While on The Last of Us Part II Remastered (2024), I had the responsibility of leading a team that was in charge of mixing and mastering cinematic descriptions for the game. Having done this by myself on The Last of Us Part I (2022) I was well aware of the challenges that came with this feature, so we started off in a much better place than I had on the previous project.

Dividing the content became paramount, as it would be quite a feat for any one of us to handle the full 4+ hours worth of cinematics by ourselves. And since The Last of Us games are very dynamic, we knew that each cinematic description would need its own unique, hand-tuned mix pass as we couldn’t rely on batch processing to one common loudness level for every cinematic.

Luckily, though, the team was up for the challenge and we were able to support the feature, helping bring the much needed feature on another one of Naughty Dog’s games. And because of this I was able to get more experience mixing the game in-engine, as I was in charge of any in-engine mix moves that needed to take place when cinematic descriptions were enabled.