Raising Volume on Voice Also Raises Room Noise

L

LuckyProducer

Well-known member
So I currently shot a film and some scenes the mic was closer to the actors and in other scenes they were further. So now I need to mix the audio so all of the voices are at the same level. Problem is, the scenes where the mic was further from the actor has more room noise. So when I raise the volume, the room noise gets louder also. Any suggestions on what I can do even out the volume of voice throughout the film?

My brother-in-law suggested to use a noise gate on those scenes and then put soft music or record room noise to overlay the track with it. Then he said to use a compressor. What do you think? Any other suggestions?
 
what is usually done is you underlay a room tone/air/ambience track. You can use a fitting exterior ambience and eq it so it works inside (cut off high frequencies). Noise gating may or may not work. It might present new problems (pumping etc.) Try using as much of the close mic'd recordings as possible, even if it's another take, as in a wide shot dialogue can be a little out of sync without being noticable. Try around a bit, that's the best way.
 
If your NLE will allow you to draw volume automation, you can manualy go and "draw" the volume up or down and way lower except for the dialog basically acting as a manual noise gate/downward expander, but completely controlled by you. This works best if your NLE will let you see the Volumer automation over the wave form. Also if your NLE doesn't show you this info you can export to an audio editor like protools or something similar that will let you automate volumes, smooth out and then bring back to your NLE. also like mentioned before a good looping "room tone" will hide the instances where there is a tonal change in timber of voice due to scene cut. There is also tons of other tricks that help polish it up, but its taken me 25 yrs to learn these, and I doubt I could post them all in this post...lol utilizing this method leaves the least scarred audio clips due to full spectrum noise reduction plug ins and the sort.

Now this is very tedious , but well worth the effort if your film has all sorts of volume levels as you can go word by word if necessary and adjust it according to what the scene calls for and to make sure all your dialog has same average out on your meters. I recently had to this for a client director who decided to not "waste money on hiring a sound guy cus after all this is film", well... I didn't slap him, but I sure took his money, now he paid what 3 or 4 sound guys on his set would have cost, because the audio he had made all his invested efforts useless.

a gate will probably create more harm than good. if anything try using a downward expander (fancy word for variable noise gate) where you can adjust the amount of level that is attenuated when the signal is below set threshold as well as a couple of other parameters. this allows you to get a certain amount of level reduction with out the "snap" on and off of a gate.

good luck
 
Thank you so much for your quick replies guys! I will try that! Do you know where I can get room noise loops or do I need to record it myself? Thanks again!
 
About the room noise, what normaly is done is a recording of the room noise after the shoot (mostly at the end of the day).

Sometimes it's also done quicker when there's a specific sound for which can not be waited like rain. Because when you shoot first during the rain, and then suddenly the rain stops, you don't have the rain anymore....

But don't do it when for instance someone is mowing the grass or when there's a festival or something...then just cancel the shooting day... Even when you got George and Brad.... In case of the guy mowing the grass...just ask him to stop during shooting (he can continue during preparations of other shots). Explain it to him also that way...because people don't know how film is made....

So back to that room noise thing, always record room noise... always....always....always...

Always ???

yes always...

Realy always ?

yes realy always
 
This goes into your "lessons learned" file. On future productions be sure to capture room tones from each set. The term "room tone" is deceptive, as you should also capture outdoor ambience. Just create some for now; they won't be as good as what you should have done but miles ahead of not having them at all.
 
Another thing I forgot to mention.... When recording roomtone, leave the lights on (or the ones making noise at least) and then kick everyone out of the room.

Tell them to be quiet... so quiet means the only sound that can be heared (of the crew) is the beating of the hart..... No walking, no paper taking, no whispering, no wiwi, no movements...
idealy would be there in a coma for 4 minutes...

Something fun to do is to have some people in a room, tell them to be quiet and record... You will be amased how much noise the make.....
 
Wow guys! You are so helpful! Lesson is definitely learned! Thank you soo much! If you are interested in seeing the first cut of the movie (before I got fix the audio levels) let me know. I have it password protected on Vimeo cause I didn't release it yet to the public.
 
I just wanted to address the bit about possibly using a compressor on this material. Using a compressor will give you still more noise, not less. Why is this?

The problem you are having is that the level of the background noise (noise) is too close to your dialog levels (signal). The solution in this case, as others have stated, is to increase the dynamic range between the signal and the noise. Either by manually drawing volume envelope curves, using a downward expander, etc.

A compressor is sort of the logical opposite of an expander. It narrows the dynamic range of your material. A compressor will flatten everything over a certain threshold according to a certain ratio. Without getting into all of the theory, after a certain volume threshold, everything past that point gets squished down.

At this point, your material is quieter than it was before, with less dynamic range. In order to get the material back where you can hear it at the same volume, make up gain is then added to get the new compressed signal to be louder. Since you squashed your signal down, when you apply the make up gain, your signal AND THE NOISE FLOOR all come back up. In this way, compressors decrease your signal to noise ratio.

Compressors are a great tool, but the opposite of what you need here. I agree with the other posters, manually editing the volume envelope is best, or use a downward expander if you don't want to spend the time.

Good luck!
 
This would go to why you DON'T want to record anything but dialog when in production. Room Tone is ,if possible, recorded after every setup is finished. But it is not background sound. You use it to fill holes left after you edit the dialog.

