Mixing Audio & FX Levels in Pro Tools

Video Transcript

Let's talk about sound mixing. What's your first step? If you've imported a lot of soundtracks from your project and you want to start balancing them, you may be a little perplexed, where do I begin? The most important thing is the dialog track. If you go through and get you dialog balanced at the right level, everything else will ride against that. What we do is I have all my tracks organized together in groups. I have all my dialogs put together on all the tracks. In this case I have a very simple session. I have dialog one and two, you may have twelve or more tracks and music, you might have a few tracks. Effects seem to blossom out into a lot of tracks. The basic method is starting with your dialog track, you get your levels correct on those first and then you balance everything against it. Generally it works as pieces of the pie. What's happening, what's the most important thing going on. The dialog is always on top, you may have a section where you have a music montage where the music becomes more important. At that point the pie starts to change a little bit. You have your music becomes more important. Then you might have a heavy effects sequence then the effects take over. Some cases you have all three playing together, that's when you do a tricky balance, but the important thing to know is the dialog is pretty much always on top and that's the thing that tells your story. So that's the first thing you go to work on is get your dialog at the right level and balance everything against that.

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