Question about getting a clean dialogue track.

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ironpony

Carbonite Member
I want to work towards getting one while helping a friend out with his movie. His sound guy dropped and he asked me to help since he cannot find anyone else before shooting starts. I've learned quite a few things about recording sound on set (not so much in post yet), but one thing I do not know is how to record a clean dialogue track on a low budget.

On outdoor locations, it seems pretty much impossible. Their are always vehicles going by no matter what the locations, he has been able to get. The shotgun mic will cut down on it, but it will not be clean, since he is looking at film festivals and DVD distribution. A requirement distributors ask for is a clean dialogue track.

Another thing is indoors. Even if you manage to get a quiet location where you can turn everything off, their is still the sound of footsteps and things like putting coffee cups down, that make the sound in the track. I've been told before to have the actors take off their shoes and to do things like use coffee cops with felt underneath for example. But even if you do that you can still here the sounds. Footsteps with just socks on, still makes sounds, and objects being moved with felt on them, still make sounds. So far I have tried the no shoe thing, and you could still hear the actor's pants making rustling sounds as they walked and talked. I could ask them to take their pants off, but what if their still was a bit of a noise? What then?
 
ironpony said:
So far I have tried the no shoe thing, and you could still hear the actor's pants making rustling sounds as they walked and talked. I could ask them to take their pants off, but what if their still was a bit of a noise? What then?
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I think if you have actresses walking around on set with no pants on, you don't have a damn thing to worry about whether there's any 'noise' picked up by a mic at all.

On the other other hand, guys with big swinging... uh... microphones... yeah, I think that's right... probably not as uncritical about set noises...

On the other hand, here's a thought... don't deliver dialog with any background other than 'room tone' you have selected. Just use your favorite audio editing environment, and cut a way any portion of the audio track that is not someone speaking, then 'add back' some clean 'room tone' as described in one or another of the myriad of posts on the subject, that doesn't have shoes squeaking, pants flapping (or whatever), or any noises of people on set who can't seem to not walk during the take, or other 'body noises' that could arise from the 'action', or any noises that come from the uncontrolled great outdoors beyond the walls of the set.

I recall on the BTS material on the first "Lord of the Rings"(2001), that because Jackson's studio was in the flight path of the Auckland airport, they had to have a lookout for incoming planes and shoot around the planes landing, as the racket from the engines rendered any dialog unusable.
 
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Wardrobe should be working to avoid abnormally loud fabrics.

As for footsteps and coffee cups, felt padding on the bottom can tame the issue without being seen by the camera.

As for traffic, you can do a few things:
- Utilize the off-axis rejection of the shotgun to maximize the ratio of dialog to background
- Shift the location to maintain the sense of the scene but to minimize the bleed-through of traffic (done in tandem with the above)
- Use lavs as well as the boomed mic.
- Get extra takes and wild lines to make sure there are enough pieces and parts (alternate takes) to stitch the scene together (always a good idea, and should be standard practice in noisy environments)
- Get "room tone" of the location to have extra cars passing in the background and other extraneous noise for smoother dialog editing. (Also should be standard practice.)
- ADR (last resort, and a huge PITA)
 
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Hey Harmonica -

We've been over this ad nauseam on the other forum. You persist in looking for different answers, but the (excellent) answers you just got here are the same as you get everywhere else. There are no "magic button" solutions; it requires hard work, dedication, skill, ears and TALENT.
 
I've seen this used with some success: hang sound (moving) blankets on a pole between two stands (like a green screen or background). That will form a wall to isolate sound and prevent things like echoes against walls, sounds from behind a window etc.. Now, this is not always practical, but in many situations it can be placed off-camera and it's a cheap and fast solution to cut down on some unwanted sound effects.
 
Sometimes it works. My director wants to do a walk and talk scene down a hallway in a public plaza, while using people as extras. People who are not actors. He would just put them out of focus, so they will be recognized in the movie. There will not be a clean dialogue track therefore, and he will use lavs, so that the people will not know their is a boom operator around and stare. He will have the DP shoot it from far enough away with a telephoto lens, that no one will know they are being filmed. For this their will be no clean dialogue track so should I just rely on post effects, to get rid of background noise? I have had surprising success before, while still retaining good quality it seems, but some have their doubts and say it's like playing with fire.

As far as wardrobe goes, he's just having the actors wear their normal clothes to save money.
 
This:

My director wants to do a walk and talk scene down a hallway in a public plaza, while using people as extras. People who are not actors. He would just put them out of focus, so they will be recognized in the movie.

and then this:

He will have the DP shoot it from far enough away with a telephoto lens, that no one will know they are being filmed.

In other words, he'll blur the people in the crowd around the talent while keeping the talent sharp, and he'll do it from a long distance with telephoto lenses? Best of luck.
 
I'm no camera operator and have never used a telephoto, just doing the best I can for my task.
 
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Just do what we told you in the other topic. We've explained it's all to do with the ratio of wanted to unwanted sound - so the closer to the mouth the mics are, the cleaner the audio - and we've already told you that you can't repair it in post. The old saying "You can't polish a turd" comes to mind.

Why do you keep taking on job after job, learning very little, and immediately going onto the net asking for help - knowing people will suggest things you won't do? The number of jobs you've told us about means you should now be an expert.
 
OldCorpse said:
I've seen this used with some success: hang sound (moving) blankets on a pole between two stands (like a green screen or background). That will form a wall to isolate sound and prevent things like echoes against walls, sounds from behind a window etc.. Now, this is not always practical, but in many situations it can be placed off-camera and it's a cheap and fast solution to cut down on some unwanted sound effects.
Click to expand...

It is a practical and fast fix for many problems.
In the early 70's I used to do similar things to get good drum recordings in smaller rooms with plaster walls.
Hanging a few blankets always made a noticeable difference.
 
Well it seems that some things are fixable in post as I have had some very surprising results. I removed a furnace noise out of a scene, and the voices are still their and sound really good, and the furnace is gone. So that's fixable in post for sure. But I guess why I keep taking on job after job is that I want to get ahead in the filmmaking world and the only way to do that is to take on jobs it seems, otherwise people just think I am not that serious about it, and I miss opportunities.
 
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