In my latest blog I touched on loudness standards for video games or as I mentioned the lack thereof. Game audio is currently in a pretty confusing place compared to older industries like music and film. These disciplines have learned many lessons regarding loudness standards over the years as different bands and their engineers tried to push their mixes louder and louder so it's a little easier for music to be standardized in terms of loudness. For game audio people we are still trying to figure out how to set a standard across the board seeing how different and diverse games can be. Not to mention all the other aspects involved like the separate consoles, play time, range of gameplay, how people listen to games and the importance of audio for gameplay.
That aside I'm going to focus on mastering and how certain companies like Sony are recommending their games get mastered and some techniques being used in the industry at the moment. First I want to mention why things get mastered and what the term mastering essentially boils down to.
Why we master things:
For music, mastering is a key part of the production phase that happens after mixing. Once an album or song has been mixed it is sent to a mastering engineer who's responsibilities are:
- To balance the loudness and ensure it obeys industry standards
- Maintain and strengthen key sonic characteristics across the album (keep the 'feel' alive)
- Prepare for release to chosen platforms (Each with different standards and may need slightly different processes)
These are the base kind of goals of a mastering engineer and their role is very important in the industry. So how does this equate to game audio?
Well of course games need to adhere to some kind of loudness standard otherwise it would be total and utter chaos among different titles and studios. Also a game should be roughly the same volume throughout the entire experience right? Well not really, a lot of video games ebb and flow and have totally different feelings and scenes that change how much loud the audio is in any given scene. For instance you might have a really intense section of a game to contrast the quiet sections like in horror titles.
Basically what I'm trying to say is it's harder to pin down video games in terms of standards because they're all so different. However video games do need mastering, they need to be controlled and kept in check for the players sake. Mastering video game audio is entirely for the consumers, without any regulations or limits it's the players ears and their overall game experience that suffers. Could you imagine if you played a game that's key dialogue was too quiet or even too loud and you're constantly changing the volume just to keep up. Or if you were playing a horror game and a jump scare completely blew your ear drums out, or was too quiet and didn't really scare you at all. All these concepts are why mastering video game audio is an essential part of the process. But without any real standards to follow how do the professionals in the industry go about mastering their game audio?
How we can master video game audio:
Currently Sony (PlayStation's owner) is the only gaming company with their own loudness standard called ASWG-R001 which comes in two forms, Home and Portable. This is pretty progressive because it finally gives the game audio team a guideline to follow when creating PS4 titles. For most other titles like Xbox and PC most studios use the Europian TV standard called EBU R128 which is a very well know industry standard for TV and film. So when mastering game audio, different platforms have different standards that most studios try to follow.
When I was researching this topic I was often asking my self the question, " but isn't leveling your audio just part of mixing?" Maybe you thought the same thing?
In an interview with Garry Taylor, Audio Director at Creative Services Group, Sony Worldwide Studios and Marina Villanueva-Barreiro who is a senior engineer at SCEE Research and Development that Varun Nair conducted in 2015, Marina responded to the question, "In your experience, which is a preferable approach to mastering the mix — master as you mix or treat it as a separate process before the release of the game (similar to the music industry)?" Marina replied thusly,
"I believe audio mastering in games should be seen as a separate process, similarly to how it’s done in other industries. This gives audio designers the artistic freedom and flexibility to create the most amazing audio mixes without considering the restrictions imposed by the hardware or listening environment." - Marina Villanueva-Barreiro (Nair, 2015)
Garry also had a response to this question stating...
"Often, the teams creating content, who may have been working on a title for years, sometimes find themselves too close to a project to make an objective assessment of their work. That, at least, is my experience of game audio development over the 20 or so years I’ve been making games. In my opinion, mastering should be about bringing fresh ears to a project." - Garry Taylor (Nair, 2015)
So similar to music, mastering is treated as a separate process near the end of a project just before it's release. While controlling levels throughout the mixing process is obviously a key part of mixing, mastering is left to the end to ensure it's ready for release, especially if the same game is getting released onto separate platforms as their are differences across them all.
Now that we know about general loudness standards and when mastering happens lets look into some techniques for mastering your game audio. Your first goal is to ensure your mixing actually follows your set standard. Mastering is basically the final step in the mixing process so by this stage everything should be balanced properly so mastering is just making sure that your mix fits with your platform and nothing is lost to different variables such as varied speaker systems, headphones and so on. A lot of top end titles will actually have pre-set standards for different audio hardware such as TV speakers, sound systems and of course headphones. So getting the final mix is important to ensure no one misses out on your hard work just because they aren't wearing headphones.
As Marina mentioned in their interview earlier mastering game audio is similar to mastering in other disciplines like film and music. This means there's more to mastering game audio than just double checking your game meets set loudness standards mastering is also checking if your game makes sense. Mastering an album for instance, part of that process is making sure it follows and enhances set theme that the album is trying to convey. The same can be done for video games.
Before you release a game for good you want to make sure it's the best it possibly can be, maybe you've been mixing and play testing your game everyday for a couple of years, wouldn't you be so comfortable with how your game sounds why not do what other disciplines do and give your mix to someone else to master for you to ensure it's the best it could be. Maybe they touch up some EQs you've set on some dialogue or sound effects, maybe they balance your music a little better in that one scene so it has more of an impact? Maybe they noticed that something was off somewhere and they help you truly MASTER your mix before release. These are the kinds of things I didn't really see online when I was doing my research. I'm sure it happens somewhere but game audio is so new compared to film and music and there are no set traditions that I can find and sometimes it's really confusing for someone like me to try and learn how things actually work. People have been making games since the late 50's and even Pong had sound effects, surely there is a way to standardise our practice somehow? Or maybe it's such a unique and varied subject that there is no one standard and that standardising game audio would be a detriment to video games in general. These are the kinds of questions I find myself asking the void lately but I'm sure once I find my way into the industry these will be answered for me over time. Well I hope so anyway.
Thank you for reading I hope you learned something about mastering game audio.
References:
Izotope.com. (2019). What Is Mastering and Why Is It Important?. [online] Available at: https://www.izotope.com/en/blog/mastering/what-is-mastering.html [Accessed 14 Aug. 2019].
Nair, V. (2015). Sulpha: The New PS4 Mastering Suite. [online] Designingsound.org. Available at: http://designingsound.org/2015/06/04/sulpha-the-new-ps4-mastering-suit/ [Accessed 14 Aug. 2019].
Pressey, S. (2014). Audio loudness for gaming: The battle against ‘ear fatigue’ - MCV. [online] MCV. Available at: https://www.mcvuk.com/audio-loudness-for-gaming-the-battle-against-ear-fatigue/ [Accessed 14 Aug. 2019].
Nikolic, J. (2019). Loudness Standards - Full Comparison Table (music, film, podcast). [online] Youlean. Available at: https://youlean.co/loudness-standards-full-comparison-table/ [Accessed 14 Aug. 2019].
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