Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures: Noise Reduction

this lesson is going to be an function into noise and for film and television now saying we're going to talk about noise reduction for film and television is a little dangerous because it's a huge and very wide topic it's a bit like saying in this lesson we're going to talk about poetry well what do you mean poetry what kind of poetry well same thing with noise reduction but you got to start somewhere now when you're working on a project it is extremely unlikely that you're going to complain about the lack of noise let's imagine there's a shoot the sound is robust the acting is wonderful there is good articulations so it's easy to process easy to understand everything's great and it's very quiet you're probably not going to go back to your cutting room and go wow this is great it's great it's great if only there were more noise no almost always there's too much noise for one reason or another basically the world is a noisy place so typically you have to do some sort of cleanup it might be as simple as a little bit of EQ it might be a lot of EQ or it might be some sort of a buzz remover it could be of harmonic filter or it could be broadband noise reduction it just depends now there are those times when you are insanely lucky and you get tracked that you don't have to do anything - but that's very very unlikely so basically noise is ubiquitous and therefore noise reduction is everywhere and you've got to get used to it now something you need to remember though about noise reduction is that everything is relative you shouldn't think that you want to get rid of the noise and be nice but you probably can't and you probably don't want to because reducing noise is a trade-off between noise level and the quality of the dialogue ain't no free lunch here the more you cook the sound probably the more you're going to screw up the dialogue so you have to make a balance between how much noise reduction do you really need as compared to how much can you get away with the other thing that being relative is that certain scenes a lot of noise reduction and others don't this has nothing to do with how noisy is the scene but rather what is the scene a scene recorded on 42nd Street and Broadway in New York can be pretty noisy because you are where you are a scene recorded at the Indianapolis 500 race can be pretty bloody noisy because look where you are so you don't really have to cook it so hard because it is what it is and even if there are mismatches between shots you can probably solve those problems with a race car going by or in the case of New York a car horn a car by bus brakes something like that and it won't seem at all weird or inappropriate that it's loud however if you have a scene a very intimate scene in what should be a very quiet location it's got to be quiet no camera no crew no highway nearby just the people in the scene stuck there alone with their problems so noise reduction is very very location specific and very scene specific remember movies are not ultimately about noise movies are about people people's voices the words they say the energy the contact between people this is what makes a movie wonderful it's what makes people want to see it it makes it able to touch the actors so don't screw that up noise reduce it as much as you can as much as you should don't go any further I've already told you that there's zillions of different kinds of noises but that's sort of an unmanageable number so for sake of discussion let's reduce noises into two basic categories one of them is transient noises basically noises that are short hence transient noises these could be clicks clacks clunks electrical clicks those kind of actor noises could be a car horn although it's pretty tricky anything that's short is a transient no it's also called an impulsive noise now the other kind of noise problem is ambient noise ambient noise is the stuff that covers the whole scene it could be things that came from the set or it could be things that come from outside of the set essentially they're like backgrounds they run the length of the scene although once again this isn't necessarily true but it's easier to divide sounds into these categories because this way we can think about them in an intelligent way transient noises where do they come from well some are actor generated as you'll see in a demo in just a moment sometimes people make noises that you don't want them to make things like that or clicky when they talk or little things like that things that aren't really very flattering you probably although not necessarily want to get rid of these noises hence transient noises clean up the actors another example of noises that are generated by actors is clothing rustle now in most films that you're willing to admit that you see the actors wear clothing clothing can make noise as you see right here is a little microphone if this were a real film it would of course be hidden but I don't care now if I were to move a lot you would probably hear how they make it do some noise you would probably hear the mic rattling around in my clothing now if you get this kind of noise than both the Wardrobe person and the sound person should be fired but you get a drift there's clothing rustle however there's things like starch cotton that makes a noise sometimes in a historical film you'll have women wearing dresses that are all poofed out and typically the what makes it poof out is something called crinoline which is a very crunchy sound bedsheets you crawl into your nice soft wonderful sheets and you don't think it makes any noise not record it and it's all crunchy and yucky and you can't imagine ever sleeping in that anyway all of these are sources of noises generally by the actor and they're things you have to deal with okay other kinds of transient noises crew noises it could be feet it could be dolly it could be all sorts of things now one good rule of thumb when dealing with crew noises is if the cameras moving you're probably going to get noise if it's a dolly there might be creaks and crunches coming from the dolly track you might hear the wheels going you you might hear somebody pushing it it's simple you see the camera move watch out also the same with a Steadicam a Steadicam is very quiet because it's not on Rails however somebody is walking of course they're wearing soft shoes but if they walk over a quick in the floor or on to a different kind of surface you'll probably get a crunchy sound there are noises made by the recording equipment for example the microphone normally in a boom shot in fact by definition in a boom shot the microphone is at the end of a boom or a fish Pole now it's held there by little shock mount so that if the mic moves around or rather as the the boom moves around the energy is absorbed by the shock mount so it shouldn't be passed on to the capsule the microphone however things happen if for example the boom person has been recording for 15 minutes and is really really tired he might change his grip in which case the boom drops just a bit and the shock mount can't handle the energy so the mic goes it's a very low frequency noise it's easy to get rid of before we move on any further let's listen to a classic actor generated transient noise de frente de barro kick moto boosts Amiata yeah boy barukh marui ok what's weird about this the guy sitting down talking he's pretty articulate he has a nice voice but every time he finishes a sentence he makes this noise what the world is that well we hate to admit it but this guy is wearing false teeth I mean he's no youngster and the way that most false teeth work it depends on how many teeth you have to replace there's a plastic plate up against the palate I mean you got all these teeth glued to it again it sort of fits into whatever remaining teeth you have typically this this plastic top is glued in a sense to the palate so when you stop talking it can fall just a bit and air escapes