Simon Billington
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah lab is usually the way in these cases.
You could always record both so you can mix in a little of the shotgun (environmental mic) in with the lav in post production so it has a bit of ambience to it. Both mics will have to remain a fixed distance apart for this too work. Not easy if you’re roaming. Then you just need to align the phases before you make your cut.
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They could be referred to as “tags” or “audio transitions” if my memory serves me correctly.
There doesn’t have to be much in one of those. Probably 2 secs in the case of Law and Order. It’s really just some kind of percussive sound, possibly several, with heaps of reverb.
You just need a similar concept and you can probably do it yourself. You only really need to layer a few sounds, add a few effects on top. What you choose these sounds to be is a matter of reflecting on the style of your cut. The Law and Order thing reminds me of a judges gavel. I don’t think it is, but it reminds me of it and it fits the theme.
Anyway, that’s something to think about.
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Yeah I remember when this happened. The new tool is actually a replacement for the old and looks to be an improvement.
It does pretty much the same thing, it just gives you a different way to work with it. There are tutorials on YouTube showing you how to work with it. It shouldn’t take long to learn.
Otherwise you could always go third party. This is another tool that does a similar thing to the original Dynamics plugin, yet it does its own thing at the same time. There would be others out there, I just happened to to notice that this one is currently on sale and quite CPU efficient. You would have to check for compatibility if you were thinking about picking it up, however.
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Sorry it took me a while to get back to you, I’ve been quite busy lately.
Without hearing it yet it seems like it would have been quite a difficult issue to deal with. Audition has some basic tools to sort out some common problems, better than FCPX/Logic I believe, but still a bit underpowered to deal with problematic situations.
There’s no ideal solution except prevention, but some of the higher end noise management and audio repair solutions like you get from Waves and iZotope could get you something more usable. It will never be perfect, but it maybe enough for what you need.
Of course these things cost quite a bit of money, then you need technique on top. It’s not something you learn overnight.
When I get a moment I’ll try give it a listen and see if i can offer you anymore feedback. I’ll try to reply sooner this time!!
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Actually there are certain frequencies that will create that kind of effect. Noise repair tools wont help in this situation.
Generally harsh frequencies can be found around 3-5kHz, sibilance 6-10kHz and the nasal sound around 900Hz-2kHz. What frequencies you address really does depend on the subject.
In general, once you find the irritating frequencies you can use a standard eq to “notch them out” and pull them down a bit. Too much can have detrimental effects to the quality of the audio. Not enough nasal frequencies and a voice can lack presence, not enough harsh frequencies and a voice can sound dull and not cut through enough, not enough sibilant frequencies and a person can sound like they have a lisp.
If you find you need to pull more frequency content out, but it is having a negative effect on the overall sound, then you need to back off the eq till it sounds reasonable and use a dynamic eq on top of that. Something like this for example. They generally don’t comes standard so you may have to purchase one.
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Did you manage to sort your issues??
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Those kind of peaking effects are known as “plosives”. It happens when strong consonant sounds come out of the talents mouth and causes the mic to freak a little. It’s a side effect of having the talent too close to the mic and talent not watching their Ps, Bs, Ks and Ts.
For future reference try getting them to stand back from the mic a tiny bit and also try a “pop shield”. They help break up and diffuse the air before it hits the mic.
They come up in the file as bursts of low energy, you may not even see them peak high in the audio file. It really helps to have a spectrogram (view of the frequencies) to tell where they are the most energetic.
RX has a feature that helps fix these issues. Or you can try a dynamic eq/compressor like the F6 or C6 and set the plugin to to selectively duck those frequencies when they hit.
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Limiting a huge dynamic range can prove to be problematic, as you have discovered, and can often result in unwanted artefacts. It’s not necessarily about the quality of the processor, more often than not it’s a simple matter of physics and you may be asking more from your processor than it is capable of doing without unwanted side-effects.
Generally I’d suggest compressing a track as well, but you can only do so much of that before it brings up noise on the dialogue track. So more often than not you require a chain of several processes to get something close to the desired effect.
A chain such as this one…
- Automate Volumes
- Soft-Clip
- Compression
- Equalization
- Limiting
You don’t have to do do all of that, but its the sum of all the parts that’s what get’s you’re audio to sound better. Just a bit of each, its the sum off all the parts.
