Mic names on the tracks, where they belong

On set, the sound mixer names every channel. The boom is called boom, and each lav carries the name of the person wearing it. Those names are the quickest way to know who is on which track.

With B/side you see those names on your timeline, each on the right track. You do not need the sound report open beside you to remember that track four is the groom’s lav.

What you get

• Names on every channel of a multitrack sound file, as the sound mixer wrote them.
• The right track for each name, so a lav is always where you expect it.
• Names that travel to the mix, so nobody has to relabel anything later.
• Names in your hand-off files, so the sound team opens your cut and sees the same labels you used.

Why it matters

Cutting dialogue is choosing between mics. When the names are on the tracks, you pick the cleaner lav for a line by reading the track name. You are not soloing one track after another to find the right voice.

It matters again at turnover. When the cut goes to sound, the mixer sees the groom’s lav where it should be, with its name on it. Fewer questions come back to the cutting room.

Good for conversations

Interviews and podcasts often have a mic on every person. Reading the names on the tracks tells you who is speaking where, which makes a first pass through a long conversation much quicker. It also makes it easy to bring one voice up and another down in the mixer, because you can see whose fader is whose.

Nothing to set up

Ingest a multitrack sound file and the names are already there. There is no relabelling step, and no spreadsheet to keep in step with the timeline.