Sound for Video in a Studio: Sync, Wild Tracks and ADR

Sound is half of a film and gets perhaps a tenth of the planning. The camera department has a shot list, a lens list and a lighting plan; the sound department, if there is one, has a bag and a question about where the fridge is. Yet an audience will sit through a soft shot and will not sit through a line they cannot hear.

This guide is about sound for a video shoot in a small hire studio: sync in a treated room, dialogue in a room that is not, wild tracks and room tone, ADR in a booth afterwards, and handing it all to the editor in a usable state.

Why sound is the half that gets forgotten

Pictures are visible on the monitor. Sound problems are only audible on headphones, and on a busy set the person wearing them is often the only one who knows the take has a problem.

A studio reverses that order, because a room built for filming has already made the acoustic decisions. The question becomes which room, and what to do in the one that was not treated.

Sync sound, and what a treated room does

Sync sound is the dialogue recorded at the same time as the picture — the words as the actor said them. It is always the best version of the performance and often the only one, because a non-actor will not say it the same way twice. The room's job is to let that recording be used as it is.

Two things wreck sync sound: noise from outside and reflections from inside. Treatment addresses the second — soft surfaces that stop the voice bouncing back onto the mic. Isolation addresses the first, and it is a construction job: mass and air gaps between the room and the world. Studio B is built as a room within a room and sound treated, so it does both: dialogue comes back without the smear of the room on it and without the building leaking in underneath. The distinction is spelled out in podcast recording: what you actually need.

Studio A is not sound treated: planning dialogue around it

Studio A — 1,200 sq ft, a white drive-in infinity cove, full blackout, ground-level access through the roller door — is not sound treated. Scope says so plainly because the alternative is a production discovering it on the day. A big hard room with a cove is reflective, and a roller door is not sound-proof.

That rules out careless dialogue, not dialogue. If the shoot needs the floor, the cove or the drive-in, plan the sound for the room you are in:

• Get the mic close: a boom worked in tight or a lav changes the ratio of voice to reflection in your favour.
• Soften what you can. Rugs out of shot, blankets on stands behind the camera and bodies in the room all absorb reflections. The cove stays bare because it is in frame.
• Schedule the talking for the quiet. Tell the studio when the dialogue scenes run, and keep the roller door closed while cameras roll.
• Record wild lines straight after each scene, and budget for ADR if the take still does not hold.

Or split the day: action, movement and anything shot MOS in Studio A, dialogue in Studio B. A whole-building buyout from £1,500 a day gives a production both rooms with nobody else on site. Neither room is a sound stage, and most shoots do not need one.

Wild tracks and room tone

A wild track is sound recorded without the camera running. The commonest kind is a wild line: the actor repeats a line, in position, immediately after the take, while the camera department resets. No picture means no boom-in-shot problem and the mic can go wherever it likes. Wild lines are the cheapest fix in sound and the most neglected, because they need thirty seconds of a set that wants to move on.

Room tone is the other wild track: thirty seconds of the room doing nothing, recorded with the same mic in the same position and the same people standing quietly. The editor lays it under every cut and every replaced word so the background never jumps. Every room has a tone, including a treated one, and every scene needs its own; it is the last thing recorded and the first thing forgotten.

ADR and voiceover in the booth

ADR — automated dialogue replacement, though nothing about it is automated — is re-recording a line in a booth after the shoot, with the actor watching the picture and matching their own lips. It rescues the take with a siren under it, replaces the line the writer changed in the edit, and records narration. The booth's virtue is that it adds nothing: the voice is recorded dry and the sound editor puts it back into the scene with the room tone and a little reverb.

Scope's music studio has a treated vocal booth with a large-diaphragm condenser and nearfield monitors. It books dry — you run the session — at £80 for a half day and £150 for a full day, or with an engineer at £140 for a half day and £280 for a full day. For ADR, take the engineer unless you have done it before: cueing picture, running beeps and managing takes is a job in itself, for £60 more across a half day. The choice is laid out in dry hire vs an engineer; the voiceover booth hire page has the rest.

Bring the picture with burnt-in timecode, the sync takes and the scene's room tone. An actor who hears their own on-set line before each take matches it far better than one working from the script.

The take with the perfect performance and the siren under it is not lost. It is a wild line you have not recorded yet.

Mic choices, in general terms

There are two mics on most video shoots and they are not rivals. The boom — a directional mic on a pole, worked from just outside the frame — gives the most natural voice and follows the action; it needs an operator and somewhere to hide. The lav — a small mic clipped or hidden on the body — is consistent wherever the camera is and survives a wide shot, at the cost of clothing rustle and a slightly closed sound.

Record both, on separate tracks. The boom is the sound you want; the lav saves the take when the boom could not get in. In a treated room the boom can work from further out, because there is less room to pick up; in Studio A it wants to be as tight as the frame permits. Scope does not publish an in-house kit list, so bring your own or ask what can be supplied when you enquire.

Monitoring

Somebody wears closed-back headphones on the recorder for every take, and that person has the authority to ask for another one. The camera's headphone socket is not the same thing: it tells you a signal arrived, not what it sounded like. Leave headroom; a quiet recording can be raised, a clipped one cannot be fixed.

For playback, Studio B has a dedicated edit and playback area, and the music studio's nearfield monitors are where a voice recording is judged properly. On a multi-camera day the recorder is the clock everything aligns to — multi-camera interview set-ups covers timecode and clapping when there is none.

Delivering sound to the edit

The best recording in the world is a liability if the editor cannot find it. Deliver sound as its own set of files, one folder per shoot day, with a sound report listing every take, its timecode, which track carries which mic and anything the recordist noticed. Keep the original sample rate and bit depth and mix nothing down; the editor wants the isolated tracks, not your opinion of the balance.

The terms, including the 48-hour cancellation notice, are on the FAQ and the full card on the rates page; the vocabulary — MOS, wild track, room tone, ADR — is in the film production glossary.