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My wedding footage speeches have an echo..
I’m a beginner fcp editor and I currently edit wedding videos. On my last wedding I found that the audio on the reception speeches were all quite delayed. It seems like its due to the way my cameraman was positioned between the DJ’s speakers and the speech giver. I don’t know if I can fix this in fcp or soundtrack pro. Nothing I have tried has worked so far. I’m hoping this isn’t a raw footage error..
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6 Replies
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Echo or delayed? If delayed (meaning out of sync) you can more the audio to match. If there is an echo that is much hard to remove. If you don’t get an answer here post it in SoundTrack Pro since you will probably need to fix it in there.
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It’s definitely an echo. I’m worried since i can’t seem to fix it with any filter. I will try a post on soundtrack pro.
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Hey, dumb question; just wondering if deliberately causing phase cancellation would help this problem at all?
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[Mark Suszko] “Hey, dumb question; just wondering if deliberately causing phase cancellation would help this problem at all?”
No. It really doesn’t matter what the signal, mixing the same audio in phase with out of phase gives perfect cancellation in the digital world.
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As a follow-up, if the phase cancellation was a little less than “perfect”, you get a large drop in level, yes? So the secondary echoes, already weak, would get really lost, wouldn’t they? I suppose using gates with sharp attack/release times would be a (relatively) better way to go about this? I know nothing will *perfectly* fix this kind of thing, but I’ve always been a little curious about how people go about trying to repair it in post. I suppose you could go in and draw on the actual waveforms with an editing tool, but that could take years, I’m guessing… I’m kind of surprised nobody’s written a plug-in or app that uses the power of DSP’s to analyze the sound, detect the echo using comparisons, and cancel or suppress it with downward expansion or something. Or did they? There’s live echo-canceling gear for concerts, isn’t there? What’s the difference then?
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If the phase cancellation was less than perfect, it would tend to cancel the signal with the most coherent phase – the dialog – and leave the ambience artifacts. However, in a digital timeline, phase cancelling is perfect when you match levels.
Gating, as I have previously stated is not the best method for noisy sync as the disappearing room tone is very obvious. The best technique that I have used is a CEDAR DNS1000 which is a denoiser designed for dialog. Like most denoisers it works by frequency based downward expansion. When you tell it to work equally on all frequencies, it can dry reverb but only slightly. It does almost nothing to early reflections which is the worst attribute of a hard walled, hollow room. The only hope for the future is a very smart deconvolution algorithm, but to work effectively, the room needs to be sampled and the mic and actors have to be relatively fixed.
If people bothered to listen to the sound they recorded and, horror of horrors, employed a sound recordist with decent mics, they might find that there are less of these plaintive cries to fix the unfixable.At the very least, pack some absorbent material like a roll of underfelt.
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