Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 17 The choice you are actually making is long form or short form, and it determines which gate you use. Long form, meaning movies and episodics, is dialogue-gated using Dolby Dialogue Intelligence, which is now free. Short form, meaning commercials, is full program with the relative level gate, which exists because commercial mixers used to game the measurement with pockets of near silence. Those are two different presets for two different jobs, and they are not meant to be combined. Unless you are delivering a spot, full program is rarely the right method, which makes it worth reading a spec sheet carefully enough to spot when someone has asked for it by accident. Chasing LRA Is a Fool's Errand The best technical moment concerned loudness range. A/85 allows plus or minus 2 dB. Some platforms have specified plus or minus 0.4 dB on dialogue plus a hard LRA ceiling, and that is where it gets interesting. LRA discards the loudest and quietest percentile bands before computing the range. Change one thing and the whole measurement re-runs, which means it can re-select which events are inside and outside the window. Turn a loud element down to shave 0.2 off your LRA and the number can go up because you just changed what qualifies as an outlier. Three hours disappeared on the panel chasing 0.2 on a single episode. The A/85 team treated the old silence on LRA as a sin of omission and now explicitly cautions against it, along with dialogue intelligibility scores. Craft, Not Compliance In the spirit of "ask me anything," attendees filled the Zoom chat with questions about mix approaches. The mix advice was refreshingly By submitting, you are granting CAS permission to use your image for promotional purposes. unglamorous. Threshold-based attenuating EQ parked permanently at roughly 1 kHz, 4 kHz, and 6 kHz, engaging only when something pushes into it, so you keep the weight and lose the fight. Clip gain on word onsets, frame by frame, because a de-esser or compressor removes the transient while clip gain keeps it. Do not over-compress dialogue; peaky is intelligible, flat is fatiguing and people tune out. Couple a small fader move and a small carve so it reads as neither a hole nor a scoop. None of that is new. What is new is that CAS members can now ask the authors of the standard why the number is behaving the way it is and get an answer. Jon's included an insightful summary of the process and guidelines in his article for this issue. The updated A/85 documents are going up on the member forums, and the AMA runs monthly. Use it. MEMBERS check your e-mails for the next AMA session happening later this month!