Tutorial: How to Record for Perspective
Why Record for Perspective?
I remember a time I first began editing when I was struggling to make a car door slam match the picture on film. I shifted the sound earlier, later, added and removed elements and it still didn't fit. The editor who was mentoring me said
If you're trying too hard to make a sound fit, then you're using the wrong sound.
He told me why: the car door sound effect should have been correct (it was the proper model and year), but it had been recorded inches away from the car. In the scene the camera was a few meters away from the car. This difference made the sound jarringly wrong.
In other words, no matter how you synchronize the sound with the picture, if the actual nature of the sound is wrong, it will never work. This taught me how important it is to use the proper sound:
- correct volume
- correct timbre
- correct perspective or apparent distance
Cheating the Effect
Of course volume is easy to adjust. If the tibre is wrong, you can choose another sound from the same family. However if the the sound's perspective or apparent distance doesn't match the picture, no matter what you try it will never completely fit.
Simply raising or lowering the volume of the sound may seem to make the sound closer or further away, but this is only a 'cheat'. The match will be close, but will invariably seem subtly, disturbingly, off.
What About Using Reverb?
One common trick is to apply reverb to closely-recorded sounds to make them seem further away. Even the best reverb plug-ins cannot replicate perspetive perfectly, however, and the result will sound slightly odd.
How do we solve this problem? Read on.
