Is this sound fixable??

NickMilo

NickMilo

Well-known member
Posted this in the Jobs section, but I thought I'd post here to see if anyone had some suggestions on fixing this audio...

So I had 4 cameras going for a band that was playing at the vans warped tour... I had a DVX in the back hooked up to the mixing board. The audio tech running the stage suggested this option, but when I checked the audio after the show, it came out pretty messed up.

I tried messing with it in Final Cut, but no luck yet... I'm kinda green when it comes to sound, I just randomly tried messing with the 3 band eq...

(As for the other cameras- turns out the 2 other filmers on stage weren't recording audio, and I was under and over cranking on the HVX, so I'm pretty much just left w/ the audio from the DVX)

Here is a preview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4FRdP3m3vY


If you can spot the problem and/or offer any suggestions, please let me know...

MUCH THANKS!!
 
Are you sure the sound "problem" wasn't due to the fact their performance was awful? Sounds like they're from the "loud is good" school and it's possible that what you're hearing is them overloading and clipping their own sound system. It's not a matter of equalization, that adjusts frequency balance. What's prominent in that clip is overload distortion. I don't think it's fixable. When the band makes noise instead of music, you're going to record noise and there's nothing you can do about it after the fact.
 
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Yeah, I'm gonna go with Steve on the assessment of the band. They're pretty bad.

But I will add a couple of things:

1) Strictly taking a house feed from the board is never good, as the house mix sounds fine in the house but sounds like total poo for recording, as far as mix and balance go. You have to have a dedicated record feed, mixed for the camera, if at all possible. If all you have is a crappy house board feed, then take a mono feed and have a mic recording to the camera's second channel. Then blend the two together in post.

2) The clip you provided is plagued wth distortion, but it's analog distortion and not digital. This means that the FOH engineer doesn't know how to keep his board out of the red. Seems like the engineer is from the same "louder is better" school, but can't keep it under control. Or, there's a possibility that the feed signal level and the camera's input were mismatched. You might want to check and make sure that you didn't blow out the camera's audio inputs by sending a line signal to the inputs when they were set to mic. Even if you use the input level controls to take it down on the meters, once distorted always distorted.

Unfortunately, you're stuck with what you have. And there are important lessons here... always coordinate your cameras, and make darn sure that everyone has some sort of audio going to each camera. And don't leave your primary audio recording unattended/unmonitored, or you're bound to be surprised later and not in a good way. Especially with a 4-camera shoot that I assume is non-sync, how are you gonna sync the cameras up without any reference audio?
 
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As someone who plays in a rock band as well as shoots video, I can hear the potential here and they could've sounded fine. Believe me, when playing a show like that, the band has little to no say as far as the mix that comes through the house system. They're just happy to be on tour and do what they're told sounds good for the live event.
Unfortunately, considering what you've got, I don't think it's really salvageable. The best I ever did at recording a band live like that was to pull signal out of their board into the Edirol R44, and mixed down the instruments separately from the vocals, and a bunch of time beforehand to do a few takes to EQ it in the recorder... However, doing it that way sacrificed a bit of how they sounded live. So...
I would say just do the best you can? Not much for advice, but chalk it up to a learning experience, and next time try to get an audio recorder to pull the sound out of the board into, and even if you have to mix on the fly, do so early on in their set, and you should be able to get a good amount of decent audio that way.
 
Ouch... that is a line level sent to a mic input...painful. I think the only way you can come close to fixing this is to get a a good recording (studio recording) of the songs they want to use and create a montage type video for them.

Best of luck...and in the future, always bring your own audio guy to a band gig.
 
yeah thats definetally just clipping. Nothing you can do now. It has nothing to do with the bands music or their performance. Steve house was kinda just using this oppurtunity to take shots at music he doesn't like. A little rude imo. Its just somewhere in the signal the gain was too high.
 
orchidsofwrath said:
yeah thats definetally just clipping. Nothing you can do now. It has nothing to do with the bands music or their performance. Steve house was kinda just using this oppurtunity to take shots at music he doesn't like. A little rude imo. Its just somewhere in the signal the gain was too high.
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I'm not saying Steve was being rude at all, simply that since my taste lies in such styles of music I could hear the potential there for it to actually sound decent. Problem is, with what happened with the audio, even a big name act of any type (U2, Mariah Carey, Dave Matthews, Black sabbath, Eminem, whatever your taste) wouldn't have sounded good there. That's all i was saying. Here's what I did in a similar situation:
If the band is willing, take the video from that event, then shoot them in a closed space with canned recorded audio playback so they act to it, like a regular music video. Then, when you cut it all together, use the live shots that synch up best with the pre-recorded audio, cut to the other when it just won't work, do some different angles blah blah and boom. All the sudden, they have a full-on music video featuring crowd and live performances from Warped Tour, plus the controlled performance shots you directed and lit perfectly. I promise they'll like the result as my client did... gives a live edge to an otherwise average music video, and shows what they can do!
 
RandomHero said:
I'm not saying Steve was being rude at all, simply that since my taste lies in such styles of music I could hear the potential there for it to actually sound decent.
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Oh yeah i wasn't accusing you of calling steve rude. I just personally thought steve was rude haha. Since your absolutely right it was utterly unrelated to their music. I didn't like how steve started rattling stuff off about the band making noise so whats recorded will be noise. I'm sure steve relizes that even behtoven's 9th clipping like that will sound like crap.
 
We could debate the musicality of the style - I personally don't consider arythmic, unpitched screaming at vocal cord injuring levels accompanied by atonal guitar crashes to be music (don'tt much care for hip-hop or gangsta either, for that matter) - but the issue is if their performance is such that it overloads the gear, it's the performance that is producing the noise and the damage was already done before it ever reached the recording chain. With other than pure acoustic music the FOH engineer is as much a part of the band as the vocalist or the drummer in that regard - whether the problem comes from the engineer not setting up the board properly or the vocalist eating the mic while shouting, the noise was done in the performance. As orchid suggested, even an orchestra playing Beethoven, a pianist playing Brahms, Diana Krall or Sarah Brightman at their best is going to sound like c**p in that situation.
 
I will go the opposite of most of the opinions above and say that it is quite possibly "salvageable". If you send me a short sample I will give it a shot. I have salvaged stuff that sounded worse, but no guarantee's. Now wheter it should be salvaged I will leave to others.
 
Noiz2 said:
I will go the opposite of most of the opinions above and say that it is quite possibly "salvageable". If you send me a short sample I will give it a shot. I have salvaged stuff that sounded worse, but no guarantee's. Now wheter it should be salvaged I will leave to others.
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If you do get a sample and make it sound decent, please post it in this thread so we can all hear it!
 
It's a distorted recording of distortion rock, so your never going to clean beyond the way it sounded live but I have had some surprisingly good results with some total blow out recordings. It depends on how much info is destroyed VS how much is masked by the dominating distortion. The distortion I think is removable but you never know exactly what is left till you try. There is another thread with some trashed wedding sound (you would think that these threads might get people to hire folks who knew what they were doing??? who knows maybe they will) that I played a bit with but the sample was MP3 so there is only so much you can do with files that heavily compressed. Of course a "new" problem/misunderstanding comes in because folks then go "Oh I just by software X and I can fix anything". A craftsman with the right tools can do amazing things. The better the craftsman and the better the tools the more amazing. But neither alone is likely to be able to get the job done.
 
Exactly. That's why live events is so difficult. If you think you can just set up and go, you'll get burned eventually. But if you take the time beforehand to prepare completely for the event, something like this won't always happen. Then again, some things are just unforeseeable. That's where 'software x' can really come in handy, and people who can use it.
 
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