Supervising Sound Editor
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A sound editor is a creative professional responsible for selecting and assembling
sound recordings Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording t ...
in preparation for the final
sound mixing Audio mixing is the process by which multiple sounds are combined into one or more channels. In the process, a source's volume level, frequency content, dynamics, and panoramic position are manipulated or enhanced. This practical, aesthetic ...
or mastering of a television program, motion picture, video game, or any production involving recorded or synthetic sound. The sound editor works with the supervising sound editor. The supervising sound editor often assigns scenes and reels the sound editor based on the editor's strengths and area of expertise. Sound editing developed out of the need to fix the incomplete, undramatic, or technically inferior sound recordings of early
talkies A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before ...
, and over the decades has become a respected filmmaking
craft A craft or trade is a pastime or an occupation that requires particular skills and knowledge of skilled work. In a historical sense, particularly the Middle Ages and earlier, the term is usually applied to people occupied in small scale pro ...
, with sound editors implementing the aesthetic goals of motion picture sound design. The
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motio ...
recognizes the artistic contribution of exceptional sound editing with the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing. There are primarily three divisions of sound that are combined to create a final mix, these being dialogue, effects, and music. In larger markets such as New York and Los Angeles, sound editors often specialize in only one of these areas, thus a show will have separate dialogue, effects, and music editors. In smaller markets, sound editors are expected to know how to handle it all, often crossing over into the mixing realm as well. Editing effects is likened to creating the sonic world from scratch, while dialogue editing is likened to taking the existing sonic world and fixing it. Dialogue editing is more accurately thought of as "production sound editing", where the editor takes the original sound recorded on the set, and using a variety of techniques, makes the dialogue more understandable, as well as smoother, so the listener doesn't hear the transitions from shot to shot (often the background sounds underneath the words change dramatically from take to take). Among the challenges that effects editors face are creatively adding together various elements to create believable sounds for everything you see on screen, as well as memorizing their sound effects library.


Equipment

The essential piece of equipment used in modern sound editing is the
digital audio workstation A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrat ...
, or DAW. A DAW allows sounds, stored as computer files on a host computer, to be placed in timed synchronization with a motion picture, mixed, manipulated, and documented. The standard DAW system in use by the
American film industry The cinema of the United States, consisting mainly of major film studios (also known as Hollywood) along with some independent film, has had a large effect on the global film industry since the early 20th century. The dominant style of Ame ...
, as of 2012, is Avid's
Pro Tools Pro Tools is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed and released by Avid Technology (formerly Digidesign) for Microsoft Windows and macOS. It is used for music creation and production, sound for picture ( sound design, audio post-produ ...
, with the majority running on Macs. Another system in use presently is
Yamaha Yamaha may refer to: * Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese company with a wide range of products and services, established in 1887. The company is the largest shareholder of Yamaha Motor Company (below). ** Yamaha Music Foundation, an organization estab ...
owned
Steinberg Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH (trading as Steinberg) is a German musical software and hardware company based in Hamburg. It develops music writing, recording, arranging, and editing software, most notably Cubase, Nuendo, and Dorico. It als ...
's cross platform DAW
Nuendo Nuendo is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Steinberg for music recording, arranging, editing and post-production. The package is aimed at audio and video post-production market segments (marketed as an 'Advanced Audio Post-Producti ...
running on Macs using
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...
but also on
Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...
. Other systems historically used for sound editing were: *
WaveFrame AudioFrame The Audioframe is a digital audio workstation with sampler, hard disk recorder A hard disk recorder (HDR) is a system that uses a high-capacity hard disk to record digital audio or digital video. Hard disk recording systems represent an alter ...
, manufactured by
WaveFrame The Audioframe is a digital audio workstation with sampler, hard disk recorder A hard disk recorder (HDR) is a system that uses a high-capacity hard disk to record digital audio or digital video. Hard disk recording systems represent an alter ...
of
Emeryville, California Emeryville is a city located in northwest Alameda County, California, in the United States. It lies in a corridor between the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, with a border on the shore of San Francisco Bay. The resident population was 12,905 ...
* Several DAWs have been manufactured by Fairlight * SonicSolutions * AMS-Neve Audiofile * AudioVision manufactured by Avid The WaveFrame, Fairlights, and Audiofile were of the "integrated" variety of DAW, and required the purchase of expensive proprietary hardware and specialized computers (not standard PCs or Macs). Of the two surviving systems, Pro Tools still requires some proprietary hardware (either a low cost portable device such as the "Mbox" or the more expensive multichannel A/D,D/A converters for more professional high end applications), while Nuendo (a successor to
Cubase Cubase is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Steinberg for music and MIDI recording, arranging and editing. The first version, which was originally only a MIDI sequencer and ran on the Atari ST computer, was released in 1989. Cut-dow ...
) is of the "host based" variety.