so if you'll notice again almost every time you hear this noise is in a pause between phrases digging into da Boa liquid to booze see those little click things now you might not notice these at first but once they have been pointed out to you you can't escape them and you will forever hear this sound so what's the problem it's a natural sound it occurred on the set he's an old man okay he has fake teeth the problem is this they're too loud if you were in the room listening to this guy talk you think I had such a nice guy and you wouldn't even notice his teeth but when you record it you don't have the advantage of being there in person when you're in person you have facial recognition things you know you can look in his eyes look at his face you can look at his body and you're there you're with them you don't really pay attention to however once you record it all those messages are gone so you're stuck with this okay that's part 1 part 2 it's not a very nice sound it's not a very flattering sound and unless you want to make this guy out to be old and sort of decrepit come on give him a break get rid of the clicks even though this kind of actor generated noise is a little embarrassing and not very pretty it's actually very very easy to get rid of all you got to do is locate the click then right around it locate some room tone blasts over the click make a little fade on both sides and almost always that does it again it does it because you're in a silent space you're in a room tone space you're not in the middle of a word so let's take a look at how to solve this particular problem let's first of all find a click that we want to get rid of diggy diggy done well let's get rid of some right here okay now normally when you're trying find clicks pops anything like that you're going to want to scrub scrub like so Cassandra it's the only way to find something now in this particular case it's easy because you can see it but more often than not in this sort of view you will not see a transient noise like this so learn to scrub now let's try to find a little bit of room tone somewhere around here let's say let's take this and copy it and see what we got as far as fades go okay let's play it thank you done good it's gone here's a before you done see there's a there's before here it is after done okay this is a no-brainer it's really easy now let's say you couldn't find some good room tone right here well logically this is going to be the same thing so you could steal it from here and drop it over here and there you go you're done the only problem with that is that room tone tends to change over time so I mean it won't here because it's so so close but the world changes over time so what you steel here may be slightly different than what's happening here and what you're placing it into although you never know so try it if it works it works if it doesn't work it doesn't work and you'll try something else but for the most part in this particular technique you want to take room tone from as close as possible to the event that you're trying to fix so since it's the same problem throughout maybe we'll do one more yeah boy that's a big one let's see if we can do this guy real fast see that's a double so it's extra exciting we might be able to do this grab a whole bunch of room tone here and copy it and blast over the whole thing that might work let's see or I do we can't let's see yeah boy but you boil it basically works it works fine the thing is there because this room tone that we inserted is so long it's not that long it's about one frame you can hear a little bit of a doubling so the question is just how no onok do you need to be this would probably be fine for most abortions but one faculty eat no one's going to hear it it's probably fine but if you're totally absolutely neurotic work on it some more find some new room tone and off you go let's say you can't find any tone in this area so you might want to look let's say here or here or here or somewhere else to make to steel tone so that you can blast over this noise that's relatively easy and more often than not it's going to work however there's times that this doesn't work so you need to create a longer string of room tone so that you have something to work with so the way I do this is I simply copy my original region and I paste it down onto this track notice this track is not called dialogue ABCD and so forth but rather it's called work one work two whatever now work tracks I make so that I can do crazy stuff let's imagine that you're a very neat carpenter and you have all your tools hanging up on the wall your wood that you're going to work with is nicely organized everything's neat and then you have your work bench which is this this monster you've got things piled up and no one can make sense of it but you that's your safe place it's where you can get stuff done and you don't care about the consequences I use a work track for two things first of all if I need to open a huge region from my region list I can drop it on to this track without worrying that I'm going to blast over something else that's further down the timeline because what if I do well I don't put anything on the work track that I care about so it doesn't matter second in this particular example we need to extract the room tone from between the words and to do that easily we're going to use the shuffle mode now the shuffle mode is extremely valuable and it is equally dangerous because with the shuffle mode you can do something like this you can say okay I want to get rid of those words so you use the shuffle mode and you simply delete it notice what happened everything moved to the left in other words it got rid of the thing that I had highlighted that's great but the problem is everything down here is also going to move to the left not just the things that you can see which is safe because you see it but also the things that are downstream from here so you can easily knock something on a sink if you're using the shuffle mode on a real track however if you're using a work truck who cares because you're not damaging anything real so let's get closer here see if there's anything we can steal that's going to work now you've got to keep in mind that I made this little demo I cut it down from a full track just so it's manageable it's easy to see so it's a very very short section here of clips that might be so short that I can't extract any real room tone but let's see what's going on yours going to solo okay this is all worthless here because it's breathing listen again yeah so let's get rid of all it's a via no use so that's of no use here it's okay let's do this it's cut a bit more out like so let's then go back to the normal slip mode as you see up here at the top and we do a little fade action let's see how that goes okay this is our room tone now it's not very long in fact it's only 18 frames which isn't bad let's listen to it one more time okay it's okay now before we move on it's usually easier to make a region or a clip out of this combination because imagine that we have five or ten different little Clips making up this string of room tone it's a little unwieldy and sort of hard to work with so instead it's easier just to consolidate it into something and let's say let me see what scene this is this is scene 36 F so we label this 36 F room tone and now we have some room tone stashed away both as a file and as a clip so whenever we need room tone for this particular shot we've got it and it's quite easy the last example showed noises between words it's very very easy to get rid of these there are only real two traps you could fall into the first is you simply make a bad edit and you don't cover up the the edges of the noise so you get a little bit of a vestige of it or you bet you make bad room tone you simply make a bad choice in what you're filling the hole with and it doesn't match but for the most part it's really really easy now the hard stuff very often in fact most of the time