My friend, Van Dewitt, recently put the finishing touches on his crew's first mountain boarding DVD. The DVD is called "Let IT Happen". You can see a web version of the video on their site at http://www.dirtstararmy.com/dvd2009/ . They wanted to get a commentary track option put onto the video as an additional feature to give the DVD a little more value. I've been volunteering (almost obnoxiously so) my services to Van for a while now and he finally took advantage of my offer.
We met with most of the participants involved before hand so we could figure out what the expectation was and what they were hoping to get out of this activity. In the end we planned to record 5 guys watching the video talking about the footage and giving some behind the scenes insight.
To setup for the session I rearranged my basement studio to make for a comfortable move watching environment. I setup 3 microphones on stands and used my 2 lavaliere microphones to mic the two guys who weren't close to the microphones on stands. This allowed me to have each participants voice recorded to their own track for mixing and panning. I used my M-audio project mix IO to simultaneously record these 5 tracks.
To sync the commentary to the video I simply imported a Quick time version of the movie into pro tools and setup my 50-inch LCD television as a secondary monitor. With this as the setup I was able to record all 5 tracks in perfect sync with the existing audio (the audio that was imported from the Quick time video).
We recorded two takes. Each take was recorded on different tracks altogether. At the end of the recording session my pro tools session had 11 tracks. 10 vocal tracks from the guys doing the commentary (5 tracks for each take) and 1 music track that was imported from the quick time video. I setup two stereo AUX buses and sent the vocal tracks from the first take to AUX-1/2 and the vocal tracks from the second take to AUX-3/4.
I used a vocal leveler compressor on each individual vocal track, tweaking the settings only where completely necessary. EQ on all the tracks was already pretty close to perfect so I left this where it was. The last thing I did at a single track level was to pan each track in such a way so that the stereo presence of the vocal tracks gave a feeling of sitting in a room with these guys.
Once both takes were setup and sounding good on their own I used automation on the aux tracks to switch between the two different takes depending on which one had better commentary at any given point in time. Finally I mixed the original audio from the DVD in at a very low volume level so you could still hear the original soundtrack and sound of the DVD. Once the mix was finalized and mastered for DVD audio levels and dynamic range I bounced the finished product to a 24-bit wave file to send over to the guy doing the DVD authoring.
I would love to post a copy of the finished result, however I'm not sure what the marketing plans are for their DVD and I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate me posting it online for free. I'll try to post a 1 or 2 minute sample in the next little bit, but to hear the whole thing I suggest you purchase their DVD. To be honest the commentary track is very entertaining, their footage
and the production value of the video is simply amazing especially if you knew what their budget looked like.
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