Sound-effects library

Sound-effects editors typically use an organized catalog of sound recordings from which sound effects can be easily accessed and used in film soundtracks. There are several commercially distributed sound-effects libraries available, the two most well-known publishers being
Sound Ideas Sound Ideas is the repository of one of the largest commercially available sound effects libraries in the world. It has accumulated the sound effects, which it releases in collections by download or on CD and hard drive, through acquisition, exclu ...
and The Hollywood Edge. Online search engines, such as
Sounddogs Sounddogs.com, Inc. is a commercial online library of sound effects based in Marina Del Rey, California, with offices in Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay. It is the first and largest online sound effects and production music library on the Internet ...
, A Sound Effect and Sonniss allow users to purchase sound effects libraries from a large online database. Many sound effects editors make their own customized sound recordings which are accumulated into highly prized personal sound effects libraries. Often, sound effects used in films will be saved and reused in subsequent films. One exemplary case in point is a recording known as the "
Wilhelm Scream The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect that has been used in a number of films and TV series, beginning in 1951 with the film '' Distant Drums''. The scream is usually used when someone is shot, falls from a great height, or is thrown from ...
" which has become known for its repeated use in many famous films such as ''
The Charge at Feather River ''The Charge at Feather River'' is a 1953 American Western film directed by Gordon Douglas. It was originally released in 3D with many arrows, lances, and other weapons flying directly at the audience in several scenes. The movie is most notab ...
'' (1953), Pierre Marette Story (1957), ''
The Empire Strikes Back ''The Empire Strikes Back'' (also known as ''Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back'') is a 1980 American epic space opera film directed by Irvin Kershner from a screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, based on a stor ...
'' (1980), '' Raiders of the Lost Ark'' (1981), and ''
Reservoir Dogs ''Reservoir Dogs'' is a 1992 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino in his feature-length debut. It stars Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Michael Madsen, Tarantino, and Edward B ...
'' (1992). Credited with naming and popularizing this particular recording is sound designer
Ben Burtt Benjamin Burtt Jr. (born July 12, 1948) is an American sound designer, film director and editor, screenwriter, and voice actor. As a sound designer, his credits include the ''Star Wars'' and ''Indiana Jones'' film series, ''Invasion of the Body ...
.


History


Early talkies

The first sound process to substantially displace
silent film A silent film is a film with no synchronized Sound recording and reproduction, recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) ...
s in the moviegoing market was the
Vitaphone Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one ...
process. Under the Vitaphone process, a
microphone A microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike (), is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and public ...
recorded the sound performed on set directly to a phonograph master, which made Vitaphone recordings impossible to cut or resynchronize, as later processes would allow. This limited the Vitaphone process to capturing musical acts or one-take action scenes, like
Vaudeville Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...
routines or other re-creations of stage performances; essentially, scenes that required no editing at all. However,
Warner Brothers Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California, and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. D ...
, even as early as ''
The Jazz Singer ''The Jazz Singer'' is a 1927 American musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music score as well as lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolate ...
'', began experimenting with the mixing of multiple phonograph recordings and intercutting between the "master" sync take and coverage of other angles. The original mixing console used to make the master recording of ''The Jazz Singer'', still viewable in the Warner Bros. Studio Museum, has no more than four or five knobs, but each is still visibly labeled with the basic "groups" that a modern
sound designer In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...
would recognize: "music", "crowd", and so on. Warner Bros. developed increasingly sophisticated technology to sequence greater numbers of phonograph sound effects to picture using the Vitaphone system, but these were rendered obsolete with the widespread adoption of
sound-on-film Sound-on-film is a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying a picture is recorded on photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an analog ...
processes in the early 1930s.