noises fall not between words but within words why is it that way it's just to make life hard and miserable you know that's life normally what you have to do when you have a noise within a word is to actually find an alternate take of that particular shot and cut in the word it's not as bad as it seems it just takes some time and you have to be very sensitive about changing the acting however we're not going to show you that one in this demo because that's a whole nother story about how to find alternate takes so there's another trick you can use not on long sounds like which is actually pretty long but on very very short clicks like electrical noises you can use a tool that most workstations come with in the Pro Tools it's called the pencil first let's look at a clip and I'll show you where a click is it's not a very big click so you have to sort of learn to listen to it and almost my house so I have to keep a close eye on those two I see a No okay there's two clicks here we're gonna deal with the first one now listen it's right about here keep a close eye on those two where he says those there's a click on the word those let me zoom in so I have those two right there there now you could argue who cares wise you know it's a nothing clique that's probably true however one by itself isn't a big deal however you get enough of these and it sort of wears your brain down it makes it hard to listen to things it sounds like the overall ambient noise level is high which in this case it really isn't it's a good recording it's also like I don't you have a dog barking next to your home one bark ah you don't really care but after three or four hours that dog really wears you down and you're trying to decide which is a better option a gun or rat poison and because you just your brains go no no no no no I can't take any more so even though this individual click is truly not a big deal you need to listen for these and decide if you want to get rid of them or else so let's do it it's right there okay I'm going to zoom in let's make this bigger okay that's the click right there notice you can't see it that's the way most clicks are you simply can't see them aha when you're close enough there it is now as I said most workstations have something called a pencil which actually enables you to redraw the graph cool there's a catch though listen the Pro Tools every single thing you do as far as an audio suite operation or mixing or anything like that it's not destructive it might destroy your region it's probably not going to go back to the original file and mess it up so let's say you need to do an EQ as a an audio suite event you do it it makes a new sound file so you've got the original and you have the copy which is the results of your audio suite work however the pencil is an oddball the pencil actually goes back and changes redraws if you will the original sound file so if you screw it up you're doomed I mean you can do undo right now it's no problem but let's say that you do it tonight you're dead tired you do the pencil thing though yeah yeah yeah it's great you get some sleep you come back in the morning and you listen to it and go oh you can't say oh good I'll just make it thankfully I made a copy of the region I'll simply slide it back into place and everything will be fine no it won't when you copy a region you're not making a new sound file you are simply copying the visual display of a pointer which points to something on your hard drive so in order to not want to kill yourself later you need to make a physical copy of this of the area right around the thing you're fixing so by far at least an approach tool is the easiest way to solve this problem is to simply do a consolidate if you're truly a Boy Scout you could rename this consolidation 13 b08 consolidate but most of the time who cares now the reason for this is that well let's do it first and I'll show you the reason for it okay here is the thing we want to fix you see it's just a little perturbation in the in the waveform so if you go to the pencil and this is where you get to practice your arts and crafts do something like that isn't it lovely okay let's what it sounds like okay well that's not fair because you don't have any roll up to it viable to okay it's gone now this pencil the upside of it is it's quick and mostly it's fun everybody's likes the pencil it's like Foley everybody loves Foley because it's so cool and it's so weird the pencils simply fun because after hours of edit edit edit think think think edit edit edit it's fun to pull out the pencil and go whee that was great but it only works for extremely short clicks like this one here it would not work for anything longer see that's a that's a very tiny click so something electrical for example the old man go on it would never work because that it's an acoustic event it has a heart attack as you saw sort of che like this actually for you it's shaped like this and you can see the ring out it's too complicated to use a pencil on that okay so now in review we have seen two different ways to solve two different kinds of transient noises the first is a noise between words easy blasts over with room tone the next is you have a small small small click within a word or a thin something you care about lock and there's a click in the middle of my lovely breath then you have to do something normally what you'll do is go to an alternate take and replace the word however if you one can't get to the alternate take or to none of them are a good word match none of them are a good acting match for what is in the original or if you're just bored and want to try this you try this but this will not work for something that's long now the other kind of noise is ambient noise ambient noise is really what you think about when you think about noise reduction could be traffic could be air-conditioning could be anything it's just the the junk that fills up a scene normally that junk is not good but like I said at the very beginning before you start on your trip to get rid of the noise ask yourself do you really need to get rid of the noise is the noise hurting the scene isn't always helping the scene don't be a hero and get rid of all the noise if it's actually serving the story now ambient noise where does it come from some of it comes from the set some of it comes from outside of the set the set you have lights lights typically buzz if they're big lines to go because there's a there's a ballast on the on the the light it's sort of like when you listen to a fluorescent light up clubs it goes e so you got to think about that air conditioners air conditioners are horrible for two reasons first of all air conditioners actually make a lot of noise that's problem one problem two is that you get used to it so quickly that you don't notice it your brain just goes I'll get it air conditioner and it thinking about it it quits hearing it the microphone doesn't do that because microphones aren't that smart they might sound good but they're not very smart the problem is not well there is a problem of dealing with but the best way to deal with an air conditioner is on the set to get rid of it to turn it off now if you're in a big office building let's say it's not good enough to turn off the air conditioning of the office you're in you've got to turn off more than that ideally you got to shut down the building which of course will never happen because the the air conditioning units themselves in a big building or on the roof so as they go it makes the whole building kind of go in this harmonic thing that's just a disaster to get rid of camera cameras make noise in the good old days like up to five years ago when they actually had film cameras ago but there were all sorts of notches and ways to get rid of it the art of getting rid of camera noise is almost as old as the talkies modern cameras modern either whether it's a high-def or a digital cinema camera they sound like little baby vacuum cleaners which makes you crazy because