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Make Sure You Have the Right Setup for Mixing
If you plan to do your own sound design and mixing, it’s important to make sure that
you have the right supporting hardware for the job. You will be the last word in how the
audio sounds, and the audience is going to hear exactly what you export. When deciding
how to equip your room, keep the following essentials in mind.
• A high-quality audio interface: It’s important to have an appropriate audio interface for
routing either stereo or surround channels to your speakers. Your audio interface should
be able to accommodate the bit depth of the audio you’ll be working with. It should
also be of high enough quality to produce a clean-sounding signal.
• High-quality monitoring speakers: It’s crucial that you use high-quality monitoring
speakers that provide accurate and unbiased imaging of your audio, with no
exaggerated or omitted frequencies. This ensures that you hear problems in your audio,
such as high-frequency hiss or low-frequency rumble, so that you can do something
about them. It also ensures that you don’t inadvertently overcompensate EQ or level
settings when the fault lies with your speakers, rather than with the quality of the
source audio itself.
• Studio-quality microphones and a suitable recording environment: If you’re recording
voiceover, dialogue replacement, or Foley effects, it’s important to use microphones
that will pleasingly capture the type of audio you need. There are many different types
of microphones, and they all have different strengths and weaknesses for various
applications. Just as important is the environment in which you’ll be recording. It should
be quiet and lack excessive reverberation. (It’s usually not a good idea to record in a
room that’s too “live,” such as a completely empty apartment in which you can hear
your own slight echo.)
• A properly balanced mixing room: It’s very important that your room have balanced
acoustics so that you can accurately hear your mix; otherwise, your speakers can’t do
their job. Positioning your speakers and adjusting where you sit relative to the angle
of the room’s walls makes a big difference in how your audio sounds. Additional foam
and fabric wall and ceiling treatments also affect the room’s acoustics. In an ideally set
up room, no one set of audio frequencies is either exaggerated or reduced; this way,
you can make critical level and EQ decisions.
Organizing Your Audio in Preparation for Mixing
Whether you do the sound design and mixing in Final Cut Pro, in Soundtrack Pro, or at
another facility entirely, it’s important to organize your project to facilitate the work that
will be happening. In particular, there are three things you can do to make the process
go smoothly.
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