The Windy City

[foolgladly]

Hey Guys,

Pulling my hair out here a bit and I'm looking for some advice. I'm doing location audio on a little independent feature, and I'm not really happy with the dialogue I'm pulling. I was supplied with a Sennheiser MKH-416 with a complete Rycote blimp setup (including fuzzy cover) and two Sennheiser UHF wireless lavs. I'm running all three simultaneously, varying between using the lavs as plant and body mics.

I come from a studio background, and I'm struggling considerably with getting clean dialogue over background noise (wind, traffic, etc.). We're not shooting in particularly noisy locations, but I feel as if I should be able to pull dialogue closer to "Hollywood" quality using this setup for dialogue between two actors. Even my interiors seem to carry a bit too much background noise, even after turning off all HVAC and other troublemaking appliances.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Do I gain down until the background is practically nonexistent and normalize later? Is ADR a more common evil than I think?

Sorry to be so broad, but I'm struggling and working 20 hour days.

Thanks in advance. You guys have always been nothing but incredibly helpful.

Chris

 

[Dave_Fisk]

Can you still hear the voices pretty well? If you gain down until the bg's are gone, that won't help, because the sound editor will just bring them back up again, and the noise will be there. As long as you can still hear the voices pretty well, you just have to make the best of it. You can't stop traffic or wind. As long as it sounds natural, you are ok. If you can, make sure you record some wild sound of that very same traffic to help your sound editors out later.

-Dave

 

[shaftbond]

alot of hollywood films "loop" their dialogue in noisy locations (record it later in studio and lay it under the video for newbies). if you can manage a setup where the actors can watch the video and match their own lips (and listen to the "real" audio in headphones), it actually turns out really good. a good amount of extra work, but gives you ultimate control