it's a broadband sound that's very very hard to get rid of but we got to deal with it finally things like coolers and freezers now what do I mean by that let's say you're going to do a shoot in a convenience store a place that sells you know cigarettes and you can't sell cigarettes anymore but you know chocolate and water and beer can you sell beer okay anyway it sells stuff it's going to be air-conditioned of course and there will also be a cooler for drinks and there will be a freezer for ice cream and things like that all of these things make a ton of noise and again though when you walk into the store you probably won't notice it but you've all seen films in which some kid goes and tries to buy beer walks into the store it's already noisy and then he opens the cooler to get the beer huge noise but again you've got to pay attention the sound recordist must pay attention to that now those are just a few of the possible steady-state noises that can come from the set outside the set there's traffic you know about that there's the generator generator you know lights need electricity lights need a lot of electricity so there's always a generator somewhere down the block if it's a super expensive shoot it's a good generator that doesn't make a lot of noise but if it's if it's not an expensive shoot it's got some rented thing that sounds horrible and makes noise anyway watch out for it then there's other industrial noises like construction sound goodness knows what but there's all sorts of noises now just like we divided noise into two basic categories those being transient or impulsive noise and on the other hand ambient noises or steady-state noises let's divide ambient noise into two different types one of them is tonal or harmonic sound those are things that have a harmonic structure in other words it works like when you pluck a guitar string there's a fundamental and there's lots of harmonics examples would be electricity if you get a bad ground there's a fundamental of either 60 or 50 Hertz depending on where you are and then there's all these harmonics the best example of that is you plug in your guitar into an amplifier it's a ground issue and it causes this electrical harmonic the other kind of noise is broadband if tonal or harmonic sounds have a harmonic structure broadband doesn't think of tonal as buzz or hum and think of broadband is hiss if you do that you pretty well understand what the deal is there's a third thing that's sort of outside the loop and that is if you have a problem that's very very unusual like let's say you have a classical concert and in the fifth row some idiot has a phone that's beeping that's a very difficult problem because you can't really go back to alternate takes especially if there's only one take so there are devices called spectrogram editing which allows you to actually paint out these unusual sounds I've used it for birds people use it for trucks backing up or go baby baby and it's very good extremely time-consuming but it's a miracle before we can move on we need a very very brief history of noise reduction I'm sorry to do this to you but it's kind of important so that you understand better which tool to use for which most of the noise reduction devices that you'll use today actually had their birth or at least their grandparents had their births in the late 70s early 80s this is the time when the CD was released and became very popular now at the time there wasn't a whole lot of the inventory on CD of course because first you have to have the machine but if you don't have content the machine won't happen and yet if you don't have the machine the content won't happen so one of the tricks to get people hooked on CDs was to re-release tons of old material imagine in the vaults of various music companies the treasure trove of old recordings whether from the 30s 40s 50s or 60s great recordings at least from a musical point of view maybe not great sounding recordings but stuff the people want to hear however when people forked out their money for their CD players what were they sold they were sold it's quiet so they want quiet recordings so keep in mind too that in the 50s let's say when my parents bought a record they were playing it on not terribly sophisticated playback devices you know it was the old turntable in the box with the prop up speakers cool to look at you could carry it around but it didn't sound very good so the it didn't matter if there was some hiss or other stuff on the record however by the 87 T so forth the quality of the playback equipment had gotten much better so people could actually hear all this stuff anyway for whatever capitalist reasons it was necessary and desirable to re-release lots of material so they had to come up with gizmos that would make it sound good on a record there are three basic problems you encounter when you're transferring a record and trying to release it first pops and clicks obvious if your master is some sort of a plate in other words a record pops clicks you understand what that's about no point explaining it the next problem is Rumble now imagine you have a really old 78 rpm record and you want to clean it up and rerelease Caruso singing something well the way that this thing was originally made the way the original recording was made there was a shaft with a motor turning a wheel and there was an engraver this motor was in probably in direct contact with the plate which held the master so any sort of Rumble coming from the motor was passed along acoustically to this device where the needle was cutting it so it wasn't unusual to get some sort of a on these old records and then when it's transcribed in other words when it was transferred from analog record to digital something there could have also been transcription errors either in the shape of the needle or in the actual mechanical sound going from the record to the digital so in addition to removing pups and clicks of crunches and things like that there had to be some form of removing harmonic noise and then there's his old stuff has his in fact yes but old stuff really has is so this forms sort of the triumvirate of noise reduction today 30 years later these are still the same basic issues the processors are better they're easier to use they're more sophisticated but they do the same thing so you need to understand basically how these things work just like when we remove the click from our dear departed uncle we just took some room tone on either side and blasted over it well a D clicker does the same thing it hears a click it looks on the other side and says hey yep this is a click it gets rid of it then there's a hole and it goes hmm this happened here this happened here so this must be what's happening here ok that's it that's how all interpolation processors work just by identifying something removing it and then figuring out what to put in its place humm simple it's basically a multiband knotch so you it's like a multiband equalizer which will in fact use sort lee seun to figure out a harmonic get rid of it and then figure out all the rather figure out the fundamental figure out the harmonics make little notchy things you're done broadband is slightly more complicated in an ideal broadband processor you find a little piece of pure noise pure noise noise that's not contaminated by content there's no decay of the of the symphony there's no beginning of the guitar in other words pure noise if possible it didn't write a description of that sample of pure noise and then essentially simply play the signal through this it's much more complicated than this but it compares at every frequency the the description of noise a comparator to the signal if the signal at any given bin is very close to the description goes all your noise and then you can attenuate it by some sort of amount that you want but let's say this bin it's not at all similar so ok you're not noise and it just leaves it here and so forth and then it recombines it back into a normal sound