From the course: Audio for Video Editors: Essential Terms

What audio assets do I need to deliver?

From the course: Audio for Video Editors: Essential Terms

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What audio assets do I need to deliver?

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- This is all fine and good in understanding the clips and the tracks and how they work together, but let's talk about what assets you need to deliver at the end of the project. There's a reason why I set up the stereo tracks the way I do in a session, and it's because you need to be able to separate out elements, as well to deliver different types of mixes. This template right here laid out gives you the ability to send narration to its own feed, all three tracks of dialogue to its own feed, and nat, etc., music, sound effects to its own feed and then out the master. It gives you the ability to say, well, I want to mix minus VO. And then you mute the VO sub. All the VO is muted out, and then you just can quickly output your mix. Of course, you have to organize all your tracks like this and your sub to be able to do that in one click. Stereo full mix is still king. That's what you always deliver. Music and sound effects is the next most prevalent mix that is delivered. And MD&E, or mix minus narration, that we just talked about, is also very common. Saving each element as its own WAV file is very, very important. How often do you go back into a project and different effects aren't there anymore, and you're perhaps missing a miscellaneous clip or two? If you have bounced out, if you have outputted each stem separately and the full mix, you can save those all together in an archive and always come back to it. You can have all the VO printed just the way it is, dialogue, nat sound, and music, and sound effects, so you don't have to worry about if all the clips come back or if all your plugins or inserts work, or your audio effects work. It's very clean to deliver. So when you do this, you should always think about, at the end, what you have to deliver. You should ask the client before you start, what do you have to deliver? Oftentimes, they don't know themselves. If it's a stereo delivery for a corporate client, this will cover all your bases. If you're delivering for broadcast for stereo, this will cover all your bases. But if you're deliver 5.1 or some kind of surround, make sure that you understand the different deliverables that they want. But this is a standard way to get all the assets that you need at the end. If you do this before you start, at the end, you won't be caught short having to work around a lot of things to get your assets out. Setting up your timeline and your track mixer like this may seem like overkill, but at the end of the day, especially when you're not sure what assets you have to deliver, being set up to be able to quickly deliver whatever material the client wants is crucial, and it'll help you in the long run archive the elements that you need so that you can come back to the project at any time.

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