"Just Fix It in Post"

Everyone loves to say "just fix it in post," but that normally means a headache for the post-production team.

It's very common on the set of a film or any video shoot with audio for people to record something poorly, and say "we'll just fix it in post," leaving it to the post-audio engineers to toil, instead of just getting a better take.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of post-audio engineers can fix a lot of issues with recordings, but we can't do magic.

Recordings on set often have background noise, like A/C or nearby traffic, and a lot of the time we can edit around those things, or use an audio repair/cleaning software called Izotope Rx to remove as much background noise as possible.

Izotope Rx

However, when the crew on set clips the audio (distortion that occurs when an audio signal goes past the highest level a recording device can handle) because they weren't monitoring levels, and just submits to post anyways, we're going to have a hell of a time making that sound good.

Even worse, some people say "we'll just fix it in post" when the actor mumbled their lines or the take is just flat out bad. We can't wave our wands and fix a bad performance, but more than you'd expect, people think we can.

If you're saying, "we'll just fix it in post," please make sure it's feasible. We can't fix egregious errors. We can make them better, but nothings better than a good recording in the first place.

Audio engineers are talented and have all sorts of tricks, but we're not wizards.

A good litmus for "we'll just fix it in post" is as follows:

• Is the weird sound in between the dialogue? Yes, we can fix it in post.

• Is their a weird sound on top of the actor's dialogue? No, we can't fix that (we can make it better, but not better than a clean recording).

• Is the take great, but there's some background noise like a low hum of an A/C? Yes, we can fix that.

• Is there an ambulance driving by during a take? No, we can't fix that.

• Did the actor mumble their lines? No, we can't fix that.

General Rule of Thumb:

Is the issue compromising the overall quality of the take? If yes, then get another take.

Let's say there's an issue in the recording but it seems minor to you:

Does fixing it seem plausible? Would you want to figure out how to fix it? If yes, then fine. If not, then just get a better take.

Moral of the story: we can fix a lot in post, but not everything. If you're recording on set, do your best to get clean takes, and we can make it sound great from there.