now why should you care the reason you should care is that as we use these devices the more you know about them to know you the more you know about how they think the better you are equipped to use them properly now enough talking let's look at something here's an example that includes both tonal noise harmonic noise as well as broadband noise so before we do anything let me just play the clip I know a haunted Arizona today me complicado know cuanto a por que no Lola a vivant a Miami B rien de los ángeles kaif un hombre que ma boo so my momma para darle la cabeza me Padre para darle en la gala wha a me papa entiendo hmm there's two basic problems on the bottom you hear what I assume is the generator it's if it is a generator there's a very low frequency fundamental followed by a whole bunch of harmonics that's the that you hear now at the top you hear some hiss I don't know where it comes from it doesn't really matter where it comes from at this point but we have to attack it on both ends so I think the first thing we'll do is go after the harmonic sounds so what we're going to do before you do anything in any sort of noise reduction please make a copy okay this way you first of all if you totally screw it up you have something to go back to but also you will always have a reference this is unprocessed as you do your work whatever kind of noise reduction you need to add every step refer back to the original remember we are not dealing with noise noise is not what people care about when they watch a movie noise does not convey the passion the joy the pain the whatever of the story or if what the actors are saying the words do that when you're reducing your noise when you're managing your noise it is very very easy to lose touch with the words you get so proud of yourself you get cocky about wow look at all the noise I got rid of that you forget to listen to the words it's seductive it's the siren song of noise reduction but you got to keep an original there if for no other reason to regularly listen to the original sound to know what it's supposed to sound like so make a copy as we did here now let's listen I'm going to turn up my monitor volume a bit okay let's listen to this here we can do I know intend Arizona today Morgan blue god no cuanto a por que no Lola Ovid there are certain processes which can easily be done as inserts this one for example all we're doing at this point is creating an EQ filter there's virtually no latency on that so who cares you you could use it as an insert now the other thing I have to say is sort of a disclaimer throughout these demos I'm using exclusively waves products now I have access to all sorts of products but I'm using waves in this one first of all since I'm doing a series of demonstrations in this lesson I kind of want a certain continuity of product and wage is very common a lot of people have waves so that's what I'm using I'm going to insert in the case of waves it's going to be a q10 mono q10 in this case is a very old fashioned multi band equalizer what's cool about it is that it is crazy and it will let you do anything you want so for example if you wanted to put a super super narrow you know look at the Q on this guy and put a peak or a notch or whatever most eq's would not let you do this because they say hey you're nuts it's not going to sound good the q10 says hey you're a grown-up do what you want we do not take responsibility for this so this this EQ or something like it is very good for notches because again it'll give you super deep notches things that may not be very musical but they're good for surgery now what we want to do is to shop around and find the right frequencies to match the harmonic structure of this noise which I assume is a generator so we start playing I know a haunted Arizona taurima complicado no cuanto a por que no Lola a vivant a Miami billion de los ángeles kaif un hombre que ma boo so me mama para darle la cabeza me Padre para darle okay now I've shopped around until I have a peek a very very narrow peak at around 75 Hertz something like that I'll move it around you can hear I know a-huntin Arizona today my completa no cuanto a por que no Lola I bet you want a memo so you shop around and you find what you think is the worst low frequency background noise once we've found that we simply flip this over and turn it into a knotch something like that it's really not a notch a notch goes to 0 goes to infinity this is just a 15 DB cut here let's make it a bit narrower okay let's before and after I know our hunt and Arizona term accompli Dada no cuanto a por que no Lola I let you on the ma'am so let's call this the fundamental something like this now let's pop up and see now theoretically this is an 80 the next one theoretically be at 160 but life is never so kind this means that the source of the noise is much more complicated than we thought but let's keep trying so porky no Lola avid yo auntie momma Baron de los angeles kaif when hombre que ma boo so me mama para darle la cabeza me Padre para darle okay it's really not bad I've skipped number three this is four here notice that it's at 156 which actually is about twice of this one which is 79 so for all sorts of reasons no one will understand it worked so let's make this a cut let's see how it works I know a hunt and Arizona taurima complicado no cuanto a por que no Lola Avianca mama be tender Los Angeles okay fine hombre que my boo so me okay if you hear the bottoming is getting cleaner and so far we have not messed up the voices again this is we haven't done anything else to this particular clip so by a being we're actually comparing it to the original let's do it again I know hunt and Arizona to them accompli da no cuanto a por que no Lola okay it's getting into good shape let's do one more notch and be done with it so let's take this guy narrow it up in theory we could say there's going to be something around 300 but let's just see I know vent and Arizona story me Gunpla gana no come on ma porque no Lola avid yonder mama billion dollars on honey give one now when you hear this horrible sound don't be tricked by it it's it really has nothing to do with what you're doing it's just the filter is ringing because it's too narrow it's again this is where I said the q10 like many other paragraphing equalizers will let you do crazy things so this is just the EQ going beyond its capabilities what you're trying to listen for here is a low frequency sound that we can peak right here so we can later cut it so this is let's hear it again I know a hunt and Arizona taurima complicado no cuenta por que no Lola avid yonder mama beat hinder Los Angeles alright we have a we found something around 300 now let's make that a cut make it narrower and let's see we got I know a hunt and Arizona taurima completa no cuanto a por que no Lola a Vedanta mama beat Hindu loose on honey great that's all the low-frequency we're going to deal with right now it seems like a very small thing however this low frequency stuff is muck it gets in the way of the feeling of the dialogue so it's very important that we get rid of it before we attack the stuff on the top now before we go to broadband I want to see if we can get rid of n any of that high-frequency stuff most of it is crickets I think but let's see if there's any set noise that we can find and get rid of just so we don't have to push the broadband so hard so let's see what that is hi Noel hunt and Arizona taurima complicado no cuanto a por que no Lola a Dante Miami burgeon de los ángeles que fue el hombre que McHugh so my momma para darle la cabeza me Padre para darle en la gamma1 a my papa entiendo okay let's see if this hunt then there is only three more complete ah no come on don't porque no Lola I bet you're on the memo okay notice this did a good work on the crickets here well we need to make sure of those that were not mucking up the voices so let's listen to this again I'm going to just turn this guy on and off and see what we've done to the