How To Do Music Video Playback

Andrew from D&D Microphones here. Today we're on set with location sound mixer Fletcher, but he's also a playback engineer. You've worked with music video stars like Rob Zombie, Eminem, you did the Katy Perry Roar music video. We are blessed to have him here and today he's going to teach us how to do playback. So let's go check out his custom cart. So Fletcher, what do you do when you first get this out? You're going to want to get the song as soon as possible. You want to make sure the file's good, everything's there. You never know sometimes till day of. A lot of times the record label will want to keep the track secret, so it's purposefully held back from you. But if you can get it beforehand, like the day before, it's great to put the time code to it then. Okay, so you're adding time code to their music. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes the label will actually give you the track already time coded, but most of the time they'll give you like a stereo, just standard final mix. Sure. I'll export that as a mono sum track and then marry that to an LTC time code track. So basically it's a mono audio track, but the time code is married to it. So wherever you start the track, the time code will correspond exactly to that moment. Exactly the point for the rest of the day. That chorus will always be that time code. Exactly. Perfect. So you've got it all set up in a Pro Tools like template it looks like. Yeah, yeah. I like to use Pro Tools because you can visually see the waveform. It makes it easy for dynamic sections. You can literally just go to where the beat drops or blah, blah, blah, but also you can make your marker locations, and I like to typically listen to the song beforehand. You know, you'll mark the intro, verse one, you know, maybe another little intro moment, then verse two, chorus, whatnot, whatnot. So we've got it all set up. Looks like we're ready to go. Let's go take a look at what you do now once it's time to ready the wall. All right. Let's check it out. So things are all set up over at the cart. Where does the signal need to go on set? Okay, so you're splitting your mono audio track and your time code track. The audio is going obviously through the speaker, but then you might have people who need in-ears. That's a whole other bridge you might have to cross, but the time code, the first place you're definitely sending it is to a smart slate, and I use a Comtech transmitter. It's on the back side. Comtech receiver here. So the time code is married to the track, so basically every time you start at a chorus, it'll correspond to the time code in the exact same moment. So that's for syncing purposes in post. Exactly. So is there any time, though, in post-production where they don't use time code? There is. A lot of the times they'll just go really quick with it. So if you can send scratch audio to camera, then you can do that. I like to use Sennheiser G3s or the Zaxcom IFBs. If you do that, then they can just pop it into PluralEyes and sync it up that way. So even PluralEyes is used at the highest level of production. It's not just always time code. That's really cool. But sometimes you need to do playback for a narrative movie, and they still need to capture dialogue at the same time as playback. So let's learn how that's done. Let's say we're in a nightclub. We need to shoot a dialogue scene, but there needs to be like 50 extras behind us dancing to the beat. How do we do that? Okay, so ideally you'll know what the song is beforehand. Okay. And what you'll do is create a thump track to the BPM of that song. Okay. And what the thump track is, is just what it sounds like, a low-frequency thump at 50 hertz, and that's going to provide the rhythm for your extras in your background to kind of groove it out, and you'll still be able to capture the dialogue from the shotgun as long as you do a roll-off, a low-frequency roll-off. Let's take a look. We got a thump track all queued up here. Yeah. And there you go. That's a thump track. And if we had a low cut on this microphone, you know, we would not hear that at all. If we had like a subwoofer instead of this tweeter, you guys would really be feeling that thump. What else do we need to think about, though, when it comes to all this kind of stuff? We just got to think about the low cut, 50 hertz, and we got to think about the BPM of the music that post-production is planning on using. Yeah. Ideally, you'll know exactly which song it is before you create the thump track, but if you can get the BPM somewhat close, you know, the rhythms will kind of match. And there you have it. We need a subwoofer, a thump track, and a low-cut filter in order to record narrative dialogue with a dancing scene going on behind us. And that's how you do audio playback on music videos and how you record dialogue on narratives when you get an audience behind you dancing to the beat. If you like the channel, don't forget to hit follow, like, and subscribe, and that little notification bell. Leave a comment below and tell us what you want us to do on the channel. The best comment is going to win a Deity shotgun microphone. I'm Andrew from Deity Microphones, and thanks for watching.