How to get rid of Room Reverb sounding audio...(need help)

C

Crossroads Films

Active member
I'm in the process of making a movie and I wanna know whats the cheapest way on dealing with a room with alot of reverberation. I heard putting pillows in the corners helps...I see those rectangle sound reverb stoppers people put around but is there a way to make home made DIY methods of this to cut down cost a bit?
 
Carpet or rugs are your friend as well. Especially since not that often you are showing people's feet. We usually cover the floor with carpet remnants when we can.
 
Some other things that can help are: "don't shout to much, speak clearly, slowly (not exagerated but not rush rush neither)
Mic as close as possible
Doing some EQ helps also to cut out some of the "rumble" reverb stuff.... (but that's something to do in post). But this won't "kill the reverb", it only will "make it sound a little bit better"....
Going from "mmh,sounds weird" to "ok...it's better...not perfect, but better".

And reverb is sometimes needed to give it a "natural" sound... But if it's to record music or VO....carpets, curtains.... But even then...
 
The OP didn't mention what mic he was using. In a room with echo, it is best to not use a shotgun mic. Using a small condensor hyper will work better. And of course, mic as close as possible as dre mentioned.

Grant
 
Remember that proper location scouting includes serious consideration of the ambient noise and the site acoustics.
If you have a really reverberant room, don't get your hopes up that you will be able to do anything significant for cheap (or fast).
If decent dialog recording on location is really important, then changing locations may be the better option.

Your options include:
1) Make the room less reverberant. [Expensive and time-consuming]
2) Increase the ratio between desired (speech) and undesired (ambient noise/acoustics) by making the microphone MUCH closer.
[Maybe not possible depending on the parameters of your situation.]
3) Don't excite the room reverberation. Whisper. Use sign language. [Also maybe not possible in your situation.]
4) Use ADR (dialog replacement). [Quite possibly impractical, especially if using amateur talent.]
5) Substitute a location more suitable for recording dialog.
6) Have the actors speak Klingon and use subtitles (or voice-over translation)
7) Make a silent movie. I hear one did rather well at the latest Oscar awards (although not even nominated for sound)

When you see/hear a space like that in a Hollywood movie, you can bet that they did NOT use the location tracks.
Rather, they likely did nice, clean pristine ADR and added back in some artificial reverb to visually match the space.

Audio is nowhere near as magic as it looks (sounds) in the movies/TV.
 
and if you recorded some tests with a mic on camera....it's normal you hear a lot of "room-reverb".

Don't be scared to fast....
 
Here's two I got from Barry's video. Beware parallel walls. You can block to keep them at an angle. That helps. I'll walk around clapping and listening to see where that slap is. Inside, use a hyper cardioid instead of a shotgun. as folks said already.
 
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