to the actual voices I know hunt and Arizona taurima complicado no cuanto a por que no Lola Avenue anta mama virgin de los ángeles que buen hombre que ma boo so me mama para darle una cabeza me Padre para it's not totally transparent so I think that we should bump this up a bit now at this stage it's very tempting to say wow this is much warmer than the original recording it's really much better if you're the editor the mixer the floor sweeper and everything else you have the right to make such a choice the thing is normally if you're the editor you're going to want to try to not mess up the voices at all at least as best you can it's true that when I had this guy a little bit lower here it actually make the voices sound better but that's really not your place at this point your place is to get rid of as many annoying sounds as you possibly can without impacting the voices so I've backed off a little bit let's listen one last time I know our hunt and Arizona taurima completa no cuanto a por que no Lola a yo anthem okay I think it's pretty good so we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and process this okay so now this first line here is the one has been processed now before we move on there's one more thing I do suggest notice this is scene 27 for 8 so I'm going to do this I'm going to save this a preset we'll call this demo 27 - 4 - 8 and this is q10 this tells us this is what the processing of this particular clip is just makes life easier later ok we've saved the preset but let's now also save put a reasonable name on this so it's a 27 for 8 q10 that's the name of the clip now so let's move him down to here move you up to here here's the original here's the q10 guy I'm also going to make a copy of this ok original original q10 processing now we want to see what we can do as far as attacking this guy now there's a few ways of going about it the old fashioned way was to take a noise sample and then describe it and then run the signal through that and that's a very effective way to work newer processors though whether it's the cedar or the wns by waves or the isotope rx - don't ask for a sample but since this is a tutorial let's let's do it the old-fashioned way because sometimes doing it the old-fashioned way is in fact the best way to go so here's what we're here's our process guy let's see what we can do to it come on doing a porky no Lola now that you're on the Mac by the way you notice here that especially on him he sounds sort of not very good right now you think oh my god we screwed it up because the processing well in fact in this case we didn't what we did is we exposed a bad recording here's the original cuenta por que no lo la cuenta por que no Lola see we actually didn't mess it up we just exposed the fact that it wasn't recorded very well all right so what we're going to do is go to a processor call Xena is at this point Zeno is another waves thing here we have get rid of the breath this is a pretty good example I want to lose the breath let's find something that's good there this is a piece of noise that doesn't have any of the significant elements of the shot so in other words this will describe our noise profile okay there this is our description of the noise now we're going to do is going to run the whole thing through the processor I know hunt and Arizona taurima completa no cuanto a por que no Lola a you want a ma'am obedient little son he'll if I know we're gonna okay so far all we've done is we've taken a threshold this is what every broadband processor does we've taken a threshold raised it so that it now you know anything below the line is being processed that's how it works it's just like on a compressor here is that the reduction so in other words anything below this white line is being reduced by this amount now in this kind of noise reduction a little bit goes a very long way so if you overdo it which I'll do in a second you it sounds like a cell phone it's really horrible so let me show you that I know and then there is only three Mogan blue god no oh I don't know it's called swimming by some people that sort of sound in the it's around the words and it's also in the background listen again I know and then there is only three more complete ah okay so that just won't do or doing now is a relatively low threshold with a moderate amount of noise reduction so if we in this case keep lowering I know the shadows only thought I'm a complete God know what doing it it sounds better all of that now that you're on the ma'am I'll be we're doing almost no noise reduction so let's raise this back to six and there's a trick we can do here we can actually change the curve of the sound or of the noise profile so that we can say oh I want to do less mid-range and I will do more more low the problem here is fundamentally high-mid so let's I know hunt and Arizona today Morgan plead are no cuanto a por que no Lola what we're saying here as we lower this line which is the line that sits on top of the noise sample we're saying okay at this frequency which in this case is 1777 I want to do less processing so if you want to hear more clean 1800 Hertz you actually lower the processor it's it's backwards from an EQ so I know a-huntin there's only three me completa no cuanto a por que no Lola a strong mama Baron de los angeles kaif when hombre que ma boo so me mama para darle la cabeza mi padre para darle en la gala one o me papa nd okay so what we've done is actually we're able now to have a higher reduction because we're not reducing everything this area which was the most sensitive we which is saying hey don't process as much here okay now just for fun let's process this and we I'm not going to save the presets here and I'm going to call it twenty seven four eight q10 I'll just call it Q plus Z for Z noise okay that's what we've done now let's look at another possibility for doing this this is a type there are plenty of noise reduction devices that work in this manner there's another type of broadband that works in a different manner which is this the cedar DNS 1500 2500 there's several the iZotope are x2 the waves w NS there are many many more they work in a real-time way and it's a basically an entirely different way of thinking so let's do an audio suite here noise reduction w NS mono okay the way this works and like I say there's a lot of things that work this way so this is sort of a general statement we have bands however before you start choosing oh this is a band this is a band and so forth what you need to do is figure out generally what range is your processing going to be so let's listen to this and decide are we low we met a little that is only three more complete I know what doing it okay I think we are either mid range or mid high let's try mid high so it's from three thirty Hertz to twelve thousand Hertz let's see what we get here so the way this thing works is you know it's pretty obvious how it works you have bands and you have in essence attenuation although it doesn't really work like an EQ there's a temptation to do something like this which is say suggest something that is only thirty we're gonna tell me what to do what doing it but that's that's sort of lazy and you'll be punished if you do that so I'm going to go back to full reset good and then go back to mid high good okay so the best thing to do is actually work a bit take each band and see what it does and understand what it does before you make your choices so preview I know a hunt and Arizona taurima complicado no cuanto a por que no Lola avid you wantem am obedient little sound he'll give one so what I'm doing is I'm simply going through each band and not just seeing what reduces the noise the best but what it does to the overall flavor and especially to the voices so I'm gonna go through all six bands before come back to you so here we go I know hunt and Arizona taurima complicado no cuanto a por que no Lola a video ante Miyama Virgen de Los Angeles que fue el hombre que ma boo so my mama para dar