Audio problems in my production

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paa79594

Active member
Hey I am new to the forums, looks like a great place to seek help.. anyways I just started a project and and we are now in post and my audio is pretty bad.

I shot inside a grocery store and the building has many generators and loud machines etc. I am using Final Cut Express and I have access to an older version of Soundtrack. Is there anything I can do to cut out the loud noises in almost each scene?

Thanks in advance, Paul.
 
By the older version of Soundtrack, do you mean before it was Sountrack Pro when it was just a music program? If so, I don't think you have any noise reduction tools in that version. You might be able to use a high pass to get rid of some of the hum and maybe notch out some other offending frequencies. Just don't go to far and cut so much that the voice sounds pinched and unnatural.

If it is really horrible noise level, then ADR might be your only hope.
 
Yeah its the standard Soundtrack program. I've tried hum reducers etc. and nothing seems to work. ADR would be okay however majority of our scenes are improv.
 
You can still ADR improv scenes - presuming you have a strong enough dialog track to let your talent listen to what they said and repeat it. You'll probably want to go line-by-line to get the best match.

This is why you wear headphones during the shoot. You could have worked to reduce as much of the background noise as possible during the shoot. Lesson learned. :-)

Phil
 
Think of audio post production as being able to clean up your audio around 5%. It can not save bad audio but make OK audio better.

Post up a sample and we can tell you if it salvageable.

Cheers
 
Noise reduction isn't probably going to work well on multiple motors. You might get some relief from a harmonic filter, don't know if there are any in ST. Roger Nichols sells a filter that has harmonic filters in it. But the odds are that with multiple sources by the time you get rid of the "noise" your dialog will sound bad.
 
paa79594 said:
thanks for the help...
Click to expand...

Well he wasn't polite but that is actually pretty true. There is a cruder phrase I have heard a lot in post about the difficulty in polishing turds.

And while not nec. helpful it comes from the very common and VERY frustrating truth that folks tend to blow off these issues and then expect miracles in post, and the ones who expect the biggest miracles are the ones who are least willing to pay for it. The whole death scene from Mosquito Coast was constructed from snips of various take because it was filmed in a boat and the lapping water was stepping on words. But they had a professional sound editor (actually a large crew but only one was doing that reconstruction) who probably spent weeks getting that right. You can't just record anything and have it magically transformed into what you wanted to record. You actually have to record it.

So before getting miffed realize that what was said was true and your probably the hundredth director that he has had ask him for advice about salvaging tracks that SHOULD have been recorded better in the first place.

In your case as folks said above some EQ might help, some NR might help, but the only way to get clean tracks is to ADR. The odds of someone who doesn't know that much about sound getting good or even passable results are slim but give it a shot you have nothing to loose.
 
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