Our first guest lecture of this year was with Freelance Sound Editor Lucy Johnstone, who spoke to us about Post Production Audio for Documentary Television.

Lucy was really engaging and informative, and the session was very interesting; the information about how little time is actually available for Post Production was especially nice. Until now I had been operating off of the presumption that Post Production was something that people would have weeks to do, which is of course the case with feature films. Not the case with TV! Lucy outlined that for a 1 hour (46 minutes without ad breaks) programme, around 4 days would be the norm, from beginning to final mix. I definitely need to learn my keyboard shortcuts and practice if I want to be able to work that quickly and efficiently.

She then went through some tips for editing Dialogue from production audio, something she specialises in, and played a raw clip of a short trailer from Grand Designs, both before and after she went through Dialogue and Ambience and Atmosphere editing techniques; getting us to pick out what we felt needed to be done to the sound to bring it up to par. I think I did pretty well, but I now need to have a look at RX5’s Ambience Matching tool, an application that is particularly useful when editing dialogue.

Lucy then showed us a few helpful ways we could improve efficiency in our Pro Tools workflow, and stressed that we should be duplicating everything, so that originals can always be sourced at the exact timecode they were originally placed, if anything goes wrong. After that we spoke a little about jobs in the industry, the differences between in-house and freelance work, and what equipment she works on, before she took a few questions.

This lecture was really enjoyable, and incredibly informative. I’m very thankful to David that he was able to bring Lucy in, and am already looking forward to the next lecture.