By Randi Altman
Many of you might already know Terence Curren, owner of Burbank’s AlphaDogs, from his hosting of the monthly Editor’s Lounge, or his podcast The Terence and Philip Show, which he co-hosts with Philip Hodgetts. He’s also taken to producing fun, educational videos that break down the importance of color or ADR, for example.
He has a knack for offering simple explanations for necessary parts of the post workflow while hammering home what post pros bring to the table. You can watch them here:
I reached out to Terry to find out more.
How do you pick the topics you are going to tackle? Is it based on questions you get from clients? Those just starting in the industry?
Good question. It isn’t about clients as they already know most of this stuff. It’s actually a much deeper project surrounding a much deeper subject. As you well know, the media creation tools that used to be so expensive, and acted as a barrier to entry, are now ubiquitous and inexpensive. So the question becomes, “When everyone has editing software, why should someone pay a lot for an editor, colorist, audio mixer, etc.?”
ADR engineer Juan-Lucas Benavidez
Most folks realize there is a value to knowledge accrued from experience. How do you get the viewers to recognize and appreciate the difference in craftsmanship between a polished show or movie and a typical YouTube video? What I realized is there are very few people on the planet who can’t afford a pencil and some paper, and yet how many great writers are there? How many folks make a decent living writing, and why are readers willing to pay for good writing?
The answer I came up with is that almost anyone can recognize the difference between a paper written by a 5th grader and one written by a college graduate. Why? Well, from the time we are very little, adults start reading to us. Then we spend every school day learning more about writing. When you realize the hard work that goes into developing as a good writer, you are more inclined to pay a master at that craft. So how do we get folks to realize the value we bring to our craft?
Our biggest problem comes from the “magician” aspect of what we do. For most of the history of Hollywood, the tricks of the trade were kept hidden to help sell the illusion. Why should we get paid when the average viewer has a 4K camera phone with editing software on it?
That is what has spurred my mission. Educating the average viewer to the value we bring to the table. Making them aware of bad sound, poor lighting, a lack of color correction, etc. If they are aware of poorer quality, maybe they will begin to reject it, and we can continue to be gainfully employed exercising our hard-earned skills.
Boom operator Sam Vargas.
How often is your studio brought in to fix a project done by someone with access to the tools, but not the experience?
This actually happens a lot, and it is usually harder to fix something that has been done incorrectly than it is to just do it right from the beginning. However, at least they tried, and that is the point of my quest: to get folks to recognize and want a better product. I would rather see that they tried to make it better and failed than just accepted poor quality as “good enough.”
Your most recent video tackles ADR. So let’s talk about that for a bit. How complicated a task is ADR, specifically matching of new audio to the existing video?
We do a fair amount of ADR recording, which isn’t that hard for the experienced audio mixer. That said, I found out how hard it is being the talent doing ADR. It sounds a lot easier than it actually is when you are trying to match your delivery from the original recording.
What do you use for ADR?
We use Avid Pro Tools as our primary audio tool, but there are some additional tools in Fairlight (included free in Blackmagic’s Resolve now) that make ADR even easier for the mixer and the talent. Our mic is Sennheiser long shotgun, but we try to match mics to the field mic when possible for ADR.
I suppose Resolve proves your point — professional tools accessible for free to the masses?
Yeah. I can afford to buy a paint brush and some paint. It would take me a lot of years of practice to be a Michelangelo. Maybe Malcolm Gladwell, who posits that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something, is not too far off target.
What about for those clients who don’t think you need ADR and instead can use a noise reduction tool to remove the offensive noise?
We showed some noise reduction tools in another video in the series, but they are better at removing consistent sounds like air conditioner hum. We chose the freeway location as the background noise would be much harder to remove. In this case, ADR was the best choice.
It’s also good for replacing fumbled dialogue or something that was rewritten after production was completed. Often you can get away with cheating a new line of dialogue over a cutaway of another actor. To make the new line match perfectly, you would rerecord all the dialogue.
What did you shoot the video with? What about editing and color?
We shot with a Blackmagic Cinema Camera in RAW so we could fix more in post. Editing was done in Avid Media Composer with final color in Blackmagic’s Resolve. All the audio was handled in Avid’s Pro Tools.
What other topics have you covered in this series?
So far we’ve covered some audio issues and the need for color correction. We are in the planning stages for more videos, but we’re always looking for suggestions. Hint, hint.
Ok, letting you go, but is there anything I haven’t asked that’s important?
I am hoping that others who are more talented than I am pick up the mantle and continue the quest to educate the viewers. The goal is to prevent us all becoming “starving artists” in a world of mediocre media content.
