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Adding Audio to Your List of Services

Nov 10, 2009 12:00 PM, By Gary Eskow

Find out where the racket comes from.

The power of music and its ability to influence the message of the moving image is inarguable. In advance of the celluloid era, composers were asked to help sway audience response to the Passion Plays, and it's well known that the Greeks and other early advanced cultures found an almost indescribable magic in the aural arts. That's all fine, but how much will it cost me to add music to my current video project?

The question is an important one. Here's the good news: Recent, but now thoroughly developed, technologies make it possible to score film and video projects for a fraction of what the cost was just a decade or so ago. The bad news? There is none.

Tradition

Before taking a look at what you—the video producer armed with a reasonably powerful computer, a good set of ears, and a couple of bucks—can do on your own, let's take a look at how the audio postproduction process has historically taken place and that model's evolution.

If you shot a commercial, film, PSA, or any other film project back in the 1980s, you probably would have found a Moviola somewhere and edited down your footage with or without the assistance of a professional editor. Flushed, perhaps, you then would have hired a composer, given her a VHS tape (hopefully with timecode on a center track), and had a score written and produced in a professional studio. Then you would have moved on to an audio post house that would add sound effects and perhaps record foley.

Too expensive? That's OK. Since the 1960s, stock music has been a thriving industry. In the era we're discussing, stock music libraries had begun the migration from tape to CD and ultimately to the distribution via computer disk. Variety multiplied, costs dropped, and stock music became an increasingly viable way to score not only lesser-budgeted pieces, but many high-priced projects as well.

The development of the personal or project audio studio streamlined the process further. The boutique approach sharpened, with smaller shops offering suites of services that included composition, library music, foley, and full audio mix. Feeling the need to compete, many larger audio post houses jumped into the game to your continuing advantage.

Consider, for example, SoundHound. Located in New York, SoundHound has a long history in the industry. Damon Trotta, a senior mixer, has been with the company for 19 years. I asked him why you, the extremely gifted video producer on a budget, should consider walking into a facility like the one he calls home. Although most of his clients are producers working at networks and agencies, Trotta makes the case that it's in your interest to explore the advantages of adding audio at a room such as SoundHound.

"There are more tools available to the desktop audio post professional, and talented amateur, than ever before," Trotta says. "But you get what you pay for. [Producers] need to ask themselves what they want audio to contribute to their project and make a reasonable assessment of what path they have to take to get there.

"Producers of high-budget projects are always working under the gun, and they simply don't have the time to try and figure out all the variables—how to resolve various video and audio compression schemes, for example, or how to import an OMF [open media framework] file."

Even those producers who are counting shekels carefully can get high value out of working at a room such as SoundHound if they come prepared. Trotta says high-end facilities have been forced to respond to shrinking budgets and the emergence of desktop tools, and you can take advantage of that. "Expectations are up, timelines are down, and I'm expected to be all things—a composer, a sound designer, a mixer, whatever the client needs," he says. "After 19 years, I've learned how to provide all of these services—in a great facility—to all of my clients, including those working on a budget."

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