With the deadline of a sound replacement task slowly creeping up, my group, the Tragically Discarded Little Dreamboats and I decided to head into the Neve studio to work on some Automated Dialog Replacement (ADR) to replace the vocals of our chosen scene. Overall we have decided to replace all sounds from a 2 and a half minute scene from the first Avengers movie. The scene has been slightly edited but the original can be found here [1].
The first studio session we had turned out pretty poorly as we tried to use the Mid-Side (MS) microphone technique and missed a critical step in the setup of this technique, which lead to some really bad phase issues in the recordings. The setup of the microphones was fine and although not looking exactly like this, it did hit the same mark as the side mic was set to figure 8 pattern and the middle mic was cardioid.;
[2]
[3]
The problem, however, lay in the way which we had setup the microphones in the DAW. When recording with this technique, the figure-8 microphone track needs to be duplicated with one being panned hard left and the other hard right. One of these then needs to be phase flipped. Technically, this cancels out the microphone, however, when the cardioid mic is brought up, a nice stereo sound is achieved [2]. In the recording, we forgot this step, and as a result were left with some weird sounding recordings. As well as this, we had a distant mic which was out of phase with the mics setup in a the MS technique and made the few takes we did sound really discoloured and tinny.
We then came back a few days later and have since re-recorded half of our ADR using only a RODE NT2A microphone. We chose to keep it simple as we had wasted a little bit of time on bad recordings with the errors we had and it’s so far turned out really well!
Today, I am in the MIDI studio and then the C24 studio. We are working on our soundtrack for the clip and also recording some Foley and the rest of our ADR. So far, we have gotten most of the soundtrack done. We are aiming to recreate the marvel theme with a Jazzy sound instead of large orchestral noises.
By the end of tomorrow’s (Saturday) studio sessions, we hope that the clip will be fully completed, with our ADR, soundtrack, foley, ATMOS and other elements all correctly timed and fitted with the movie scene.
Connor 
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