Mixing a film - music is loud but doesn't crowd dialogue??

Hello good sirs. So I'm composing to a new project right now but he also wants me to mix the whole thing, which I already agreed to. It's a documentary, so outside of music it's basically all talking.

Now up until now I had assumed that I would lightly compress all of the dialogue and normalize it, then automate the music's volume every-which-way depending on what's going on... But for the most part, if someone's talking, the music is very quiet. Yeah?

That was until I saw the documentary "The Captains" on Netflix. There's a scene where Shatner is interviewing Patrick Stewart, and there's a rather loud piano piece going on. But somehow Patrick's voice sat just perfectly... So you have this loud piano piece during an interview, and somehow it wasn't crowding the dialogue at all.

I was wondering if anyone had some insight in how this would be accomplished, in a somewhat-automated way... As in not having to do EQ cut/boosts manually all the time... Would I have to set up something like sidechain, where the music ducks the instant dialogue occurs?

There are a number of approaches, and you'll likely end up using a combination of all of them.

One trick is have voices panned close to centre, and make sure your musical elements are mostly panned wider than that. Basically create a bit of a gap in the centre for voices.

Another is to use an analyser of some sort to find where the most energy in the individual voices is, frequency-wise. You can get a surprisingly large effect from making small cuts in your music backing at those frequencies.

You can do this as you describe, where it only happens when the voice is speaking, oryou can just leave it set for the duration. I prefer the latter in most cases, though you will sometimes want to fine tune.

The ducking technique you mention is a common one, and it does work, but really it evolved out of necessity for live broadcast radio. You'll get a much less obtrusive effect by doing manual volume automation under the spoken parts, though it can be quite time consuming.

I would not try, especially on the first time out, to try to get the music loud during the voice over.  

Use some compression to keep the vocal strong, but envelope the music so it fades down on the voice over parts. 

The voice over is the more important part of a documentary.

mike_mccue


Does anyone make a Robert Altman plugin?

I've got one but it only turns up if the conditions are right.  You wouldn't want to rely on it.

Hey Wayofmind-

    If you are the composer, I would start by making the musical elements appropriate under dialog during the composing/writing process.  This will make your job much easier later on when it's time to mix.  Music generally takes a back seat to dialog and sound effects.

Good luck!