If film post-production could be summed up in one word, it would probably be a toss-up between editing and processing.
I’m going to pick up where I left off in Part 1 of The Post-Production Process and How I Go About Doing It, and that was with editing.
But first, I just wanted to reiterate that post-production is when you gather together all of the pieces of the puzzle that you acquired during production and you then turn those pieces into something pretty and assemble them into something meaningful.
We learned in Part 1 that there are really eight steps to the post-production process: organize, import, edit, add visual effects, color correction and grading, score, sound mix, and export.
I’m going to finish telling you about each one of these in detail and how I go about the post-production process for each one of my projects so that I can get safely across the finish line.
One Piece at a Time
I will do the video and the audio edit at the same time for each scene.
I really need to be able to hear what people are saying and how they are saying it along with some sound effects and music because all of this can influence my decision-making when it comes to the picture edit.
I don’t need as many video layers as I do audio tracks, because I am stacking audio clips on a regular basis, but, for the most part, I don’t need to stack video clips, except under certain circumstances like with titles or any brief effects I may do.
I will setup ten video layers in the Premiere Pro Project, just to be on the safe side, and I can always add more later on if I need them.
The audio track setup is a little more extensive. I will start with forty audio tracks, and, again, I can add more later if I need them.
I will have A and B audio tracks for every actor in the project. So, if I have six actors, then I will have twelve dialogue tracks (six A tracks and six B tracks).
I will also have a Room Tone A track and a Room Tone B track.
After that, I will have five production effects tracks, five Foley tracks, ten SFX tracks, and three music tracks.
I may not put something on every one of these tracks, and, if that happens to be the case, I will just delete those tracks at the very end.
I will then complete the picture edit, the sound edit, and the titles and credits.
I have recorded and added any Foley needed and I will add any visual effects needed at this stage, after the picture edit is complete.
I will utilize Adobe After Effects for those.
Even after all of this, things will still look and sound pretty rough.
Let’s Make It Pretty
Your film isn’t going to magically look like a film no matter what kind of camera or what kind of lenses you were using to shoot it with. That’s what color correction and grading is for.
I always shoot in Log, and what that does is it tells the camera to shoot in a neutral profile so that you will have more information in your picture that you can work with in post.
Nothing will be over-saturated. Your darks won’t be too dark and so on. That way, you can do more in post to make your picture look exactly how you want it to look.
In Premiere Pro you do this in the Color workspace and utilize the Lumetri Color panel.
You can work from the information provided by the Lumetri Scopes which include: Vectorscope HLS, Vectorscope YUV, Histogram, Parade (RGB), and Waveform (RGB).
You can check for over-exposure, under-exposure, and whether or not your brightness and saturation meet certain standards.
You can also utilize third-party plug-ins if you so desire. FilmConvert Nitrate is a good one for Premiere Pro.
After the initial color correction, you can then get really creative and give your film a “look”.
This is called Grading.
Do you want to add some red into a scene to indicate danger? Do you want to add some cool colors to emphasis sadness? Do you want to play around with complimentary colors and really draw attention to a certain object or subject?
It’s your movie, so make it look however you want it to look. But you have to make it look like something, and you do that with color correction and grading.
After you have the “look” of the film, you can hire a composer to do the score, or, if not, you have probably already organized your music tracks that you acquired from an online service or music library.
The next thing to do is finish up the sound.
DAW
Adobe Premiere Pro is a terrific video editor and you can do a lot of amazing things with the audio in it, but still, it wasn’t made solely for audio.
To complete the sound for a motion picture, you really want to use a piece of software that was made just for sound.
These are called DAWs, or Digital Audio Workstations. They are software programs devoted solely to sound, although you can still import a video file for reference.
There are a lot of great programs out there but the DAW that I use is Adobe Audition.
I’ve already done a lot of the prep work with the audio in Premiere Pro. I’ve checkerboarded the dialogue and separated all of the actors onto their alternating A and B tracks.
I’ve separated the production effects from the dialogue and placed them onto their own separate tracks so that I can process them differently.
I’ve added the Foley, sound effects, and music.
Now, I need to move all of this to Adobe Audition.
But how?
I know they have a dynamic link, but still, I like to use an OMF file, because I will utilize other programs from time to time. Plus, if I do collaborate with anyone, I’ll already have an OMF file.
