How to make some voice overs sound like they are over the radio?

shaocaholica

shaocaholica

Well-known member
Well I think its pretty clear I'm not an audi o guy but I've been getting more and more into it as some of my personal projects have required more and more of it. Not sure if this is a good place to ask so please let me know if there are any better places for this kind of discussion.

Basically I have some VO I recorded recently thats pretty clean and I want to process it so that it sounds like its over a two way radio. Here's a short clip from Generation Kill that has exactly the effect I want:

http://finalpass.net/Audio/Radio/target.wav

Here's a sample of the audio I want to process:

http://finalpass.net/Audio/Radio/VO_female.wav

I have some radio on/off/static samples but they aren't great. For all intents and purposes I could just steal them from other movies/TV. The part thats giving me the most trouble is getting the actual dialog to sound right. Right now I'm working in Audition but I'm sure the basic principles of what I need to do can be applied in any package.

Here's what I've been trying with some success but it doesn't sound great:
-Clipping the waveform and bringing it back down to normal volume
-Layering some white noise (this doesn't sound right)
-Converting to 11k and back to 48k, realistic effect but not really like the target I'm going for although I think this is fundamentally one of the important steps
 
shaocaholica said:
Well I think its pretty clear I'm not an audi o guy but I've been getting more and more into it as some of my personal projects have required more and more of it. Not sure if this is a good place to ask so please let me know if there are any better places for this kind of discussion.

Basically I have some VO I recorded recently thats pretty clean and I want to process it so that it sounds like its over a two way radio. Here's a short clip from Generation Kill that has exactly the effect I want:

http://finalpass.net/Audio/Radio/target.wav

Here's a sample of the audio I want to process:

http://finalpass.net/Audio/Radio/VO_female.wav

I have some radio on/off/static samples but they aren't great. For all intents and purposes I could just steal them from other movies/TV. The part thats giving me the most trouble is getting the actual dialog to sound right. Right now I'm working in Audition but I'm sure the basic principles of what I need to do can be applied in any package.

Here's what I've been trying with some success but it doesn't sound great:
-Clipping the waveform and bringing it back down to normal volume
-Layering some white noise (this doesn't sound right)
-Converting to 11k and back to 48k, realistic effect but not really like the target I'm going for although I think this is fundamentally one of the important steps
Click to expand...

Not being a professional... I'd capture radio 'noise' from tuning an AM radio to a frequency which doesn't have a station transmitting, recording the 'static' and then mixing that with to your voice recording that has been filtered with a low pass filter with a cut off somewhere around 5K Hz, or lower.

In terms of operation, when the handheld is 'keyed' there's dead silence locally. Refering to analog devices, when not keyed, there is the background static, then voice mixed with background static for the received transmissions. With digital devices, there is cleaner sound, but when the received signal is too low, there are cutouts to dead silence, or decoding artifacts, similar to ugly compression artifacts... The problem with digital is the cutouts. In the analog case, low signal that is high noise, a human could perhaps still intuit what the transmission was, evenif there were missing sylibles or the like. With the digital cutouts the transmission is to choppy often times for the human to make intellegible sense out of the received transmission.
 
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You can buy plug-ins that will do what you want, or close to it. But you may have most of what you need to build it yourself.

There are a few layers here. First, you'll need to add the clicks and beeps in there. Then compress the hell out of it to give it that two-way radio punch. Then, reduce the bandwidth of the audio using a parametric EQ. Take out everything above, say, 1kHz. Then remove everything below 600Hz. Play with it from there. You'll also need to add some distortion to the voice.

I'd put the compressor before the EQ as the compressor will affect the frequency response, and the EQ will be able to compensate for that.

So, plug-ins/filters needed:
- compressor
- two-band parametric EQ (hi-pass and lo-pass bands)
- distortion
 
C2V said:
You can buy plug-ins that will do what you want, or close to it. But you may have most of what you need to build it yourself.

There are a few layers here. First, you'll need to add the clicks and beeps in there. Then compress the hell out of it to give it that two-way radio punch. Then, reduce the bandwidth of the audio using a parametric EQ. Take out everything above, say, 1kHz. Then remove everything below 600Hz. Play with it from there. You'll also need to add some distortion to the voice.

