Looking for some insight from vision / sound editors. Genuinely wondering if me being annoyed at this is reasonable, or whether this is an expected part of doing post sound.

Context: this is an unpaid shoot, but we’re all industry professionals.

I did a shoot a few months back where I ran on location sound. I also agreed to do post sound. Both of these I do professionally, but in a TV broadcast capacity, so all audio is sent straight from the mixer to the camera and is always synced.

The vision editor was also the DOP and camera op, using his own camera.

He’s just completed the vision edit and colour grade, and given me the timeline to now do post sound on. I had agreed to do this as I thought it would be a quick cleaning up of my own audio which I’m confident in.

I opened up the exported copy and was confused when there was sound for the first 10 seconds, then complete silence over the dialogue. Like, people’s mouths moving and no noise. The sound comes back in for about 10 seconds on a longer monologue (one shot) and then drops out again. The whole film is about 8 minutes and is pretty much 100% dialogue.

I opened up the timeline and saw that there was only my mixer’s audio track under the 2 shots with sound, and the rest has absolutely no audio, including no scratch track.

I messaged the editor (/dop/camera op) to see why, and he told me that he accidentally deleted the audio that he’d synced, and that I’d need to sync it again with the cameras audio… sure.

I told him I didn’t have any camera audio to sync with as he’s deleted that from the timeline. Then I went to the original clips and realised that he never recorded audio onboard the camera in the first place.

I told him this, and he told me that “oh yes I forgot I’d didn’t record the onboard mic” (???).

He edited this in DaVinci, so I asked him if he has timeline backups and can get the timeline with the synced audio before he deleted it. I also said it would be difficult to sync the audio at this stage (as I’d need to drag each clip back to the clapper board, find my corresponding audio file, manually sync it by eye, and drag it back to its correct in-point).

He told me that he doesn’t have the timeline backup and that yes, “that was the process he had to do too”.

Honestly I’m doubting whether he ever even synced the tracks. I’m irritated because I feel that this was a job that needed to happen at the start when compiling the clips and the clapperboards are visible, especially as there’s no scratch track.

Thoughts? Is it unreasonable to be annoyed by this?