Why do sound guys want to record dry, and add room reverb later?

And as a general note nobody is going to say yes turn off my freezer. But you can do it IF you plug it in between takes and have somebody who's job it is to make sure nothing stays off too long. About the only thing I have had real resistance to is the ice machine in a bar. The thing is they can't have people turn things off and let stuff spoil, melt etc. That won't happen if you are responsible and make sure things get turned on during the 90% of the time on set that sound is not recording.

IF they don't TRUST that you will be conscientious about this and understand the consequences (like paying to replace everything in the fridge) then they will always say no. It's up to you to sell the importance of turning off the sound making things and how responsible you will be with their stuff.


I also have pretty much never used blankets, though there are times when I wish I had had them. But mostly it's mic placement unless you are in an impossibly bouncy space. And shotguns indoors are definitely part of the "indi" sound problem. I think this also may be because of hollywood "magic". If your shooting a scene that is supposed to be someone shooting a film then that big long fuzzy is much sexier than a short hyper with a ball gag. It looks so much more "professional". So most of the shots of "filmmaking" show a long shotgun in a big zeppelin.

But the goal isn't really to match room ambience and tone shot to shot but to minimize both in all shots. This assumes you are going to do some audio post. If you are not then it probably makes more sense to try to match room ambience.

But you are not going to end up with a smooth "professional" narrative sound track with out doing a full sound post.

As to distributors. If you know someone who actually got distribution and they tell you my distributor wanted XYZ then listen a bit. Everything else you hear is 90% BS and 10% good storytelling. In an indi market they are going to want a film they can sell. So they will want to see a film that looks good and sounds good but more importantly fits what they think they can sell. Key to that are things like acting, story, directing, picture edit, stars attached, etc.

Nobody is going to listen to a dialog track alone and make any decision about the film. And as a new filmmaker your chances of distribution are probably smaller than winning the LOTTO. Make the best film you can. Learn from what goes wrong (plenty will). And see if you can get into some festivals. Really for a first film if it is watchable by folks who are not involved you have made a great success.

BTW the 90%/10% about distributors applies to my advice also. Of all the micro budget shorts and features I have worked on one has distribution, one I did some polish on got distribution and one I did all the sound post on has gotten tentative deals twice but has yet to actually land a deal. In the med budget range most had some short run. With the big budgets all had distribution before they shot a frame.
 
Okay thanks. Everytime I've tried to reduce background hums, such as freezers mostly, and stuff like that, the dialogue sounds muffled after and just doesn't sound as good. i've been using lowpass, highpass, and de-hummer. Would it be better to just make the hum more even sounding, throughout the whole thing? Or does it HAVE to go away for pro standards? I will listen to those clips posted when I get back.
 
"Pro standards" as you call them are to record dialog "clean" and absent of any background sounds. If the script requires background sounds "ambience" or other environmental effects, those sounds are recorded separately (typically at a different time) and also in a "clean" and isolated manner. That provides the mixer with clean pieces from which to assemble a coherent sound track. Big-budget movies have large crews of sound track personnel, mixers, editors, Foley artists, ADR studio people, etc, etc. And end up with hundreds of tracks of audio which all get sub-mixed and then ultimately mixed down to the various release formats (for theatrical exhibition, for BluRay or DVD release, etc.).
 
ironpony said:
Okay thanks. Everytime I've tried to reduce background hums, such as freezers mostly, and stuff like that, the dialogue sounds muffled after and just doesn't sound as good. i've been using lowpass, highpass, and de-hummer. Would it be better to just make the hum more even sounding, throughout the whole thing? Or does it HAVE to go away for pro standards? I will listen to those clips posted when I get back.
Click to expand...

What are you using to remove these problem sounds? If it's just a graphic equalizer then forget it.

What software do you have access to? Something like Audition would be good for this sort of thing.... and you can download a 30 day trial if you don't already have something. Of course, in that 30 days you have to learn how to use it, but there are lots of free tutorials on the web for taking out background sounds.
 
Just as a note: That is another reason for room tone. To create filters in order to reduce the ambient noises like hums, buzzes, and regular clicks.
 
I'll chime in and say sound soap (software) is pretty good at removing unwanted background noise, TO A POINT. You have to tinker with it find a feasible compromise between clean audio and super processed-sounding audio, but it definitely works. Also, there are two plugins (that I learned about on here) devoted to removing reverb. One of them I works extraordinarily well, again, to point. Sorry, don't recall the name. Anyway, it won't save you if you were careless and put your mic ten feet away from your actor or something, but if it's basically well-placed and your room is still a little verby, works great.
 
If you are trying to remove unwanted sounds after then you may not done the front end job right in the first place, you can't polish a turd as they say and there is only so much that can be done in post.

Besides it is not all about removing everything but more controlling what is there and making sure that the noise floor is acceptable and more importantly is consistent so you can't hear every edit go through and it doesnt distract from the main focus the main dialogue or sound scape for each scene.
 
Or does it HAVE to go away for pro standards?
Click to expand...

For who's "pro Standards"? On a feature with a budget those sound don't need to be removed because they weren't recorded in the first place.

If you are trying to hit a Hollywood feature standard then it's all about the post. It requires good production but you need a LOT of post to get to a big budget feature sound level.

To be more specific to your question. Some big budget films have problematic production sound. It wasn't intentional, maybe the set was still being built??? BUT they have the budget for ADR and a lot of post.

So your question doesn't really scale well. At the low budget level you need to get really clean production sound.
 
Okay thanks. I've been told to get it right on set before but it seems I cannot and I hope post works. I was told post is a joke before, but I hope not. In the tutorials I have seen on youtube, it seems to work good, but when I do what they say to do, it does not work the same. I have Audition, but have been using the higpass and lowpass filters in Premiere Pro, with not much luck so far. Are there better filters in Audition that serve the same function?
 
