making ADR sound "live"?

nycineaste

nycineaste

Well-known member
whats the standard procedure for making ADR sound like live audio? The tracks are clear, up front and well synched, but of course it sounds too "close"/intimate.

Do you add a fake room tone track? Reverb? Both?

EDIT: forgot to add that its a 2 minute short with very little dialog; it's ALL ADR'ed from the same mike so it all matches, again, it just sounds right now like an italian film (wink).
 
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You don't add a 'fake' room tone track, you add a REAL room tone track from the location where the original scene was shot. Another tool that can help is a convolution reverb to recreate the acoustic response of the original space.
 
Well the short (and not so helpful) answer is sound post.

How to get to where you need to be depends a LOT on what you want to end up with and what kind of sound post you are doing.

If you are doing a full post you don't need to treat the ADR too heavily. Generally dirty it up a bit, probably ad some reverb that matches the location.

If you are doing one of those indi shorts that try to use production sound for everything and then add a track or two of FX... well it's going to be a lot harder. Since you are using the environment that you filmed instead of the one you created in post you will have to build up something to match that existing BG plus fiddle with the ADR to match that environment.

You really have to tell us which route your taking to get really useful advice. RT alone isn't going to get you there no mater which approach you use.

You can see what I think is a pretty seamless ADR on a no budget film I worked on HERE

It's the top clip
 
Get a re-recording mixer that knows what they are doing, but even then....I've seen big budget features where the ADR sticks out like a sore thumb. It won't be perfect.
 
A good room tone and we used to use a lexicon PCM70 with small or large room setting but you need to do it in post with proper monitoring and not just desktop editing.

I now use TL Space in pro tools for my room effect.
 
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