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Audio (Combining Mono, Stereo and Faking Stereo) — Your Opinions Needed
Working with 48KHz, 24 bit audio in FCP that was recorded outside on two mics that generated dual mono audio that is in Stereo Pairs in my FCP project. The project involves two actors engaged in dialog only. During certain scenes it was extremely windy and the wind noise and rumble is not consistent. Personal jets (including prop planes) can also be heard in the audio.
My solutions appear to be:
1) Send audio files to Soundtrack Pro. set noise print and reduce noise in certain instances. This has not been productive so far as the wind was gusty and the jet/plane noise is not consistent
2) Use Noise Gate for low levels of wind/plane noise
3) Use AUBandPass Filter and reduce certain frequencies (audio quality significantly diminished when I have tried this and I am not exactly sure which frequencies to modify). Any help on this for wind and/or plane noise greatly appreciated
4) Change my stereo pair to dual mono (panned to center) and delete the mono audio track of the person that is not speaking at the time of the wind/plane noise. This dramatically improves your ability to hear the talent speaking. The issue becomes that the mono audio is a little flat compared to the stereo clips (in some cases noticeably so) around the mono clip and I would really prefer not to convert all of the audio in any given sequence to mono (panned to the center). Potential solutions to this problem appear to be:
(A) Adding a little gain to the frequencies of the human voice in the remaining mono track
(B) Creating fake stereo by copying the remaining mono track and then pasting it above or below to run simultaneous with itself (requires a lot of work to normalize\adjust the audio levels as the audio is much louder for clips where this is done)
(C) Converting all audio to mono in a sequence where there are any mono audio tracks
(D) Leaving a mix of mono and stereo sound (in each case panned to the center) and trying to switch from mono to stereo when there are long pauses/silence in the dialog
Based on your experience, what do you believe is the best option here. Re-recording is not possible here. Your views would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Running:
MacPro 2*2.66 GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon Processors
Mac OS X 10.4.11
Memory: 5GB 667 MHz DDR 2 FB-DIMMAudio Rate is 48 KHz and Format is 24-Bit
Audio playback via M-Audio BX5a monitors/speakers -
1 Reply
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your #4a is the way to go. dialog should be mono. I know there’s a seductive lure for the added depth of (even moderate) stereo dialog. I’ve experimented with this, but the fact is non-mono dialog is generally a big no-no, unless you’re specifically generating multi-channel dialog for effects purposes. If you really miss the depth the second track of dialog, use a bit of scene-appropriate ambient or room reverb.
Reid C
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