Headroom

What this is about

Performances are not predictable: an actor shouts a line nobody shouted in rehearsal, a door slams harder than ever before. Headroom is what absorbs that surprise. On set, recordists aim dialogue well below full scale so peaks land safely; modern 32-bit float recorders relax this pressure but do not abolish gain staging through the rest of the chain. In the mix, headroom keeps processing clean and leaves room for the final limiting stage. Lost headroom shows up as harshness long before it shows up as visible clipping.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Leave generous space on set — a surprised peak is unrepeatable
• 32-bit float eases recording levels but not the rest of the chain
• In the mix, headroom is what the final limiter lives on

With TillyGen

Technical notes like required headroom sit next to the deliverable in TillyGen, so the value survives the handover between departments.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.