AUTOMATE VOLUMES
Automation can be tedious and a pain in the ass, but you just want to focus on the big moves to get all the audio roughly equal loudness. Use a loudness or RMS meter and target for somewhere between -18 to -23 dBFS. Choose a level and stick to it as closely as you can while just focusing on broad level changes to keep everything in check.There are gain riding plugins out there that can do this much more efficiently and with more detail if you want to check them out. I use this one here
SOFT-CLIP
You can set a normal compressor up to behave in a “soft-clip” or “soft-limit” kind of way. The idea here is that it compresses the peaks, similar to a limiter, but it does it more transparently, to a certain point. You don’t want to abuse it, just use it to rein in some of those extremes to make them more manageable. You could also use a soft-clipper style plugin to make life simpler, you just have less control. IK Multimedia have one.If you choose to use a compressor to do the same job it needs to be able to do ratios lower than 2:1 and have a minimum attack of around 1ms or lower, as well as have an ultra-fast release, anywhere under 30ms. After setting the attack and release and adjusting the ratio to around 1.5:1 give or take, lower the threshold till you start seeing a tiny bit of action on the metering.
Bypass the plugin to compare, the effect should be barely noticeable. If you can’t hear the effect try applying a bit more, by lowering the threshold even further. Apply as much as you can when the effect becomes too noticeable, back it off. The idea is you want it to be transparent but reduces as much of those peaks as you can. It’s bit of a balancing act. You could get as much as 6 to 10dB of gain reduction before the effects become too obvious, depending on the audio and how well the compressor is set up. But watch you don’t increase your noise levels much.
If the audio appears to be a bit dark, or not as bright sounding, try reducing the release, no less than 5ms or increasing the attack, not past 3ms or a bit of both. Generally because you want to iron out all the attacks though, I would leave the attack alone if possible. If you incur a bit of distortion your release may be too short.
Keep bypassing the compressor and checking against the unprocessed audio, to make sure that you are not going overboard. However, many compressors have a mix or blend knob and you can always pull down the effect a little if you think you have gone overboard. Otherwise try just raising the threshold a little to reduce the strength of the effect.
COMPRESSION
This time you are wanting to set up a compressor with a slower attack and a relatively fast release, as well as a higher threshold and ratio. Almost the opposite of what you did with the clipper. You are only looking for around 1-3dB of gain reduction though, or thereabouts. Much more than that and it could bring up the noise level on the track. However, if you run a good denoiser on your audio you will find that you would be capable of teasing more level out of the track before the noise levels get too high. There will be some trade off, though. You are bound to increase the noise at least a little. If you find it becoming too distracting then back off the compression.In the case of this compressor, the attack would want to be around 5-30ms and the release around 50 to 150ms. Set the Output or MakeUp gain to compensate for how much you wish to compress (1-3dB), set the ratio to about 2:1 to 3:1 and lower the threshold until you get the desired reduction.
If it sounds a bit “suffocated” try increasing the attack, or if the meter isnt recovering quickly enough between major “transient” events, reduce the release. If that doesn’t work, reduce the effect by lifting the threshold.
As always, bypass the process and compare. The processed version should be roughly equal in loudness to the unprocessed sound, if not adjust the Output or Makeup gain. It should sound more energised at this stage, if not lower the threshold a bit and compensate for the overall change in level. If you want the effect to sound “snappier, increase the ratio a little and maybe the attack, if it’s too snappy, or percussive turn down the ratio, or back off on the threshold.
EQUALIZATION
Next you may want a little eq just to brighten things up a little or add a bit of low-end presence. 8k to10k boosts can help lift the audio and give it a bit of air. A boost around 150-250Hz can give the dialogue some weight. A high-pass filter rolled off under 80Hz could reduce roominess and some plosives.900Hz to 1.5K can be pulled with a narrow Q, if the dialogue is to nasal, or boosted to add a little more cut, too much will make it go nasal though, obviously. Too much of 3-5kHz can also make audio sound harsh, but if it’s sounding dull, you may want to consider boosting somewhere in this area. Anywhere from 300-600Hz can be used to reduce a muddy, “roomy” or boxy sound, if you’re dialogue sounds thin, however, you may want to consider adding some back in.