An OMF file is great because it will transfer everything just as it is from your original program.
The tracks will be the same, the individual audio clips will all be in their exact locations, and it copies all of the audio files for you.
In Premiere Pro, you just go to File>Export>OMF…, and I usually save it to my desktop.
Next, I open Adobe Audition and I open the OMF file, and all of the tracks and audio clips appear in place. It asks me to locate the audio files, and I go back to the OMF folder that was created, and there is a folder called Audio Files. I highlight all of the files by shift-clicking and import them all at once.
Now I can get to work.
I begin by organizing the tracks. Everything is in its place, yes, but now I am going to group them.
I color code all of the similar tracks. That is to say, all of the dialogue tracks will be the same color, all of the sound effects tracks will be the same color, and so on.
Next, I group all of these individual tracks together by adding bus tracks.
A bus track is basically an empty track that you can send one or more tracks to and this enables you to apply effects to multiple tracks at once and also allows you to decide how much of that effect you want to apply. You can then send that one bus track to the master track and all of those other tracks will follow.
The dialogue A tracks get four buses that I then add below those dialogue A tracks. I will call them Bus A, B, C, and D. I add a multi-band compressor to Bus A, a DeEsser to Bus B, a parametric equalizer to Bus C, and a hard limiter to Bus D.
You then have to tell everything where to go.
I send all of the dialogue A tracks to Bus A. I then send Bus A to Bus B, Bus B to Bus C, Bus C to Bus D, and I send Bus D to the master track, which sends everything to the master track after taking into account the order of things.
I do the same thing for the Dialogue B tracks and the production effects.
Next, I add three buses below the Foley tracks. I add a multi-band compressor, a parametric equalizer, and a convolution reverb, respectively.
I send all of the Foley tracks to the first bus, the first bus to the second, the second to the third, and I send the third and final bus to the master track.
I do the exact same thing for sound effects (SFX) and music (MX), only for the music, in place of reverb I put a hard limiter.
After everything is organized, I add a hard limiter directly to the master track that is set to a maximum amplitude of -5 or -6 dB.
This will ensure nothing reaches beyond 0 dB, where clipping and distortion may occur, and where my eardrums won’t be blasted throughout the entire process.
I then go ahead and start cross-fading all of the individual clips. You fade and cross-fade everything because with digital audio when the play head encounters an unfaded clip, sometimes this causes some clicks and pops that may not become evident until after export.
So, to avoid all of that, cross-fade.
I then begin work on the dialogue. I do manual and automated noise removal. Then, I work on the multi-band compressor, DeEsser, parametric equalizer, limiter, and I will utilize reverb, if need be.
I layer in the room tone for each scene, and work on that, if need be.
Then, I work on those effects mentioned for production effects, Foley, SFX, and MX.
Once I’ve done all of that, I will do the mix. This involves automation. Automation is where you can actually record all of the moves you make with the faders, which control the volume of each track.
The faders are those things you see people moving up and down in mysterious ways on a giant, and expensive, mixing board, usually in a large room with really cool lighting.
In Adobe Audition, you can just move the virtual faders with the mouse. You can also record your panning and gain control.
I really don’t do a lot with automation. I will adjust the volume here and there, as well as the panning, just to even everything out or to add emphasis.
I make sure to save and backup everything, and I then export the entire session.
I put this new audio back with the video, and this takes us to the last step of post-production.
Export Everything
Exporting everything means that you will be exporting to your selected medium. Every distribution company, every platform, and every festival seem to have their own, unique deliverable requirements.
Just know that you will be exporting the same project in a variety of different ways, and when you get those specific deliverable requirements, just follow their specifications and export using those settings.
There are different export settings for Blu-ray, DVD, DCP (Digital Cinema Package), VOD, Broadcast, YouTube, and many others.
But after you have done all of that, you are done with post-production. What an amazing journey.
Software That I Utilize Most Often
Adobe Premiere Pro CC (Video editing and color correction and grading)
Adobe Audition CC (Post-production audio)
Adobe Photoshop CC (Photo processing and graphic design)
Adobe After Effects CC (Visual effects)
Adobe Illustrator CC (Logo design and vector graphics)
Adobe Media Encoder CC (Encoding)
DaVinci Resolve (Color correction and grading)
Audacity Cross-Platform Sound Editor (Sound editing and encoding)
