I was a little nervous going into the first mix session tonight--I didn't have much idea of what was ahead of me. But I had a great time. The sound mix turns out to be one of those magic acts where you amazingly rid yourself of technical defects that you thought you'd have to live with forever--traffic, camera noise, and bad ambience can be reduced to the vanishing point by filtering out frequencies and making clever sound edits. And you get the immediate gratification of seeing the cleaned-up scene after mere seconds or minutes of work. Paul, the mixer, turns out to be a sweet guy, despite his shaky record of returning phone calls, and he's good at his job.
Another cheerful aspect of the mix is that we're moving so fast. Paul was astounded to get a sound track that was already in such good shape - all that work that Robin did on the rough mix has eliminated many hours of expensive mix time. We managed to clean up a good 25 or 30 minutes of film in one session, and after all these months of waiting around, forward motion is like a whiff of pure oxygen.
On the negative side, I'm being charged five dollars an hour more than I remember I was supposed to pay. I'll check it out with Bill, my producer, who negotiated the price. I can't complain too much: the price is still really low, and it looks as if I'll be needing fewer hours than expected.
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