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I think we understand perfectly what you're trying to communicate to us. At least I do. My whole audio approach of a movie completely changed in the last months, and every time someone approaches me with a plan to shoot something, my first question is "what did you plan for sound ?"

It's just that I've seen today a speech from Robert Rodriguez whose special skill is dividing the budget by 8 and as a guerilla filmmaker I tend to think like that too. I don't want to spend money on an ADR session (how much that costs ?) for a sound that doesn't change much. I know that every bit of sound is important but filmmaking is about compromise.

TheArtist said:

What I mean is, APE mentioned spending lots of money on ADR because dialog and SFX got tangled during production. I can understand when it's an important sound like THE gun-shot that plays when Tony blows Steve's brains out. But some of them are not critical to the story and not critical for the ambiance either (the whole ambiance sound won't suffer if one-third of a second of one effect among many others is missing). Am I right ?

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Alcove is absolutely correct.

I understand what you are saying and there is a logic to it but in addition to the aesthetics which Alcove has mentioned, there are the practicalities of how the TV and Film industry actually operates. What you are not considering is that distributors and broadcasters generally don't know much about sound and generally don't want to! Audio QC is often not handled directly by the broadcaster or distributor but by third party QC companies, although the major networks and big distributors do tend to do their own audio QC. Regardless of who actually does it though, large parts of the audio QC process are automated, some intern loads the audio mix (and other audio stems and M&E mix) into QC software which then spits out a pass or a fail. However, what you have described above is incredibly complex and well beyond what audio QC software is capable of because what you are talking about is value judgements; what is an important SFX and what isn't, what is important to the story and what isn't, what is wanted and what isn't? These maybe easy questions to answer for the maker of a film but pretty much impossible to program into software. For example, one tiny bit of SFX might be completely unimportant in one scene or mix but that exact same tiny bit of SFX in another scene or mix might be absolutely essential, how do you program that? In effect, what you are talking about is an experienced professional going through every frame of the film deciding what is important bits of SFX in the dialogue stem and what isn't and that is so massively time consuming and expensive compared to an intern and some automated QC software that it's impractical. Different QC companies/departments have different thresholds for flagging issues, different tests and criteria and different methods of audio QC testing but at the end of the day a QC failure is embarrassing, expensive (or very expensive!) and potentially disastrous if you are tight up against a delivery deadline. In practise then, you don't want to be submitting an audio mix, M&E mix or other audio deliverables which will require a value judgement to pass QC. This black and white approach to audio QC means the distributor or broadcaster doesn't have to know or think too much about audio and also shouldn't have to worry about potentially extremely expensive complaints from foreign distributors/broadcasters to whom they may sub licence the film or program.

The onus is on the Producer to produce a product which passes this strict QC process and that means in practise playing it safe and making sure there is nothing in the dialogue stem which could cause a red flag and nothing missing in the M&E mix. These audio requirements have been a standard part of commercial film/TV program making for many decades and dictates the entire professional audio post workflow and this is one of the main reasons why the professional audio post workflow is so different from the audio workflow employed by virtually all DIY no/lo budget film makers.

G

TheArtist said:

It's just that I've seen today a speech from Robert Rodriguez whose special skill is dividing the budget by 8 and as a guerilla filmmaker I tend to think like that too. I don't want to spend money on an ADR session (how much that costs ?) for a sound that doesn't change much. I know that every bit of sound is important but filmmaking is about compromise.

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For the amateur film makers I agree that it is probably a truism to say that film making is about compromise but for the professional creator commercial film and TV content it is far to simplistic to be a truism. Ultimately, there is no compromising with a suite of audio QC software! As a professional film maker you have to know where you can make compromises and where it's a catastrophic mistake to even try!

G