Dog Barking

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Lisa,

The short answer is, give the dog something to chew on, and try again.

Not to be glib, but the next question is, what software tools do you have? And how good are you at using them? If it’s just what came with your computer, there’s probably nothing there for you, regardless of your skill level. Out of curiosity, do you know the name of the software you used to make the video?

If you have access to audio editing software, you’re still in for some surgery, especially if the dog is barking at the same time somebody is speaking. Any change that you make to the barking would then affect at least part of the speech.

If there are stretches where there’s no overlap between barking and speaking, there may be hope, but again, it depends on the software you have, and your expertise with it.

Even in Hollywood, the first choice is always to reshoot in these circumstances. It’s faster for them, and it will be faster for you.

[Mark Suszko]

Taking the dog out is harder than putting new human in over the top of it. If you are the speaker in the video, and you don’t have a lot of money to throw at Izotope, ( and though Izotope has a lot of automation in it, you still need some skill and knowledge of what you’re doing to maximize its effectivemess) then there’s an old-school film audio technique you can use called ADR or “looping”.

To do this, have the marked-up script at hand, pay someone to take the dog to the park for a couple of hours. Next, re-create the original sonic environment of the live recording as closely to the the original as possible. Looping involves taking a short piece of the bad audio and playing it in a loop, over and over, while you try to speak the line or lines in as close to a match as you can. It can be done audio-only, but sometimes it helps to see the visual, to get the lip-synch better and see the micro-expressions that communicate timing cues. Both methods can work. You record that new audio over and over, until you like the match, then drop it into the audio track of the original program and adjust the other parameters like EQ to match the original. The most seamless way to do the edit is to pick a spot in the timeline where the camera angle changes, there’s a transition, or there’s a significant quiet pause or a music or sound effects cue that can help motivate a change in aural quality and hide the “seams” where you bring in the new piece. That means the looped part might have to be longe than the second or so of barking, more like an entire sentence or two, even a paragraph, depends on the material.

Looping means you only fix relatively small parts of the narrative, instead of having to completely re-do it end to end from scratch, which also cannot help but change all your timings. That’s what I’d try if this was my gig.

Just for fun, try looping Roy Batty’s “Like-Tears-In-Rain” speech from Blade Runner; it’s short and very memorable. Learning the timing and watching his breathing gets you there pretty quickly.

[Tony West]

The best program I know of for something like that is Izotope RX. You would need to spend some time with it if you haven’t used it. It really depends on how bad the barking is and if it’s over the person speaking.

[Bob Cole]

Right. Re-record.

Or, of course, you could show the dog earlier in the video. Louis Malle began his Phantom India series with a montage of people staring into the camera, often 10-15 of them in a crowd. The narrator says something like “Get used to this. In India, we were the exotic outsiders, and wherever we went, people looked at us.” From that point on, not a single shot was “ruined” by people looking into the lens – it was all part of the story.

Bob C