my dialogue track right above the cloth track that I'm about to record. I also normally enlarge the dialogue track as it helps me see all the waves in the dialogue and notice when I hear footsteps or certain props in production, and I mark them as we record the cloth without stopping. I Photo courtesy of FX Networks