Breakout Kings

Breakout Kings. Second season of the series on A&E with Domenick Lombardozzi from The Wire and Entourage. A classic tough guy cop.

The mix for this spot was a little rushed. Seems like they had a lot of sound effects already in place from another edit. But they were all mono so I kind of went through it and replaced or added to a lot of the original effects. It ended up sounding a lot better. But in fact the original mix sounded pretty cool at times. I was able to get some good ideas from it. Then made them sound a lot better. They put in whooshes and room tone all over the place! Kind of overkill but hey, it's a trailer after all.

At other times I questioned the orignal mix. You could tell the mixer was pretty inexperienced. Instead of removing the noise from a sound bite, they decided to cut around the dialogue and removed the noise only when the character was not talking. So you could hear these massive shifts in the noise floor (25 seconds in, Shea Daniels being interviewed outside). And because they cut out all the clean noise, that is, the noise in isolation when Shea was not talking, I had very little time to sample the noise in isolation. Anyone who knows much about noise, you know you need to isolate the noise in order to remove it. The plug-ins need a clean sample. And the worst thing you can do is to sample some noise that has a breath or other noise in it. Then your noise-reduction filter ends up taking out too much noise and you get this watery type of reverberant effect.

Long story short is I was still able to make the clip sound better and in fact, I think the average listener will not hear the noise floor jumps now. Not in the mix, at least. You can still hear it pretty clearly in isolation. But it sounds much better than before.