Sound for Video Session: Tools for Dialogue Sound De-noising Audition, RX

In this week's episode we cover three tools you can use to help reduce noise in your dialogue audio recordings: High pass filters, de-hum, and de-noise plugins. We cover most of this in Adobe Audition but also jump over into Izotope RX to show the same set of tools. The same principles apply for other audio editing apps as well.

Links to gear discussed and used to record this session:
Sennheiser MKH 8050 Supercardioid Boom Microphone

Voice Technologies VT-500 Lavalier Microphone

Sound Devices 633 Audio Recorder/Mixer

Electrovoice RE20 Dynamic Microphone - used to record this session

Antelope Audio Orion Studio Audio Interface

Copyright 2017 by Curtis Judd

Fix Audio With Sound That Plays Only In The Left Speaker: Audacity

If you record your sound with an external microphone into your camera or an audio recorder, you can end up with an audio clip where the sound is only recorded to the left channel and only plays back in the left speaker. How do you fix this with Audacity? We show you how very quickly!

And here's a previous episode where we show you how to do this in Audition:

Sanken COS-11D Lavalier Microphone

Antelope Orion Studio Audio Interface (Voiceover for this session was recorded with this)

Copyright 2017 by Curtis Judd

Adobe Audition 2015.1 Includes a True Peak Limiter

Dialogue not loud enough for your film or video project? Using Adobe Audition? Good news! In the 2015.1 release of Audition, Adobe added a true peak limiter! This means that you can use the “match loudness” panel to make your dialogue audio loud enough and at the same time, not worry about the audio peaks clipping and distorting.

This is a great little timesaving feature. Thank you Adobe!

Louder Sound with Audition CC

Many people, when they first begin recording and producing sound assume that if you get a nice microphone and camera, you can produce great dialogue sound straight out of the camera, no need for post production.

I haven't generally found that to be the case.

Without getting into arguments over what kind of gear you need, there's the reality that when you record, you need to leave headroom when setting your levels. But then when you're done recording, your dialogue isn't all that loud.

I typically use clip gain and compression to even out my dialogue audio clips. Once I've got it all leveled out, then I loudness normalize the dialogue. Then my audience isn't straining to hear the quieter parts or riding their volume control to hear everything.

Psychologically, louder sound also sounds better (a complicated topic that I hope to understand better some day). I don't mean audio that's so loud that its all crushed and distorted, of course, just, clear, present sound.