Simon Billington
Forum Replies Created
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Distortion is almost impossible to get rid of unfortunately. It’s like once you’ve over exposed your whites, or under exposed your blacks, you’ll never get that missing detail back because there is no information for the editor to work with.
Fortunately Audition has a Declipper as you have stated, but being built in, it might be quite limited in it’s applications. The only other Declipper I know of, so far, is the one found in iZotope RX, but that’s an expensive piece of software. Even then, there’s only so far a declipper can go to repair audio, as it is “guessing” at what the audio might have been like before it was destroyed. The more heavy the distortion, the more information was destroyed, the more the algorithm has to “guess”, the less perfect the result.
Although, there is something you could try. It could be that the reason why Audition isn’t recognising it is because the levels may have been reduced at some point after being distorted. Audition may rely on the audio being maxed out to recognise the problem.
So, in short, try Normalising the signal then try the Declipper again. See if it will recognise it after that.
Other things you can try is, a reshoot, obviously. You could try to find someone who owns a copy of RX or equivalent. You could consider making a new edit and removing the part with bad audio while covering the edit point with a cutaway or a scene change. It’s possible you can steal sound elsewhere in the piece and replace the bad audio with that. Doesn’t really work for dialogue though, of course.
Another thing to consider is ADR and just have whoever come to replace bits of dialogue. Then grab bits of ambience from elsewhere in the main audio, run that beneath the ADR. Then do a bit of audio treatment to match the ADR track as closely to the original captured audio.
Hope this helps.
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PluralEyes is a great product. Worth the investment if you constantly find yourself in the situation of having to manually sync audio.
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Oh man, sorry to hear that. This sounds disastrous. Kind of one of those nightmare come true scenarios!!
Odd how the audio is not exporting with the proxies. This sounds to me like an oversight on behalf of Blackmagic. When you get a free moment I feel its worthwhile letting them know about this issue.
Unfortunately I don’t have any answers for you right now, but give me a day or two I can look into it in further detail. It might help if you can post me a short sample of your video and audio to examine. Doesn’t really have to be longer than 30-60 secs, so you wouldn’t have to worry about any potential copyright issues with sharing the data.
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Not specifically. A mono track and left and right wont sound the same way as if it’s stereo.
If the information is the same, and it usually is which is why it’s mono, it will just collapse into the centre which is the same way TV and computers handle mono and dialogue tracks. This is what they commonly refer to as the “phantom centre”. It will still come out the centre dialogue channel if you’re working with surround. Since it’s in the middle it will be interpreted by the post production facilities as being in the centre channel and will get written that way when rendering out.
This is of course different if the two sides aren’t the same. I think many prefer it because the audio is perceivably more loud, which has the psychoacoustic effect of sounding better, but that’s just an illusion.
There is no guarantees that both sides will be the same, one might be more subject to noise induced by camera electronics than another, for example. So it shouldn’t be assumed that is in fact dual mono. If there was enough phase variance on one channel it will have this negative impact when played alongside the other. It could make it sound more weak over all. However this is quite rare, but still something to keep in mind. it’s because of this, though, that it’s usually more wise to pick one, disable the other, pan it to the centre and increase its volume by either 3 or 6db to compensate. I forget which, but i believe it’s the latter.
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Compressor seemed to have taken over the role of QT7, but then upped the ante by offering a host of other features as well.
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All good. Miscommunication is always bound to happen from time to time.
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Indeed I forgot about the FILL options. I work on a few NLE’s and DAWS, I often forget which one does what.
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No probs.
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Creating a “mono” dialogue mix is one of the best ways to handle this.
See if you can delete or mute the channels that don’t seem to have audio in it. In actual fact they will end up having noise recorded more than likely and it’s not contributing constructively to the sound overall so get rid of that. And make all your dialogue mono.
If you have music that will add in the stereo element as will any incidental effects it foley.
The dialogue could be enhanced further with denoising, a touch of dynamics and eq as well and possibly a bit of ambience with the reverb if the dialogue sounds to dry after denoising.
To get all this right though requires a fair bit of experience.
Premiere has decent tools for this, providing you don’t have anything particularly difficult to work with that needs salvaging. In that case you need more heavy duty tools like Waves Restoration plugins or iZotope RX.
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It combines both the left side and right side of stereo audio together so everything will come out sounding as if it’s in the middle.