I'd put the compressor before the EQ as the compressor will affect the frequency response, and the EQ will be able to compensate for that.

So, plug-ins/filters needed:
- compressor
- two-band parametric EQ (hi-pass and lo-pass bands)
- distortion
Click to expand...

I'll give it a try.
 
It also depends... do you want to sound it like a "now a days radio" or "50's" ?

Because today radio sounds quite good.. although in movies it's bether to sound like an "old" radio to give it more..... radio
 
dre83 said:
It also depends... do you want to sound it like a "now a days radio" or "50's" ?

Because today radio sounds quite good.. although in movies it's bether to sound like an "old" radio to give it more..... radio
Click to expand...

I want it to sound like the sample I posted. I'm not sure what era that would represent but its supposed to be modern.
 
shaocaholica said:
I want it to sound like the sample I posted. I'm not sure what era that would represent but its supposed to be modern.
Click to expand...

Compress it, distort it, and add some noise. Sound design is not always about complete authenticity as much as it is believability for the audience, since "authentic" won't always translate well to your film. The sample you posted is a bit more noisy than true, modern-day radios, but that's kind of what the audience is expecting.
 
C2V said:
Compress it, distort it, and add some noise. Sound design is not always about complete authenticity as much as it is believability for the audience, since "authentic" won't always translate well to your film. The sample you posted is a bit more noisy than true, modern-day radios, but that's kind of what the audience is expecting.
Click to expand...

And don't forget to limit the bandwidth. The classic "telephone sound" comes from being limited to around 300Hz to 2.5 or 3KHz. Voice communication channels (telephone, 2-way radio, intercoms, etc.) don't waste bandwidth on low (<300Hz) and high (>2.5KHz) frequencies that contribute nothing to the speech recognition.

And adding a touch of reverb might help make it seem to be coming from an off-mic radio speaker vs. the on-mic actor, etc.

And a "squelch-tail", that short burst of white noise at the end of the transmission. Caused by a short delay in the amount of time it takes the squelch circuit to mute the speaker after the end of the transmission.
 
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Richard Crowley said:
And don't forget to limit the bandwidth.
Click to expand...

Addressed that in a post a little further up the thread. :beer:

I also find that telephone EQ is a little softer and radio EQ a little harsher (both in reality and in the Neighborhood of Makebelieve). Phones are held up to the ear, so harsher sound (higher mids) can be tiresome, if not painful. But radio handles are designed to cut through ambient clutter, since they're usually hanging form a dashboard, clipped to clothing, hanging from a belt, etc.

I usually use 600 - 1k as my starting point, then expand or contract from there, depending on what kind of speaker emulation I'm going for.
 
After you use the high and low pass filters, you might want to use a sharp, narrow boost in EQ on one or more of the anoying frequencies. You'll have to dial around to get it right.

I also have found it usefull to put a narrow boost on the EQ to increase sibilance (again, you'll have to dial around) then bring the low pass frequency down to about that point. It helps make it sound like crap.

Oh yeah, and put a steep slope on your filters, like no less then 12dB per octave.
 
chapelgrovefilms said:
And don't 'steal' from the works of others. Bad form.
Click to expand...

Also illegal. The above suggestions are pretty much how it has been done. There are two there options. First you can get a pair of walki-talki's and feed one with your VO and record out of the second. Or get Speakerphone from Audio Ease.
 
shaocaholica said:
What I meant by "steal" was the radio on off sounds, not the actual conversation. Even so, this is a not for profit personal project that is not going to be show casing the sound design as the main component.
Click to expand...

Even though you only take the sound effects, and don't do it for profit -- it is still illegal, as well as unethical.
 
shaocaholica said:
What I meant by "steal" was the radio on off sounds, not the actual conversation. Even so, this is a not for profit personal project that is not going to be show casing the sound design as the main component.
Click to expand...

First For profit or not makes no difference at all, legally. And second sounds are copyrighted just the same as music so anything you hear in a film is owned by someone and you can't legally use it with out permission.

On a practical level you usually can't use it anyway since it's not in the clear enough.
 
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