Audio Post Pros?

RobSoul wrote on 2/17/2002, 11:29 AM

Hi,

Anyone have any advide on techniques or plug-ins that I can help clean up production dialog? I'm working on an indie film and in some instances the clicky-whirling 16mm camera sound is pretty loud. I've got a somewhat acceptable result using the Waves Q10 EQ to notch the offending frequencies. But I believe there's room for improvement. (I should mention that in the scenes with the worst camera sounds, the dialog is very low and quiet. So gating has only given me marginal results at best.)

Thanks for any tips!
Rob

Comments

Dide wrote on 2/17/2002, 2:54 PM

Maybe you can use the SF DX Noise reduction.
Make a sample/noiseprint of the sound you wanna pull down.
Fine tune it with a EQ(EQ the noise up), and use this print in SF DX Noise reduction
as the noiseprint.

(Sorry for my bad english)

Br,
Dide
The Netherlands.

DocBlase wrote on 2/18/2002, 2:18 AM

I assume the actors aren't moved away or dead? Get 'em into your studio and retrack the parts as they watch their original video. ADR that thang like the big guys do!

Borrow a good vocal mic if you can- the Rode NT 1000 is wonderful if you can get ahold of one- an EV RE20 or RE27 is also good, even a Shure SM 58 will get you nice presence.

Vegas does audio! :-)

MixNut wrote on 2/18/2002, 11:25 AM

First off...Don't gate if you can help it. Gating calls *more* attention to the noise in my opinion.

We use CEDAR or SF DX NR to remove steady-state noise from set dialogue with great success. Careful EQ will succeed in addition. Once you've removed all that you can without messing up the dialogue, ADD a steady-state room tone to help cover the camera noise and cover your edits.

RobSoul wrote on 2/18/2002, 11:45 PM

Thanks, all, for the ideas.

I found a somewhat decent result by using the Waves C1 to even out the volume levels and apply a very smooth gate, then Sonic Foundry's Noise Reduction (after capturing a noise print of the offending frequencies) and then the Waves Q10 to tightly EQ the remaining problem areas. (Which for me included dropping 18dB at 507 Hz with a Q of 50!) Rolling off the highs (7k and over) helped as well. And the last piece of the puzzle was dropping in some room tone for masking.

It's not perfect...but it's passable!

Rob

kkolbo wrote on 2/19/2002, 11:42 AM

Next time try to get the DP to put a blimp on the camera to shut it up. There isn't much excuse for the DP not doing that. Next mic it with good rear rejection pattern mics. 'nuf on that. You are here with what you have now.

An ADR session is really the best option here. It is not that expensive and can really help an indie film.

Even with an ADR session you will want to build a background room sound track. A room is never quiet except in extreme situations and the audience will notice the background noise missing. You might try all you can with EQ and then build a good background track that masks or compliments the contaminated sound. If it doesn't work you have the track for use behind the ADR.

I have many times had to quit tring to hide a noise contamination problem and actuall use it as a part of background concept. In one show there was an effect that was almost 100db in it's mechanical contamination. While every one was trying to figure out how to 'cover it' I used it's frequencies as the base for my effect. The end made the sound seem perfectly natural to the action.

Just an idea.
K

SonyEPM wrote on 2/19/2002, 12:15 PM

Here's a question regarding for RobSoul:

What kind of 16mm camera was used?

If it is a "noisy" camera (make me think ARRI-s or Bolex, no blimp), I hope they were able to feed it crystal sync. If not, it could be very hard to sync the audio and xfr'd video. I've run into this issue with an ARRI 35-3 shooting what was supposed to be "30fps". Since it wasn't locked to the Nagra or some crystal source, there was enough drift to make even 5 secs nearly impossible to sync. I wans't using Vegas at that time, but even if I was, it would have resulted in a ton of extra work.

Are you running into that...or is it just a camera rumble prob?

RobSoul wrote on 2/19/2002, 3:36 PM

Actually I'm quite a bit removed from the production end of things. I'm in St. Paul, MN and it was shot in Stokertown, PA. So I wasn't at all responsible for the production sounds (or the lack of blimping!). We've just been hired to score and mix the film. This makes ADR work pretty dang expensive if we want to cut it here! And anyway there is really no room left in the budget even if they did it themselves and shipped us the tracks.

Basically they had the sound comapany send us all the raw production DATs and we've assembled the audio track from scratch. (Adding SFX as needed.) Some scenes are passable almost as is. Others are very touchy. It's been a challenge! I personally would rather have a little camera noise creeping in here and there and apply less processing. It seems that processing the dialog almost draws more attention to it.

Rob