If you are eq’ing a mix of dialogue, music and even effects, then you will want to consider using only small adjustments, less than 3dB, and you are looking for a good overall balance between everything.
FINALLY we get to limiting!!
LIMITING
Get as much as you can out of this guy before it starts sounding distorted or too percussive. By this time you should be able to hopefully raise your audio to around -13LUFS for YouTube, or whatever standard you are working with, and get a much better level out of your mix. Doing everything up to this point will REALLY HELP in boosting your final levels and getting more satisfactory results.As i said earlier, its a sum of all the parts.
It takes some time to develop an ear for compression, but you have to start from somewhere. You will start to find that all the controls are co-dependant and adjusting the one can effect the way the others respond. I have given you a good ball park place to start, so hopefully it will be much harder to get it wrong, other than overdoing it, but not impossible.
I suggest that after setting it all up, walk away, comeback after your ears have had a break and listen to it again and see if you have gone to war with it, or whether it requires more. Turn off all the effects one by one and then slowly add them back in, making any necessary adjustments, but with fresh ears.. Be aware that tiny changes early on in the effect chain can have a more drastic effect on other processors down the line.
It’s possible to find multi effect units that bundle most of these effects in the one plugin. The D5 is a good example, except it misses out on the eq, you can always add that after the fact though. On the plus side, it is a quite clean type of processing and also light on CPU resources. Then there are other tools like Neutron or Ozone, but they are quite expensive for most to consider.
I am really dreadfully sorry this turned out to be an epic post!!
I’m hoping someone benefits from it, if not yourself.
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This is why it would be still listed there as “Obsolete”. This means it would still be available for older projects, but moving forward you get the benefits of using a better designed, better sounding tool.
Whenever Logic declared a project obsolete, it was still there to be opened in older projects, but not available going forward. It’s the same kind of deal. However, even today, you can still Opt/Alt+Click the effects slot and the obsolete (Legacy) effects will be made available to you.
These obsolete plugins were around in the eMagic days, before Apple bought Logic. Although, I know Adobe is a different beast it does make smart sense to keep it around for a long time. Or come up with a way where all your instances of the older plugin in older projects will get transparently converted to the new tool.
Unfortunately, the new Dynamics Processing audio effect lacks the compressor level meter (bar) so interactive compression adjustments during playback are impossible since there is no visible feedback like you had with the obsolete Dynamics effect. It is like driving blind.
This is unfortunate and something I think I may have missed. With any luck many of the Premiere users will be disgruntled about it and requesting improvements from Adobe. You could also do the same. It’s still young, I think it has a bit of tweaking to go through, but you’ve got to start from somewhere.
Admittedly though, as a user of third-party dynamic tools, the Dynamics Processing still not ideal. I have found better options out there, more suitable to my workflow. Its an option not suitable for everyone, however.
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There is a new Dynamics Processing plugin that replaces it, which is a much more powerful version of the same plugin. It was quite important they do this because the code for the old Dynamics audio was incredibly old and lacking in quality.
Improved Audio Effects
New in this release of Premiere Pro CC 2017 | November 2016
This release brings new and improved audio effects to Premiere Pro, thus providing higher-quality sound processing and improved fidelity from Adobe Audition. This includes:
Adaptive Noise Reduction
Dynamics Processing
Parametric Equalizer
Automatic Click Remover
Studio Reverb
New hi-DPI aware effects supported as part of this release include:Analog Delay
Chorus/Flanger
DeHummer
Guitar Suite
Phaser
Single Band Compressor
Tube Modeled Compressor
Vocal Enhancer
Multi-Band Compressorhttps://helpx.adobe.com/au/premiere-pro/using/whats-new.html
Personally, I usually opt to use 3rd part effects much of the time anyway. I just wait for a killer sale and acquire something I’ve been really needing to either improve the quality of my work or speed up the workflow.
Among my favs for dialogue dynamics processing is Vocal Rider, MV2, and eMO D5 which is a swiss-army knife and very much like the old Dynamics plugin except better in my opinion. But I do have a few other favourites as well.