la cabeza mi padre para darle en la gala 1a my papa entiendo I know even tender so Nestor ami complicado mmm cuanto a por que no Lola a yo auntie mama Baron de los angeles kf1 hombre que my booze essentially I like the two extreme bands I like this for dealing with more the rumble and here for dealing with the crickets they're both sort of outside the bay take voice range so I find them less problematic for the voice so let's try playing with those I know a haunt and Arizona taurima complicado no cuanto a por que no Lola avid Oh ante Miami billion dollar San Angeles que fue el nombre came abuse Oh me mama para darle la cabeza mi padre para darle en la gala one a my papa entiendo hmm I know I'll hunt and Arizona story me complicado no come on donut porque all right for now it's really not a bad setup there's still noise in the background but there's always gonna be a noise in the background and what you can't really see in this scene is there's all this stuff going on back behind them so it might be a just to follow the amount of noise now we can keep cooking this for a long time and get out most of the noise but then not only are we damaging the voices but it becomes sterile and then we have to just add all this noise back so I'm probably happy with this but this brings up something else you got to do let's say you've been playing with this noise reduction for 15 minutes which is a long time normally when you're doing this you're not talking into a computer telling people how to do it so it's going to be a bit faster normally anyway I've got it just the way I want before I say this is it and I print it I try to leave the room drink some water drink some tea go look at the sky come back in four or five minutes and listen to it again the odds are that what I've done right now is over-processed and the odds are that if I leave the room and come back I'll go you back off a bit and then I'll be happy your ears get stupid after so long you don't hear the noise so you keep pushing it you don't bother with the voices so you don't care and you need a break so let's say if I've left the room I've come back hi everybody there's one more thing to do it's the threshold I know and then that is only thought I'm a Gunpla god no come on don't know what the threshold does is it takes this setting that you've developed and it simply determines how much of it are you use zero means absolutely everything is going through it down here means that essentially nothing is going through it and you want to decide what is the balance between yes process this is what I want and this is how much of it I want so let's play with this for a moment I know Anton there is only today my complete God knows listen to this what doing it it's loud you know a little this that you're on the mama beat him little sound honey if I know I came up it's quieter but sort of dead so let's come back down to here so one last thing to look at again this is true on any broadband processor smoothing I won't bother to tell you what it does because it's too long of a story but basically if you go into less smoothing the processing is more intense more precise more articulate but you're more likely to hear artifacts things like that if you smooth more it's almost always going to sound well smoother a little less processing a little better transitions from one frequency to another but you lose a little bit of articulation so it can get a bit slimy at times anyway let's say that we have done this and we're happy with it so let's just do it to get it over with okay now let's see we've done first we listen to the original at which is this guy right here cuanto a por que no Lola I bet you're on the mama beat hinder Los Angeles if when hombre que my boo so my mom now let's listen what we just did cuanto a por que no Lola I bet you're on the mama beat a be back and forth original cuenta por que no Lola I bet you want a mama Virgen de Los Angeles kayfun hombre que me gusta my mama para darle la cabeza mi padre para darle en la gala one a me papa Indian alright um we've actually done less than I thought we would now what we've done is we still have the crickets most of them but we've gotten rid of a lot of the nasty background stuff so at this point it would just be a question for you is this enough you want to stop here it's quite natural there's still some schmutz in the background it's up to you in general a good rule to follow is if you're doing this in your editing room and you're going to mix this somewhere else then under process in your cutting room you can always add more you can't take it out it's like the cocoa in the milk you know you can always add more it's really hard to get the cocoa out of the milk so I would strong suggest and unless there's an objection to this particular process this is about as good as you'd want to get it in the cutting room now if you're the mixer also you do what you need to do but again when you're pre mixing this dialogue whether it's you doing it in a computer or you going to a mix room and somebody else is doing it be careful in the dialogue premix remember in the dialogue premix there's nothing Nick you're not hearing any tracks other than the dialogue so there is this temptation to go it's got to get Quadra it's got to get quieter it's got to get quieter because you've got nothing to play against in the final mix you're going to have some backgrounds you'll have some sound effects you'll have some Foley you might even have some music which means that what seems a little bit noisy now will be fine later or if it's not you can always cook it again in the mix but at this stage I think this is good enough let's look at one last example of using broadband processing along with filtering to try to remove some background noise from this particular shot but first here is the shot either some dumb kid honest a demonstration okay that's the shot there's a lot of traffic there's an air conditioner there's general Rumble this one is hard so let's see what we can do as you can see I've already made a copy of the original region so that we have our safety here now let's listen to it once again so we know what's happening either some dumb fitted honest and a monster gym okay let's first try to tackle this low-frequency junk here on the bottom let's do this noise word about EQ and q10 well use the same filter we did before now one thing I'm going to do different this time is to use a high-pass filter on the bottom here because we have Rumble here you might think ah just use a hot dress either some dumb fitted Aniston demonstration of course if you go high enough with the high-pass filter it's going to get rid of the bottom but of course it totally ruins the voice so it's sort of an absurd option so we're going to forget that one for a moment okay so what we'll do is we'll keep this high-pass available because it's handy to have and try to use notches as we did in the last example either some dumb fitted honest and demonstration that's more or less the sitter he does some damned honest and even stratagem he does some damn good honest and M instruction okay we can clearly hear that we're getting rid of some bottom but what I want to make sure of is that we're not messing up the voice too much so let's listen to the a be either some damned honest and demonstration our filtered example is a little on the thin side so I'm going to back off a bit again it's always a compromise between how much do you get rid of it how much do you ruin okay let's note let's go to the next band either some Duncan Adonis tandem instruction either some dumb kid honest a demonstration video some dumpy Adonis tandem instruction either some dumpy ID honest okay now we're definitely too thin on the voice so we have to back off here and let's see what we can do Peterson Duncan Adonis no demonstration either summed up okay that's about the most we can do at the bottom without messing things up so we'll save this for broadband now let's see if there's anything to do