Brief a sound mix

What this is about

Most corporate films are mixed by the editor on headphones in a quiet room, and then played on a laptop in an open-plan office or a phone on a train. Those are different worlds. A mix that only works in ideal conditions is not finished, it is optimistic. The brief therefore has to name where the film will be heard, what has to stay intelligible when everything else is lost, and which technical target applies. Broadcast delivery works to EBU R128 around minus twenty-three LUFS; for online platforms, check the current spec of the channel you deliver to.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Name the playback situations in the brief: phone speaker, laptop, meeting room, trade-fair hall, each with its own enemy
• Dialogue intelligibility outranks every other decision; music that fights the voice loses, always
• Deliver split stems if any version, language or cutdown might follow — remixing from a stereo master is guesswork
• Loudness is a delivery spec, not a taste question: EBU R128 near minus twenty-three LUFS for broadcast, and the platform's own figure for online
• Room tone and ambience are what make cuts invisible; a mix without them sounds like a slideshow

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Lock the picture before the mix begins and say so in writing. Every trim afterwards shifts every music edit and every fade, and the rework lands on someone's invoice.
2. Write down where the film will play and in what order of importance. A film mainly watched on phones is mixed differently from one that opens a conference in a large hall.
3. Hand over organised audio: clean dialogue tracks, separate music, separate effects, plus the room tone recorded on location. Bounced stereo from the timeline throws away all options.
4. Fix problems at the source before reaching for plugins. Choosing the lapel mic instead of the camera mic beats any amount of noise reduction applied to the wrong take.
5. Set the hierarchy explicitly: voice on top, effects supporting, music underneath. When a music moment is allowed to lead, name the timecode rather than hoping it is obvious.
6. Ask for a loudness target that matches delivery — the broadcast norm for broadcast, the channel's published figure for online — and have the mix measured, not eyeballed.
7. Check the mix on at least three systems: good headphones, a laptop speaker and a phone. Anything that disappears on the phone needs to be louder or is not carrying meaning.
8. Request stems as part of delivery: dialogue, music, effects, and a version without voice. Cutdowns, subtitled edits and other languages all become cheap once those files exist.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Mixing on studio headphones only and discovering the voice vanishes on a phone
• Letting music sit at a level that feels great in the edit suite and buries every third word
• Delivering one stereo file and paying for a full remix when the first cutdown is ordered
• Forgetting room tone, so every dialogue cut has an audible hole in it

With TillyGen

Sound decisions start on the shoot day, so TillyGen keeps the audio requirements in the plan — which scenes need lapel mics, where room tone has to be recorded, and how much time that costs in the schedule.

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.