It's such a big joke that major films spend 5-10% of their budget on sound post.

Unfortunately the real answer to most questions about how to fix something or how to get professional results usually boils down to experience, not tools.

So while I have better tools than you do for working on sound post I also have a whole lot more experience.

As to tools, high and low pass can help for high freq hiss and low freq rumble/ handling noise, but not much else. Also you need them to be really sharp. A lot of filters in NLE's will top out at 6 or so dB per octave and you really want 12 or more. Otherwise your going to start affecting areas you want to keep.

Not sure what videos you are watching but take most of them with a grain of salt. If some plugin demos removing noise then you can be sure they made sure that the noise for the demo was one their plugin worked well on. The noise you need to remove may not work well with that same plugin.

Part of the problem with sound is that it's always different so it's hard to give any blanket advice that is any use. After you do it a LOT and have a lot of experience you see more and more things that are "kind of like" that problem you fixed doing XY&Z, but it's hard for that knowledge to get passed in a non hands on way.

The problem you are trying to fix if I have followed you correctly are removing motors and hums etc from production shot in a place where the fridge et all were not turned off.

That is a really difficult thing to do even with a lot of experience. You can make a dent with a high pass but it's not going to do a lot probably. If you have a "hum remover" plugin that will probably help. You might also try a noise reduction plugin and sample the hum you are trying to remove. The last is probably not going to work very well because it's probably going to have an impact on the dialog. But it might help. Higher end noise reduction suites like RX from iZotope and the WAVES noise suite have tools that are better but it's still a lot of trial and error, and they are pretty pricey. And it's going to be different (again probably) on every take. So some will work on all the clips probably but some wont or will need to be tuned for that particular clip. The reason is that even if the noise is pretty constant the mic placement is changing so the noise will be recorded differently.

In the end you will probably only be able to reduce the hums and such. In that case the best solution is often to go with it. These hums are probably natural to the space so after you reduce them you will need to add some back in so that you can even it all out and the noise is staying constant in the BG. It's not ideal but if you can get it down to the point where it's not distracting then smoothing it out and making it part of the soundscape is probably the best option.

BTW where are you? You could probably get someone on the board who lives close to give you some in person help. That would probably be a lot more helpful.
 
ironpony said:
Okay thanks. I've been told to get it right on set before but it seems I cannot and I hope post works. I was told post is a joke before, but I hope not. In the tutorials I have seen on youtube, it seems to work good, but when I do what they say to do, it does not work the same. I have Audition, but have been using the higpass and lowpass filters in Premiere Pro, with not much luck so far. Are there better filters in Audition that serve the same function?
Click to expand...

As far as I can tell, not too many sound people use Audition. Adobe only recently 're-introduced' it as part of The Production package, so there's not a lot of 'non-pro' users who have used it, unless they bought the separate version.

The question is 'what are you trying to do'... and what 'noise' is present in your audio, that will determine what 'filter' to use, or series of filter operations.

Putting it simply. Neither low nor high pass filters will get rid of 'echo/reverb', the reason for this is, 'echo' is the 'original voice sound, and so is in the same frequency band as the original. Well... there may be some 'filtering' of the environment so that the echo only contains a portion of the original frequencies, but they are still in the same band as the original audio.

A 'hum' of 60 Hz has 'harmonics'. These harmonics occur at 120, 240, etc.. on up. A simple low frequency cut off will not kill off the 'high frequency' harmonics.

You would need a filter that has 'multiple frequencies' that it filters... i'm a bit short on time at the moment, and my 'vocabulary' for talking about DSP differs from the way most 'sound' people seem to talk, so I'd have to look up what sort of filters would 'work' then look up what audio people call them.

But I'm sure the audio people could just stated a number of them, and probably Audition has some set of them.
 
Clark, the "hum" filter I mentioned is what you are talking about. It has a series of notch filters that are connected. So you set or sweep the fundamental and the harmonic notches follow. You can usually turn on and off individual ones or switch off even or odd harmonics and you can usually set the depth of the harmonic notches.

Most sound people use ProTools. But others get some use and there used to be others that were "the one" before ProTools came along, and I'm sure there will be others that take over from ProTools at some point. Most alternatives fail on compatibility. The program that will be a serious threat is the one that can open and save ProTools sessions.

At a bare minimum for sound post you need to be able to read and wright OMFs, play sync video, and have a lot of tracks. You also need to support one or more major plugin formats (VST, RTAS, AU, ?). It also needs to be a program that can be bought with out having to buy a suite of non sound applications.

For film it should also be able to slave to TC and word clock and should be able to work in Feet+Frames (what 35mm films use for positional information).
 
Noiz2 said:
Clark, the "hum" filter I mentioned is what you are talking about. It has a series of notch filters that are connected. So you set or sweep the fundamental and the harmonic notches follow. You can usually turn on and off individual ones or switch off even or odd harmonics and you can usually set the depth of the harmonic notches.
Click to expand...

Each time I've downloaded and setup the latest Adobe Produciton eval package (on a couple of different machines now...)... I seem to over run the eval period whout ever testing anything other than 'yeah' it loaded my project... one of these days I'm going to get organized to do a proper eval... eventually.

So, I wasn't able to really use Audtion to see what it has or doesn't have relative to the types of filters I know about and know how to use. From the glossy brochure level info, it does support VST plugins, so I presume one could get higher power filters if one needed to.

I did try taking OMF out of an old project when I setup my old computer with the eval, and that didn't go so well, but then since I haven't used OMF at all, it may very well have been an operational issue...
 
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