The Silent Cost of 'Good Enough'

I learned the hard way that accepting 'good enough' sound on set can be a much more expensive problem in post-production. On an indie horror film, the director was rushing, and the on-set audio tech was under-resourced, leading to a lot of muddy footsteps and prop interactions masked by dialogue.

The problem was that I thought I could magically 'fix' everything in Foley. I ended up spending three times longer on that project than estimated, recreating every single footstep, every rustle of clothing, and every creak of a door, not just to enhance, but to salvage. The initial cost savings on set for better audio was instantly negated by my overtime.

The solution is a pre-production meeting with the entire sound team, including me, the Foley artist. I now push for early discussions about the sonic landscape of a scene, identifying potential Foley-heavy sequences, and advocating for proper on-set sound capture. It's far cheaper to get a clean source sound, even if it's not perfect, than to rebuild everything from scratch. Does anyone else find themselves constantly fighting fires that could have been avoided with better initial planning?