Generally
First you do what you can with volume automation.
Run NOISE REDUCTION on the noisier clips to try and get them down to an acceptable level
If ND doesn't work then an Expander may help to kill some of the noise.
EQ may also help but you cant go do far before it starts effecting the dialog.
Once you have gotten them as close to smooth as you can then add in the BGs and probably it will be OK.
If not then you can revisit the above to see if you can get it a bit better, or you can add more "noise" to the quieter clips.

every situation is different so it's hard to get specific.
 
robotsound said:
I just wanted to address the bit about possibly using a compressor on this material. Using a compressor will give you still more noise, not less. Why is this?

The problem you are having is that the level of the background noise (noise) is too close to your dialog levels (signal). The solution in this case, as others have stated, is to increase the dynamic range between the signal and the noise. Either by manually drawing volume envelope curves, using a downward expander, etc.

A compressor is sort of the logical opposite of an expander. It narrows the dynamic range of your material. A compressor will flatten everything over a certain threshold according to a certain ratio. Without getting into all of the theory, after a certain volume threshold, everything past that point gets squished down.

At this point, your material is quieter than it was before, with less dynamic range. In order to get the material back where you can hear it at the same volume, make up gain is then added to get the new compressed signal to be louder. Since you squashed your signal down, when you apply the make up gain, your signal AND THE NOISE FLOOR all come back up. In this way, compressors decrease your signal to noise ratio.

Compressors are a great tool, but the opposite of what you need here. I agree with the other posters, manually editing the volume envelope is best, or use a downward expander if you don't want to spend the time.

Good luck!
Click to expand...

+1 what he says
maybe digital noise remover. Expander with limiter on super peaks is your best bet.
also ADR is your best (& worst) friend
 
So many things I don't know. BGs, ADRs. Haha! I am not sure I have an expander. I am using Vegas Pro. I have some Cakewalk plugins too. Is there another name for expander?

Also, I feel like if I use the envelopes, you will hear the sound go up and down, up and down, and it won't sound natural. hmmm
 
Actually, I prefer to record room tone with all of the people in the room who were in it when dialogue was recorded. The room sounds different with more or fewer people in it. But that's just me.
 
Vegas Pro has the best audio tools right out of the box than any other NLE in my opinion, it actually started out a an audio editor, and my NLE of choice just because of the audio features and its workflow is alot like protools or something like that (which is where I cut my teeth) .
 
LuckyProducer said:
So many things I don't know. BGs, ADRs. Haha! I am not sure I have an expander. I am using Vegas Pro. I have some Cakewalk plugins too. Is there another name for expander?

Also, I feel like if I use the envelopes, you will hear the sound go up and down, up and down, and it won't sound natural. hmmm
Click to expand...

I think BG is BackGround...

ADR has different meanings "Automatic dialogue replacement", "Advanved Dialogue Replacement", "Alternative Dialogue Replacement"... chose one :-p
It's re-doing all the dialogues in studio environment. Idealy the actors see the action on a big screen with written text under it. The text is written in "pronouncing" style.
For exameple: "Hey dude, where 's my cow ?" can be written (and pronounced) as "heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyy duuuuuuuuuuuude wheereeeeeeeeeeee is myyyyyyyyy cooow"

The talens also have to act..as it was on set.
 
LuckyProducer said:
Also, I feel like if I use the envelopes, you will hear the sound go up and down, up and down, and it won't sound natural. hmmm
Click to expand...

It might not if you stop there. What you do is you blend in little bits of the room tone you recorded, and/or other snippets of your recording when people weren't talking. That way you don't get obvious volume shifts, but you have more control over the relative sound levels.

Other things that help are to make your dialog transitions between sources in the least obvious places. The most obvious place is to just use the sound from each clip, and change it over right on the cut. The problem is that when you see the visual change and the sound change at the same time, it's jarring.

What you want to do is make your sound edits independently of the picture. Believe it or not, it's a lot easier to get away with a convincingly transparent sound edit exactly at the beginning of a new line of dialog, in the middle of a sentence, or sometimes even in the middle of a word (on a consonant, not a vowel).
 
And this is why people like me make tons of money fixing things.

Its not about just bouncing levels but its knowing when and how and how much, as well as tons of other "tricks" that help polish that T_rd.

Sound is its own art form, and craft, requiring talent and experience to be able to achieve the best results.

a Good Audio editor can make decent audio sound more natural than natural. like a good photoshop person can make a picture seem better than reality.

just gotta know the tricks.

OK so everyone got it? .. mics on cams are BAD , no booming on set = BAD, recording audio into Canon DSLR = BAD, any questions?

this is obviously said with humor, im trying to work out the 6 cups of coffee from my system... LOL
 
ADR is a pretty good idea. That's an idea I can use for the future when I have more time. =D

BTW, I did use a boom, but not really a boom. Haha! I used two mics, both on a mic stands sticking out over them, or wherever they would be out of the frame.

Question: in wider shots, how do you get the mics close enough without having them show up. That was my issue with one of the scenes. It was in the kitchen. A lot of appliances on and stuff. I learned my lesson now but just wondering about the position of the mic. I mean, I see films where the shot is so wide that the only other way I can think of is lavs.

Robotsound, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about. I do those kinds of cuts. I learned that with just experience and trying to disguise the cuts. Haha!
 
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