Working with Audio Engineers

In my last post, I kicked off my “Working with” series by providing a few tips for working efficiently with your editing or animation team. For this article, I spoke with a few post production audio engineers to learn more about how they like to work and how producers and clients can maximize the value of their time in audio. Some of the tips below are also helpful for editors looking to streamline how they work with audio professionals.

Most of the tips that surfaced when speaking with editors and animators hold true with audio as well:

Start at the end and work backwards

Having a sense of what you’ll need to deliver at the end of a project will help you make better choices at the beginning.

Ask questions and solve problems before hand-off

Give your creative team as much information as you can upfront, batch the information before handing it off and organize comments in the same way.

Manage changes smartly

Understand that some changes will have a bigger impact on your wallet and your timeline at certain stages in the project.

Here are a few new tips pertaining to audio specifically.

Tip 1: Practice Describing Your Goals

Most people don’t think about how to describe sounds very often, but audio engineers need direction just like editors and animators. Speaking the language of audio can take a bit of practice. Describing what you want can be relatively easy when you have a specific issue you’re working to address, like an interview that sounds particularly tinny. But it can be more difficult when you’re trying to describe sound design, or the balance you’d like to see between music, natural sound and interview bites.

Let’s imagine that you need to add sound design to graphics, for example. In that case, you’d want to give the engineer an idea of how heavy or how light a touch they should use. Perhaps you want to add a “swoosh” to introduce each header, but not when individual bullet points appear. If you’re uncertain what effect you’re going for, you can ask your engineer to work on a segment of your project then review it and dial it in from there. That will take time upfront, but it may help preserve your timeline and budget in the long run. Your audio team might also be able to share samples of previous work that will help you clarify your goals.

Tip 2: Pay Attention to Your Listening Environment

While computer speakers do a much better job than they used to, they’re still not great at providing a super nuanced listening experience. If you’re making a web video, computer speakers and headphones are probably the best way to review your audio team’s work, but if you’re making a documentary that will end up in film festivals or on streaming platforms, you’ll want to review your mix in different environments that mirror how your audience will watch it. Try to listen on different speakers to make sure the mix translates across platforms (headphones vs laptop vs TV vs theater).

Tip 3: Don’t Assume You Can “Fix it in Post”

Recording good quality audio in the first place is still vitally important. When removing noise, you may also lose quality. If a subject's microphone is placed far from them during recording, then the mic is simply not going to be able to pick up the full frequency range of their voice. An engineer can improve the sound quality, but you’ll likely never be able to get the true "fullness" of the voice back. The tools engineers use to clean up or restore audio are getting better rapidly and A.I. is expanding what’s possible, but just like A.I. images the results are not always perfect and the potential for weird artifacts exists.

Tip 4: Give Audio Options

Have your editor provide all available mic tracks when sending your project to mix so your audio team can determine the best way to create the cleanest dialogue.

Tip 5: License Your Music

Make sure your music is licensed! Using watermarked MP3s is fine for early cuts, but when a project is sent to mix, you engineer will need the full resolution WAV or AIFF file without the watermark. MP3s (without a watermark) can work in a pinch, but they are compressed. WAV and AIFF files are uncompressed and will give your audio engineer the best quality to work with. 

Tip 6: Pay Attention to Music Placement

This is the kind of issue that can cause back-and-forth discussions near the end of a project and eat up valuable time. Editors should make sure they are importing music in stereo and making sure the tracks where music is placed in their project are stereo and not mono. The music should sound “wide” and wrap around the voice. If you’re only hearing music in the center, it’s mono.

Audio engineers play a crucial role in immersing your audience, connecting them to your subject and holding their attention. As a producer or client, you want your creatives to spend as much of their time as possible on work that will make your project more compelling. By following these tips, you can be a great partner in the creative process and help ensure your mix sounds fantastic, too.

Thank you to Donna Gureckas and Kim Howell Cates from the Henninger Media Services audio team for their input for this article.