sweetenin' audio...?

M

MachinePhilby

Member
Hey guys,

just wondering, for those who have made short films (well, anything for that) is there anything you can do to your audio to sweeten it a bit?

E.g. people talk about crushing blacks with video and the gamma curves etc etc, well what about audio, what do you/can you do to the audio to make it better? Noise reduction would be an obvious one for me but i'm not an expert, what tips do the pros have here?

(I'm more interested in knowing what I can do in the edit stages - so don't worry about what microphone to use etc I just want to know what I can do in post.)

Cheers
 
Well.. The same rule applies here as with the visuals: garbage in, garbage out.

There are no generic tips I can give apart from that Exile gave :). Your best aim is to make transparent sound which the audience doesn't notice. When they do notice it is usually when there are problems with it, and it's of course not good "exposure".

So.. The creative freedom lies in SFX, foley, and score composing. Dialogue and ambient sound you just want to make be as realistic as possible.

You can surely equalize, compress, add effects like reverb, maybe a slight delay. But I wouldn't consider those as sweetening effects. More like ways to make the sound match the visuals better. Same goes for the noise reduction. All of the NLEs come with some sorts of audio FX so you should be able to freely explore your possibilities. The best thing to aim for is during the production to record the best noisless reverb-less audio possible since you can add all the necessary FX later on. Just like with visual settings on the camera as opposed to colour-correcting in post.
 
It depends on what is wrong with it. If noise reduction comes to your mind as an improver then I'm guessing the first thing you need to do is record better tracks in the first place. If your looking at a polished "Hollywood" soundtrack then you need a pro and a bunch of time. The rule is 10 - 15 hours per screen minute to get you to the mix. That is with experienced people who have decent libraries. Most low budget films don't even think about sound till after they shoot and by then 90% of the work is trying to make "bad" " acceptable". THere are no "tricks" that will turn bad production into a good track. Once you have good production then lots can be done to polish and help the track along. Good Foley is a big one. But none of this makes much sense until the dialog is in really good shape. It's sort of like shooting out of focus picture. Untill you can see whats on the screen, special FX don't really help.
SK
 
Its a combination of things, in a combination of orders. Mainly, Im guessing you mean for dialogue, cuz thats usually what sounds crummy.

Here are some things that pro's do (obviously not in order, this depends on your source audio): compress to even out peaks, expand to drop noise floor, EQ to emphasize important characteristics or weaken bad ones, filter through NR systems to remove background to a certain degree, gate to kill ambience when the mix is too crowded.

If you are keen on learning about this, check out www.elementalaudio.com - they have some really cool VST plugins that you can download as demos, that come with these really meaty help files that explain how to use effects to bring out the best in your audio.
 
Excelent plugs. They are also RTAS so they will work in Pro Tools if that's what your working in. THey are used by a number of top editors and are very affordable. Also great support.
SK
 
Yeah, I just stumbled onto them the other day! Damn! They've changed the whole way I work, they dont cost much, and they demo's are incredibly functional so you get a good feel for them before you buy. I especially like neodynium, and I looking forward to using firium to help make ADR have closer spectral matching to production audio. Should be an interesting test!

Long live elemental audio - cant wait for their next release.
 
Neodynium, works pretty well at getting rid of light room tone and can cut the interior "echo" quite a bit sometimes. Also Firium can help match ADR.
SK
 
Do yourself a favor and invest in one of Jay Rose's books on audio. There's a lot good tips and info.
 
Here are 3 easy to remember tips:

1. Always roll off the low end.
2. Try to EQ in the mix, not solo.
3. Add layers of subtle compression, don't do it all at once.


1) One of the most prominent issues people have is overall boominess on a track. Take all your dialog and roll off the lows. You can roll off a LOT of low end, a lot more than you think. The more bass there is, the more mud there will be in your mix.


2) This is counter-intuitive for people new to audio. You would think that if you solo each track and then make it sound TOTALLY AWESOME, then the obvious result of combining 10 totally awesome tracks is TOTALLY AWESOME X10! It took me a long time to learn this. Keep in mind that when crafting a mix, each track will probably have compromises that may seem like flaws individually, but are strengths when they all work together. This relates pretty closely to #1

3) This is especially true if your compressors are not that great. Lots of times it works better to bite off a little at a time.
 
tigeba said:
Here are 3 easy to remember tips:

1. Always roll off the low end.
2. Try to EQ in the mix, not solo.
3. Add layers of subtle compression, don't do it all at once.


1) One of the most prominent issues people have is overall boominess on a track. Take all your dialog and roll off the lows. You can roll off a LOT of low end, a lot more than you think. The more bass there is, the more mud there will be in your mix.


2) This is counter-intuitive for people new to audio. You would think that if you solo each track and then make it sound TOTALLY AWESOME, then the obvious result of combining 10 totally awesome tracks is TOTALLY AWESOME X10! It took me a long time to learn this. Keep in mind that when crafting a mix, each track will probably have compromises that may seem like flaws individually, but are strengths when they all work together. This relates pretty closely to #1

3) This is especially true if your compressors are not that great. Lots of times it works better to bite off a little at a time.
Click to expand...

I would agree, but would add. You need to divy up your audio space. You can take a lot of low out of most dialog, and some compression is often a good idea. And you can also do a bit of that on the whole mix but as I said you wand to "work" the spectrum. So for instance you don't generally want to roll of much of the FX or music but you do want to carve a hole out of the vocal range when you have dialog. You don't want to have a lot of full spectrum sounds going on at the same time. In a "big time" mix dialog, FX and music are generally handled separately and them mixed together. If you have dialog and it's hard to understand (and it sounds fine on it's own) instead of boosting the dialog try notching out the FX or music in the 2 -5K range. A lot of times this will fix the problem. After you have given the elements a place to live then deal with the over all mix as mentioned above. Or maybe do the above then if you need some help go in and do some surgery. A big advantage "surround" has over stereo is the front three speakers. Part of the clarity a movie in a theatre has is because the dialog has the center speaker and everything else is pretty much pushed away from the center, so you don't get your dialog steped on by everyone else. In a stereo mix you sort of have to do this with EQ and carefull editing.

SK
 
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