The Mixing Booth

The Mixing Booth is where your film’s sound gets balanced. Four channels arrive from the rest of the booth: Dialogue, Score, SFX and Video sound. You set how loud each one is, where it sits left or right, how evenly it plays, and how it sounds against the others; a Master column does the same to the whole film at once. The Recording Booth’s Mixing tab is the full room; the Editing Room’s mixer is a quick popup of the same board. What you hear here is exactly what exports.

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One strip, top to bottom

Every channel is a strip, and every strip is the same shape, so once you know one you know the board. At the top is the channel’s name. Under it a meter shows what is playing right now, with the fader beside it: drag up for louder, down for quieter; the readout below shows the number. Then M and S: M silences the channel, S plays it alone. Below the line is the strip’s character: the pan slider places the channel left or right, the Range slider squeezes loud and quiet moments closer together, and the Stage buttons set a starting level. What sits under those depends on the channel; that is the table below.

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1 · The strips

Left to right the strips are Score, Dialogue, SFX, Video Audio and Master: sound flows left to right into the Master, the way it does on a real console. A strip you have nothing for yet is drawn dim; it wakes up the moment its sound exists. Two faders are shared with the rest of the booth: the Dialogue fader is the Dialog tab’s Gain and the Score fader is the Score tab’s Gain. Move either surface and the other follows. The pan slider places the channel where the playhead is, so a sound can sit somewhere different in different parts of the film; the lanes draw the moves you make. The Range slider is for a channel that swings between too quiet and too loud: slide right and the swings tighten. Stage −1 and Stage −3 listen for the channel’s loudest moment and set the fader so it lands just under full, or a little lower with room to spare: a flat, honest place to start before you balance by ear. The Master column is the whole film in one strip. Its fader raises or lowers everything, its pan slider tilts the whole mix left or right, its Range slider squeezes the sum, M silences everything, and S clears every solo so you are back to the full mix.

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2 · Smart Balance

Under the strips is the button to press first. Smart Balance sets every fader to a sensible starting mix: dialogue clear, music and effects underneath. It is a starting point, not a verdict; move anything afterwards, or tap Undo beside it to have your old levels back exactly as they were. In the Editing Room’s popup this row also holds Soundbooth, which jumps you to the full room, Enhance, which opens the same clean-up list as the Video strip’s light, and the Split Dialog chip. The popup is the strips and this row; the lanes, the EQ and the jog wheel live in the full room.

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3 · The lanes

In the full room the right half of the screen is the lanes: one waveform per channel on a shared time line, a ruler across the top, and a playhead that sweeps everything. Top to bottom they read MASTER, SCORE, a framed group called DIALOG/SFX SPLIT holding DIALOG and SFX, then VIDEO, and, when it is on, the master spectrum at double height. The MASTER lane is every channel overlaid: a picture of what leaves the room. Drag a fader or a Range slider and the waves react as you move. Tap a lane to select it: it brightens, the jog wheel opens, and the wheel’s rings now write to that lane. Drag along a lane, or along the ruler, to scrub; hold a finger still on a mark you rode in to delete it. Touching MASTER clears the selection. To the left of each lane is a small tool column: EQ opens that channel’s tone controls, reset strips every level and pan move from the lane once you confirm, and M and S sit at the bottom again, where a mixer’s hand expects them. The master spectrum is a heat map of the finished mix, rendered the way it will export: time runs left to right, deep sounds sit at the bottom, bright sounds at the top, and louder shows hotter. It comes up on its own when you enter the room; the button in the footer hides and shows it. Use it to spot rumble, hiss, or a gap where sound should be.

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4 · EQ

Tap EQ beside any lane, the Master included, and a card floats in the middle of the room; play, the jog and the lanes keep working underneath it. The curve at the top is the shape you are giving the sound. Under it are the band faders: up is more of that part of the sound, down is less. The 5 / 10 / 31 chips choose how many bands you want, five for quick shaping, ten or thirty-one for fine work. The preset buttons apply a ready-made curve, and the green dot shows which one is on; Auto sets Ozu’s recommended curve for that kind of channel. Every drag is one undo step.

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5 · Transport, jog and undo

Along the bottom of the lanes is the transport. On the left, the clock shows where the playhead is; tap it to switch between timecode and a frame count. Beside it are undo and redo for your mix moves, and the spectrum button. In the centre: previous clip, play, next clip. On the right, the jog puck and Ozu. The jog wheel blooms out of its puck. The inner dial scrubs through the film and coasts to a stop when you let go. Select a lane and two rings appear around it: GAIN and, outside it, PAN. Turn a ring while paused and the moment under the playhead loops so you can set it by ear; turn while playing and you ride the level or the placement live. Everything you ride is remembered as marks along that lane, and the strip’s fader follows them during playback. A two-finger tap anywhere in the room undoes the last move.

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6 · Splitting dialogue from its background

A recorded dialogue take carries the room with it. The DIALOG/SFX SPLIT group’s header has one chip for that: Split Dialog from SFX pulls the voices onto the DIALOG lane and leaves everything else on the SFX lane, so the two get their own faders, ducks and EQ. It runs on this iPad and costs nothing. Once a split exists the chip becomes Tune, with Rejoin beside it to put the single take back. (The Dialog tab’s Isolate Dialog is the same split from the other side of the booth.) In the full room a fresh split lands you straight in the Tune Split panel, so you can judge it. The scope at the top draws both halves about one centre line, with the same ruler and playhead as the lanes; tap or drag it to move. The pill on the right picks what you hear and see: Dialogue, SFX or Both; play sits in the middle. Two sliders re-judge the split itself. Separation decides where the line between voice and background sits: slide right and leftover voice leaves the SFX track and joins the dialogue. Precision decides how surgical the cut is: right is tighter, left is smoother. Both start at the centre, the machine’s own call, and a light beside each comes on when you move it; tap the light to hear the split with and without your change. If the split itself needs to be better, Adjust Effort runs it again on this iPad, harder. The meter beside it cycles how hard: one, two or four passes blended together, which cleans up mistakes at the price of a longer wait. Free, and your sliders carry over. Reset puts both sliders back to centre; Accept saves what you are hearing as the next version of the split, also free. Close without Accept and a harder pass is simply discarded.

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7 · Cleaning up video voices

Generated video clips arrive with their own sound, and the Video Audio strip has two tools for the voices in them. Split Clip Audio does for a clip what the split above does for a take: the spoken line moves to the Dialogue channel and everything else in the clip goes to SFX, free and reversible; it acts on the clip under the playhead, and Rejoin puts the clip’s sound back. Clean up is the paid, stronger option: it opens a list of every clip with sound, and each row has a toggle that cleans the voice out of the background noise. The price is on the row and it bills once; turning a cleaned clip off and on again is free, and the original is always kept.

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What happens next

When the board sounds right, you are done with sound. Every fader, pan, range, EQ, duck and split you set here travels into the file exactly as you heard it; the spectrum you were looking at is the export’s own picture. Head to Export to render the finished film, or back to the Editing Room if the cut still needs work; the popup mixer there is the same board, so nothing you set is left behind.