sweeten a lav

B

Bruce Watson

Veteran
I've got some decent dialog recorded using a Sennheiser G3 lav. It's good enough that I could use it as is. Lav was on an instructor (female, alto voice) teaching a class in a fairly reflective class room. Results were good. Nice clear dialog. But it does sound sorta like a lav. No big surprise there.

Client likes the footage and the sound, wants me to make a DVD out of it. Since I'm doing all the other stuff to polish it up and make it look good, I thought I might should try to sweeten up the sound to match. It'll be a learning experience for me since this is a little out of my field of expertise (if I have such a field ;-).

So what I'm looking for is some direction on what's "normally done" to dialog in a post-production audio workflow. I'll be using Adobe Audition CS6. I spent a chunk of yesterday searching for tutorials and found little beyond the normal beginners' guides and user guides for Audition. Which leads me to think I'm using the wrong search terms.

Anyone point me towards a good tutorial(s) for this?
 
Are you saying that what you recorded is "dryer" than what you heard in the room ("fairly reflective class room")? You could devise some synthetic reverb to make the sound more "realistic". But, frankly, I wouldn't do that. Just because the live audience heard some "room tone" as a result of sitting in the same space doesn't mean that you have to reproduce that phenomenon in the recorded representation. Since you don't know under what circumstances people are going to be viewing (or listening) to the recording, adding anything just reduces intelligibility (at least IMHO). And I would think that intelligibility is one of the prime requirements for the sound track of a lecture recording. You aren't making a dramatic special-effect entertainment production here.
 
A few dBs of subtractive EQ'ing 'may' help.. but If you don't know what you're doing, you very well may do more harm then good. I also would not recommend trying to add a 'room' effect.
 
Well, what it sounds like right now is a little dry and flat, and a bit nasally. It's a little bit of a distraction in that I notice it and think about it, and while I'm doing that I'm not paying attention to the talent's message. And I want to fix that.

I want to enhance the understandability when the DVD is played through a run of the mill HDTV. What I really want is for people to not even notice the voice track -- so no distraction from the voice track at all -- no "that seems kinda flat" or anything, just listen to the message. Same reason I try to get the colors right, and why I did a secondary color correction to knock down the blue in the box labels that's fluorescing under the crappy classroom fluorescent lighting. It's a distraction that takes away from the message.

I'm not after a big correction, because the sound is already pretty good. But a minimalist nudge in the right direction. My problem is trying to figure out what that right direction might be. Which is why I'm asking the forum here.

I'm guessing that it could use a bit of parametric equalizer effect to roll off the top and bottom a bit (there's a just noticeable bit of rumble from a refrigerator that cycled on and off during the class), and the talent is female so I thought I'd start around 100Hz for the bottom end. Might could go higher, IDK. Shouldn't effect the voice, might help with the rumble.

I also wanted to try to fix that slight nasally quality. I'm thinking a little bit of a dip in the EQ somewhere might help.

Then I thought I might add a tiny bit of reverb to try to get it to be not quite so flat / dry / "airless".

The only way I can learn this stuff is to ask questions and to try, right? So I'm going to try. If I muck it up I can always throw it away and revert to the original sound files. No doubt I'll do that several times anyway. :grin:
 
if you apply an effect in a DAW (adobe, protools, nuendo, fairlight, whatever) and you don't do "process" then the original is still...original.
 
Yeah, it sounds like you're on the right track; it's all up to you and your ears and eyes and what you see and hear. EQ to taste, and make sure that you run some test burns and listen on a number of possible playback devices. I wouldn't add too much reverb; you worked hard to get rid of that stuff, and this is not a concert or studio recording. However, if you did use a two-system recording set-up rather than going straight into the camera for audio, you might try adding just a touch of the original camera audio when you edit it all together. This can be tricky, because if the wave forms aren't lined-up right, you can cause more problems than solutions. But maybe play around with that, sometimes just cracking-in a tiny bit of on-camera audio to add to the "good" audio track can give you the room sound/realism you're looking for.

Using low-cut/hi-pass to get rid of refrigerator rumble and EQing-out nasality are good ideas, provided you don't go overboard. If you do use any reverb, remember (way) less is more, and use a short reflection program like a "small room." Even if it's a big lecture hall (but I believe you said classroom?), it will sound better and more intelligible, and nobody will be checking to see if your reverb program matches the room dimensions ;>] .

GJ
 
What's the aim ?

Is it just an instructional DVD where only the voice matters or can you keep a bit of the ambiance just to liven it a bit ?

You only had one microphone so the sound will only be mono ? As I understand it's musical voice teaching, correct ?

Well, what you ask is the job of a sound mixer but don't worry, I quite undestand that you don't have money to hire one.

What I would do is first to roll-off the highs and lows just to clean a bit the top and bottom spectrum. Try to cut the lows between 40 and 80Hz but don't go higher as you would begin to change the timbre of the voice and cut the highs between 15 and 18kHz, both with a really gentle slope, something between -3 and -6dB/octave.

Then try to figure out if you can smooth a bit room resonances, the nasty ones are most of the time around 200Hz. First, take the parametric EQ, with a large Q, positive gain and sweep around this frequency and listen to when it becomes boomy. Then try to reduce the Q to find the culprit frequency and turn it down, not to much, don't be a barbarian, treat your track gently. You may find one or two other resonances you need to attenuate, repeat the process (find it by boosting, sweeping then attenuate but be careful not to harm the voice).

You can also try to use a de-esser, in particular if your female voice has a lot of sibilants but be parcimonial.

For heaven's sake don't add any reverb but try to add a bit of compression to your track (again, be wise and light, you're not mixing a rock guitar)

Keep in mind that the processes are to make the voice more understandable and that adding up processings can result in the opposite effect and ruin your sound.

Hope I've been helpful, cheers.
 
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Without hearing the actual sound in question, throwing out frequency bands to EQ is shooting blind. Delving into something like this without knowing what you're doing, and mixing in an untreated room and on poor monitors, can do much more harm than good.
 
Sure, I was just throwing some general guidelines so he could have something to start from.

As usual, it's up to the right person to do it the "normal" professional way.
 
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