Mechanical editing

In a sound-on-film process, a microphone captures sound and converts it into a signal that can be photographed on film. Since the recording is imposed linearly on the medium, and the medium is easily cut and glued, sounds recorded can be easily re-sequenced and separated onto separate tracks, allowing more control in mixing. Options expanded further when optical sound recording processes were replaced with magnetic recording in the 1950s. Magnetic recording offered a better signal-to-noise ratio, allowing more tracks to be played simultaneously without increasing noise on the full mix. The greater number of options available to the editors led to more complex and creative sound tracks, and it was in this period that a set of standard practices became established which continued until the digital era, and many of the notional concepts are still at the core of sound design, computerized or not: * Sounds are assembled together onto tracks. Many tracks are mixed together (or "dubbed together") to create a final film. * A track will generally contain only one "type" or group of sound. A track that contains dialogue only contains dialogue, a track that contains music should only contain music. Many tracks may carry all the sound for one group. * Tracks may be mixed a group at a time, in a process called predubbing. All of the tracks containing dialogue may be mixed at one time, and all of the tracks containing foley may be mixed at another time. In the process of predubbing, many tracks can be mixed into one. * Predubs are mixed together to create a final dub. On the occasion of the final dub, final decisions about the balance between different groups of sounds are made. Historically the Dubbing Mixer (UK) or Re-Recording Mixer (US) was the specialist who mixed all the audio tracks supplied by the Dubbing Editor (with the addition of 'live sounds' such as Foley) in a special Dubbing Suite. As well as mixing, he would introduce equalization, compression and filtered sound effects, etc. while seated at a large console. Often two or three mixers would sit alongside, each controlling sections of audio, e.g., dialogue, music, effects. In the era of optical sound tracks, it was difficult to mix more than eight tracks at once without accumulating excessive
noise Noise is unwanted sound considered unpleasant, loud or disruptive to hearing. From a physics standpoint, there is no distinction between noise and desired sound, as both are vibrations through a medium, such as air or water. The difference aris ...
. At the height of magnetic recording, 200 tracks or more could be mixed together, aided by Dolby noise reduction. In the digital era there is no limit. For example, a single predub can exceed a hundred tracks, and the final dub can be the sum of a thousand tracks.


Digital sound

The mechanical system of sound editing remained unchanged until the early 1990s, when
digital audio workstation A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrat ...
s acquired features sufficient for use in film production, mainly, the ability to synchronize with picture, and the ability to play back many tracks at once with CD-quality
fidelity Fidelity is the quality of faithfulness or loyalty. Its original meaning regarded duty in a broader sense than the related concept of ''fealty''. Both derive from the Latin word ''fidēlis'', meaning "faithful or loyal". In the City of London fin ...
. The quality of 16-bit audio at a 48 kHz
sampling rate In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of "samples". A sample is a value of the signal at a point in time and/or s ...
allowed hundreds of tracks to be mixed together with negligible noise. The physical manifestation of the work became computerized: sound recordings, and the decisions the editors made in assembling them, were now digitized, and could be versioned, done, undone, and archived instantly and compactly. In the magnetic recording era, sound editors owned trucks to ship their tracks to a mixing stage, and transfers to magnetic film were measured in hundreds of thousands of feet. Once the materials arrived at the stage, a dozen recordists and mix technicians required a half an hour to load the three or four dozen tracks a predub might require. In the digital era, 250 hours of stereo sound, edited and ready to mix, can be transported on a single 160 GB
hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
. As well, this 250 hours of material can be copied in four hours or less, as opposed to the old system, which, predictably, would take 250 hours. Because of these innovations, sound editors, as of 2005, face the same issues as other computerized, "knowledge-based" professionals, including the loss of work due to outsourcing to cheaper labor markets, and the loss of royalties due to ineffective enforcement of intellectual property rights.


Animation sound editing

In the field of animation, traditionally the sound editors have been given the more prestigious title of "film editor" in screen credits. As animated films are more often than not planned to the frame, the traditional functions of a film editor are often unnecessary.
Treg Brown Tregoweth Edmond "Treg" Brown (November 4, 1899 – April 28, 1984) was an American motion picture sound editor who was responsible for the sound effects in Warner Bros.' ''Looney Tunes'' and ''Merrie Melodies'' cartoons from 1936 to 1963. ...
is known to cartoon fans as the sound effects genius of
Warner Bros. Animation Warner Bros. Animation Inc. is an American animation studio which is part of the Warner Bros. Television Studios division of Warner Bros., a flagship of Warner Bros. Discovery. As the successor to Warner Bros. Cartoons, which was active from 19 ...
. Other greats of the field have included Jimmy MacDonald of the Walt Disney Studios, Greg Watson and Don Douglas at Hanna-Barbera, and Joe Siracusa of UPA and various TV cartoon studios.


Other fields

In the production of
radio program A radio program, radio programme, or radio show is a segment of content intended for broadcast on radio. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series. A single program in a series is called an episode. Radio networ ...
s and music, persons who manipulate sound recordings are known simply as "editors", in cases where the producers themselves do not perform the task.


See also

* Audio engineering *
Audio restoration Audio restoration is the process of removing imperfections (such as hiss, impulse noise, crackle, wow and flutter, background noise, and mains hum) from sound recordings. Audio restoration can be performed directly on the recording medium (f ...


References

{{Reflist Film editing Filmmaking occupations