sound mixing the room noise

S

sean90291

Veteran
I have my audio (dialogue) in a timeline, and over all the quality is good. Problem is, there is "room noise" (that universal hiss) that I have chopped up a bit because if there is silence and there's a "glitch" or "imperfection" in the sound (e.g., someone on set bumped a lighting stand) I chop out that sound. That leaves "gaps" in the room noise. The silence suddenly drops out and becomes TOTAL SILENCE (no room noise, no nothing). Just wondering what you guys do to deal with this naturally. I suppose you could search sounddogs and find a somewhat similar roomnoise and put this in under everything? is this how you do it? Sound mixing is certainly an art unto itself.

Cheers.
 
You generally would record 1 - 2 minutes of "tone" at each location. This allows you to have a lengthy recording of the nat sound in the room that you can then drop into the scene to smooth out these gaps.

Your observations are spot on, unfortunately you're already in post!

The thing to do now is try and find the longest sections of audio that you can where no one was talking / moving etc. and loop them into place to smooth things out.
 
you loop the sections with sound forge? or just in the NLE. (I don't know why no one I was shooting with suggested getting room noise...it was my first short...and first stint behind the camera...so I didn't know fully what I needed until I started editing (for the firs time too)).

maybe the whole premise of getting 2 minutes of room noise is now sort of redundant with digital technology (can't 5 seconds of room noise be looped to be an hour of room noise?). thing is, if this is feasible, I'm not sure the best way to do it. sound forge?
 
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sean90291 said:
you loop the sections with sound forge?
Click to expand...

You could loop them in whatever you want, but I just create additional tracks in Avid and drop my tone in there, mixing as needed. I overlap tone with the breaks in audio and then fade it in and back out. I don't loop it over the entire scene... only where needed.

sean90291 said:
(can't 5 seconds of room noise be looped to be an hour of room noise?)
Click to expand...

You want as much material as possible from which to draw your loop. If you only have five seconds then you suddenly notice that a bird chirped or a floorboard creaked or the fan cycled and those sounds get heard over and over and over. Best bet is to always grab a minute. Five second loops are for your last resort needs.
 
Looping 5 secs worth of audio also just increases the amount of work you have to do in post.
Much easier to run the tape for a couple minute to capture room noise. Youll be happy you did.
 
Ah yes, you're right. I certainly notice now that seemingly "perfect" short audio clips of room tone exhibits variations (and even the odd distant bird chirp!) which are quite noticeable when it's looped over and over. Next time I'll make a point of getting room tone after all. For the time being, though, it looks like I'm able to creatively string together enough room tone to fill my spots. Thanks for the advice.

I find in Avid I get "clicks" at the beginning/end points of sound edits on the timeline. I tend to use 2 frame dissolves to remove the clicks: just a technique I came upon myself. Any other options to fix this issue in Avid?
 
sean90291 said:
I find in Avid I get "clicks" at the beginning/end points of sound edits on the timeline. I tend to use 2 frame dissolves to remove the clicks: just a technique I came upon myself. Any other options to fix this issue in Avid?
Click to expand...


check if all your sound files are int the same compression..mixing 44 khz and 48 brings this kinds of proelbems...but i actually also have anyway those clicks!!! but not so muyc as before when i got mixing 48 and 44 hz sound files
 
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