The Recording Booth

The Recording Booth is where your film gets its sound. Your cast auditions and records the script, Ozu composes the music and makes the sound effects, the sound inside your video clips gets cleaned up, and then everything meets on one mixing board. Work left to right along the tabs; each tab appears once your film has something for it to show. What you hear in the last tab is exactly what exports.

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Where every sound goes

Read it left to right. On the left are the places sound comes from. In the middle are the booth’s tabs, one per kind of sound: Voice Casting, Dialog, SFX, Score and Video. Every sound then lands on one of four channels (Dialogue, Score, SFX or Video), and those four meet at the master, which becomes the finished film, the stems for your editor, and any single channel you want on its own. A ribbon keeps its colour the whole way, so you can follow one kind of sound across the whole board. The two places a ribbon changes colour are the two places one sound becomes two: when a dialog take is split into voice and room, and when a video clip is split the same way.

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1 · Voice Casting

Every speaking character in your script auditions here. Each character has a card; tap it and you hear their current audition. If a voice is not right for the film, tell Ozu what you want or change the voice description and ask for a new audition; the price is on the button. The test line each actor reads is yours to change. When a voice sounds right, say so to Ozu or tap the take you want; the checkmark shows who is cast. Nothing here is on the mix yet. Casting only decides who speaks. The arrow at the top takes your cast into the Dialog tab. Before any of that, the booth asks how you want dialogue at all: let Ozu record it, bring in your own recording, or skip dialogue for a film with none. You can change your mind later.

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2 · Dialog

Your cast performs the script, scene by scene. Each scene chip shows that scene’s takes; play them and pick the read you want. The take you pick is what the film uses. Want a different performance? Give Ozu a note in the direction box and ask for a new pass; a scene still recording can be cancelled. If you brought your own recording, it is laid down here and lined up to the script. Below the takes is a small sound editor for the chosen take. Play or loop it while you work, and watch the level meter. Trim where the dialogue starts and ends. That length becomes the film’s length. Normalize sets a sensible level, Gain moves the whole take up or down, dynamic range evens out loud and quiet lines, and volume points let you ride a single moment. Isolate Dialog is the special one: it separates the voices from everything behind them, so the voice goes to the Dialogue channel and the room sound goes to the SFX tab, where you can mix them apart. The split versions then appear as their own row of takes; tap one and that is the separation the film uses.

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3 · SFX

The sound-effects room. Ask Ozu (bottom right) for a specific sound, such as a door, rain or a crowd, and he offers it as a proposal; choose a sound engine, tap Generate for the shown credits, hear it, then place it and it lands on the timeline at the playhead as its own lane. Anything split off a dialog take or a video clip lands here too. It works like a small mixing board: one strip per effect, a fader for level and a slider for left–right placement, with solo and mute on each. Tap a piece on the lanes to work on it; reset puts its level and pan back to normal. Along the bottom are play, previous and next clip, undo and redo, the time pill, the spectrum switch and the jog wheel, which scrubs the sound or slides the selected effect earlier or later. You hear the effects alone here; MIX plays them inside the whole film for context. The whole SFX channel’s overall level lives in Mixing. Full write-up: SFX Pre-mix.

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4 · Score

Ozu composes music for the film scene by scene. Each scene has a music direction you can read (hold to copy it), and takes you can play. To change a scene’s music, redirect it (your next chat message becomes the note for that scene) and ask for new takes; you can choose the music model and how many to render. Pick the take you want and it becomes the film’s score. If you passed on music earlier, Score renders one now. Your own uploaded music lands on the same channel.

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5 · Video

Your generated video clips arrive with their own sound: footsteps, wind, a line spoken on camera. This tab is where you tidy it. Down the side is every beat with video, in the same order as your timeline; tap a clip and it plays in the viewer above Ozu. Clip Gain turns just that clip up or down and travels with it, and dynamic range evens out its loud and quiet moments. Clean Dialog quiets everything but the speech in a clip; Restore Original puts the clip’s sound back. Anything you do here holds in the final mix, where all the clip sound is one channel.

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6 · Mixing

The board. Four faders (Dialogue, Score, SFX, Video) and a Master. Faders set how loud each channel is, M and S silence a channel or play it alone, the top slider places it left or right, the lower slider evens out loud and quiet moments, and EQ shapes tone. Ducking pulls the music and effects down while someone is speaking; Smart Balance sets a sensible starting mix in one tap; Stage puts each channel’s loudest moment at a safe level. The Master column does all of this to the whole film at once. What you hear here is what exports: as the finished film, as stems for your editor, or one channel at a time. Full write-up: Mixing.