with filters at the top here or if we have to reserve all of that for the broadband either some damn fitted Aniston demonstration either some damn candid honest and demonstration either some dumpy Adonis tan demonstration okay first as I turn this on and off you can clearly hear how some of the ugliness and this noise is going away let's also listen to the voice and see what's happening either some dumpy Adonis no demonstration either some dumpy Adonis the demonstration this is bypass either some dumpy Adonis tandem instruction okay it's acceptable it's not really ruining too much let's use a couple more bands and see if we can save some more either some dumpy Adonis tandem instruction he does some damned honest andaman stratagem he does some dumpy Adonis tandem instruction video some damn candid honest and demonstration okay this is in butters he does some dumpy Adonis tandem instruction either some dumpy Adonis not even stretchy alright the filtering is definitely helping we are thinning out the voice a bit but I think we can save that at the end of the process so let's save this just for fun this is to the oh seven a-ok certain plugins will allow you to save presets others want if your if the plug-in you're using allows you to do so do so it really saves you work down the line especially if you run into the same problem elsewhere or if you do the processing and then realize that you made a terrible mistake you can go back to your preset and start there so it's really nuts not to do so so let's process this done okay let's again compare remember here's the original here either some damn tinted Aniston demonstration and here either some damn fitted Aniston demonstration it is a bit thin but I think we can save it once we finish all the processing so let's try going to the wns first see if that will do the trick if not we'll use Z noise this is definitely going to be knit high I think and let's see either some dumb fitted honest and Emin strategy again let's listen to the band's to see what's going to work it is some dumb pianist and demonstration either some dumpy adonis tandem instruction he does some dumpy Adonis tandem instruction either some dumpy Adonis tandem instruction either some dumpy Adonis tan demonstration alright at this point what's most interesting are these two bands and this band I think let's play with those first and see what we get either some damn fitted honest and demonstrate Jamie Lee does some dumb kid honest and even stratagem he does some dumpy Adonis tandem on strategy a little son Duncan Adonis tandem instruction little son Duncan Adonis tandem instruction all right without trying too hard I think this is about as far as we want to push it now let's play with both the smoothing and the threshold and see if we can get more action with less artifacts either some damn fitted honest a demonstration either some damn fitted honest and demonstration either some damn candid honest a demonstration okay the last thing I want to do now is to listen to what we're doing and compare it to the actual original right now by going into bypass what we're doing is we're comparing this process with the q10 process but I want to go back to the original and see we've got so first listen to this either some damn fitted honest and demonstration either some dumb pianist and even strategy either some damn pianist a demonstration okay it's not really messing up the voice at all the processing could probably be a more aggressive but I think I want to try after this to use Z noise and see if by using a different technique we can get more noise reduction so let's let's save this guy let's save this some dumb fitted honest anyone all right now I'd like to do one more thing first of all let's go back one more time and compare these two either some dumb fitted honest a demonstration either some dumb kid honest and demonstration okay one thing we're doing is we're losing volume that's not too surprising we can just pick it up here or we can pick it up as a gain process but for now let's just do this maybe 3 DB I'm not sure either some Duncan Adonis ton demonstration okay that's good now at least because you can't compare when the volumes are different last thing I want to do is grab some tone here that's good and go into noise reduction xeno is mono and we okay we have a sample here now let's take the whole thing and see what we can do with it either some damn fitted honest a demonstration notice it here we're already getting some swimming so this is too much let's try lowering the threshold Peterson dam fitted Aniston demonstration hey Peterson Duncan Adonis the demonstration okay I want to rewrite the curve slightly so in the upper mid-range we're doing a little bit less processing so we get rid of some of that swish eNOS Peterson Duncan Adonis tandem instruction either some Duncan Adonis tandem on strategy okay I'm gonna print that now what we're left with is this either some damn filler done either some Duncan Adonis tandem instruction once again either some Duncan Adonis tandem instruction alright now what we've done is we've taken away most of the ugly part of the background noise we have by no means gotten rid of the background noise but again look where we are we're on a sidewalk on a street it's personally justifiable that we have some noise but it's not justifiable that we have this ugly noise so let's watch this shot full screen and see what we have either some Dampier dynasty demonstration see that's a perfectly reasonable amount of noise that suits the scene and it's not ugly now we can add some traffic we can add some sound perhaps from these apartments we can do what we want to do but we're not saddled with this ugly thing that changes the mood either some dumb fitted honest and demonstration the additional problem of the original is that there's very bad signal-to-noise ratio so the voice is not punchy and so it doesn't feel strong and either some dumb fitted honest Andamans that's you so you sort of lost in the background not so much from a listing point of view but from an energetic point of view now here's the process either some dumb fitted honest a demonstration you see there's better contact between the two characters so this process job even though it's not severe and there's certainly no artifacts and it's certainly not dead quiet does the trick better so that's it for this introduction to noise reduction both transient sounds or impulsive sounds as well as broadband and tonal sounds there's a lot more to learn but if you play with this you'll have a very good start into doing your own noise reduction remember the two most important things though 1 don't overdo it a little bit goes a long way it does not need most of the time to be dead quiet it needs to sound good and it needs to sound appropriate for the shot the other thing is this if you're not the mixer talk to the mixer find out who does what does the mixer want you to do this sort of stuff offline and bring it to the mix or does the mixer want to do it himself in the mix if you're going to bring this to the mix then you absolutely positively must have an original version fully edited on the truck directly below the one you've processed you're in an editing room you probably can hear pretty well but it's not a mix room you cannot hear as well as you will when in the big room there will be surprises you do not want to paint the mixer into a corner and provide what you think is a proper denoise job when in fact it's overcooked or it's cooked wrong and did not have an option how to get out cut the original copy the original and then denoise the copy mute the original or mute something so that there's a there is an alternate version for the mix anyway that's it for noise reduction good luck bye bye

Channel: José Luis Díaz

Views: 95,905

Keywords: John Purcell, Dialogue Editing, Sound Editing, José Luis Díaz, Jose Luis Diaz

Id: iZFZTChXAvo

Length: 76min 40sec (4600 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2013