Remove echo

T

TommieGreen

Active member
Hey guys. I just finished a new film called 'Literally'. Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxbGEQrPtlg&fmt=18

As you may notice in the scenes where the two guys are talking on the black couch in between every cut-away, the audio is terrible. It doesn't sound that bad in real life, we have no idea why it sounds like this. Fact of the matter is that it does and it has to be fixed in post. I've searched the entire web for solutions but the answers have always been too specific for a certain person's situation, so I decided to bring it on home to DVX User.

I was instructed to get Adobe Audition to remove the problem, in which I did. I searched for tutorials as to how to remove echo and couldn't find any. Do any of you guys know of any tutorials as to how to properly remove or at least aliviate the echo for these scenes? I edit in Adobe premiere Pro CS4, of which I have been vefry familiar witrh for four years now, so if you know of a way in which to do it in Premiere WITHOUT Audition, that'd be great also. Thanx in advance!
 
It's not horrible, but is very noticeable.

Removing the "roomy" sound is one of the toughest gigs out there and even experienced sound folks like myself have a hard time with it.

Gating tends to sound very artificial, but is the easiest route. Downward expansion works the best about 70% of the time. Then there is volume drawing which is very time consuming with equivocal results.

The "roomy" sound is usually the result of using a shotgun mic indoors. The reason is that shotgun mics only pick up what is in front of them, which seems like a good thing until you realize that it is also picking up all of the sound reflections from the hard surfaces in front of it as well as the dialog; i.e. it is picking up the reflections from the back wall, the side walls, the ceiling, the floor, the coffee table, etc., all of which which then bounce off of the front wall and are picked up by the shotgun mic.

Your best bet for indoors sound recording is a non-shotgun condenser mic. You can also put up sound blankets out of the shot and carpeting on the floor to mitigate the "roomy" effect.
 
actually its the way the sound is coming into the "sides" of a interference tube shotgun mic
which causes the comb filtering/phasey sound.

This clip sounds like it was entirely done with the camera mic though, and its purely a distance thing.
Of course I could be wrong.
 
Yeah, you need to get your microphone a lot closer to your talent. The closer you get, the more power the voices will have, and they will overpower all the other noise in the room, including echo. Then, you can record at a lower level, which will reduce all the room noise and your voices will be clear and clean.

Post solutions work so-so for reducing ambient noise in a room, but echo is a whole different animal and it's exceptionally hard to get rid of, and impossible if there's too much. Best way by FAR to deal with it is by making sure you don't record it in the first place.
 
I would agree with the above, it sounds like you were WAY too far away from your actors.
Thee are two things you could try. The first is to use a plugin like the Roger Nichols compressor plugin. It's a multi band compressor and if you expand the lower levels a bunch you can reduce echo, a bit. But it works a lot better with room echo problems and your problem is more distance.
The second thing is to do the above but in a much more extreme way and just remove all the BG except the actual dialog. And then add room sounds back and fill it out so it sounds "real" again. This sometimes works but again much better on room echo that distance. You probably also need to EQ the distant sound to come closer to the close sound. There is also a RN plugin that will match EQ but there are a number of others also.
 
Noiz2 said:
I would agree with the above, it sounds like you were WAY too far away from your actors.
Thee are two things you could try. The first is to use a plugin like the Roger Nichols compressor plugin. It's a multi band compressor and if you expand the lower levels a bunch you can reduce echo, a bit. But it works a lot better with room echo problems and your problem is more distance.
The second thing is to do the above but in a much more extreme way and just remove all the BG except the actual dialog. And then add room sounds back and fill it out so it sounds "real" again. This sometimes works but again much better on room echo that distance. You probably also need to EQ the distant sound to come closer to the close sound. There is also a RN plugin that will match EQ but there are a number of others also.
Click to expand...

Thanx alot, I'll try all of those if the Audition doesn't work.

But understand, I wasn't that far from my actors, look @ the scene, there is no zoom, I am JUST as close to the actors as it appears I am in the film. And there is NO echo in my room. We have carpet and they were sitting on a cotton stuffed couch next to a bed. I guess I had the audio gain up too high.
 
TommieGreen said:
But understand, I wasn't that far from my actors, look @ the scene, there is no zoom, I am JUST as close to the actors as it appears I am in the film. And there is NO echo in my room. We have carpet and they were sitting on a cotton stuffed couch next to a bed. I guess I had the audio gain up too high.
Click to expand...
Your ears hear much differently than a mic does; just because your unassisted ears hear things okay doesn't mean that the mic does.
 
TommieGreen said:
Thanx alot, I'll try all of those if the Audition doesn't work.

But understand, I wasn't that far from my actors, look @ the scene, there is no zoom, I am JUST as close to the actors as it appears I am in the film. And there is NO echo in my room. We have carpet and they were sitting on a cotton stuffed couch next to a bed. I guess I had the audio gain up too high.
Click to expand...

"That far" is relative and a normal working distance for the photography is light-years too far away for sound. It looks like the camera in your two-shots was about 6 or 8 feet from the talent. If your mic was located at the camera in those shots, it was way too far away. The normal working distance for dialog recording with a directional mic is about 18 to 24 inches from the speaker's mouth. Reducing the audio gain won't help - it's not the absolute level of the signal that causes the problem, it's the relative strength of the desired speech to that of the surrounding echo. There are only three things (best used in combination) that can prevent that ... a: increase the relative level of the desired speech by getting your mic closer to it; b: reduce the reflections by covering EVERY surface not visible in the camera with sound blankets; and c: use a hypercardioid directional mic for interiors.

Always keep the inverse square law in mind - it applies to sound as well as lighting. It says if you double the distance, you reduce the level to 1/4. Because the echos are coming from all over, they are constant in strength no matter where you put the mic. But if you double the distance to the speaker, going from 1 foot to 2 let's say, you have reduced his level relative to the echo to 1/4 of what it was while the echo stays the same. Move back to 4 feet, and it's 1/16 what it was at 1 foot yet the echo is still just as loud.
 
TommieGreen said:
But understand, I wasn't that far from my actors, look @ the scene, there is no zoom, I am JUST as close to the actors as it appears I am in the film. And there is NO echo in my room. We have carpet and they were sitting on a cotton stuffed couch next to a bed. I guess I had the audio gain up too high.
Click to expand...

Were you listening with headphones? It doesn't sound like it. There are two things at play that you need to keep in mind. The first is that you mind hears a LOT differently than a microphone. First it filters what it considers unimportant, like echo's, refrigerator hums, airplanes over head, etc. And it is aided by other senses, for instance directors are often very misguided about the intelligibility of their dialog, especially if they wrote the show. And lip reading,which everyone does to a certain extent. And second you ears hear very differently than a microphone. They are constantly making micro adjustments to capture what you want to hear.
A microphone picks up what is in it's capture zone, it does no filtering of content and it doesn't know what you want to hear. It's important to listen only with headphones and to look as little as possible ate peoples mouths and in general not be "involved" in the scene. It ruins your outside life after awhile because you spend so much of your time listening for what you don't want it becomes a habit and it can get very hard to understand people in a crowd. At least for FX recording it's almost as important to listen for what you don't want (over head plane etc.) as it is to listen to what you want.

So the short story is you were too far away, how ever far that was and ALL rooms have some "echo" except anaerobic chambers. It's not really echo but it is the sound of the room. It's the reason why things recorded indoors are so hard to place "outside", they have a room sound on them that is very hard to get rid of.
 
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