After recording all the dialogue for our project I set out to make it all fit in place. There's a lot to this process and I'll try my best to walk you all through it. I started by going through everything we recorded and finding our best takes, you'd think this would be simple but sometimes walking away from a long session and opening it up the next day (or in my case the next week) you find things you missed or lines that you could've sworn were perfect... they weren't. So I go through from start to finish and check to see if the lines I picked while recording are truly the best takes we got. For the most part this doesn't take much time but sometimes it required picking and choosing the best delivered lines sometimes even cutting up separate words within a line to get the best result. After you have all your best takes its time to cut and clean them. Usually I start at the start of the session and cut the takes to size removing any unwanted breaths, plosives or lip smacks. Often enough these sounds are easy enough to cut around being before or after important words but sometimes they're in places that can't be cut out without disrupting a word but I'll cover processing that eliminates those unwanted noises later in this blog. Part of this process is adding fades as well, fading in and out allows the introduction of the line to be smooth rather than cut straight in or out. Basically I start with all the basic but essential edits to make everything easier to work with such as cutting, fading, panning and general volume mixing. Then i start with the basic processes like EQ, compression and reverb. With the following sections I followed advice from an article I found in the past that helped me edit my podcast which applies to most dialogue editing. Obviously it's not a perfect copy paste to all situations but it's a great start for basic dialogue edits.
EQ:
EQ is used in almost all aspects of audio engineering. It helps shape the sound we want and filter out sounds we don't need. For dialogue, EQ is relatively simple we want to cut away any frequencies above or below the human range because our voices can only go so high and low. Anything above or below is unwanted noise so I start with both a high and low pass filter rolling off below 70hz and above 20khz. If I had a actor with an extremely deep voice I would usually leave the high pass filter a little lower but it's a rare case that someones voice is that low. I then cut around 250hz as Mr Taylor in the above mentioned article I referenced as it contains a boxy noise within a lot of people's voice. I'm glad I found this piece of advice because I find it just clears up dialogue that little bit. After that I boost around 4khz as this is the main clarity of the human speaking voice, which makes sense because it is also the frequency that human hearing is most tuned into (coincidence? I think not =P). When it comes to boosting and cutting try not to use more than 3db either up or down, anymore than that can really affect the quality of someones voice and you'll be able to hear it. Anyway you should end up with something like this!
This is obviously the average EQ I use, everyone's voice has a different quality so you can alter and adjust this if you need to but it's rare that I stray too far from the above EQ. EQ is a great tool for post production. Not only does it improve and reinforce sonic qualities in your recordings it can also be used creatively. For instance in this project there is a line delivered by Dracula while he is addressing his generals inside his castle. The shot however is on the castle, showing the location not Dracula himself speaking. So an effect I used was a Lowpass filter to muffle the sound slightly to make it seem as if the high frequencies were blocked slightly by the walls, on top of that I also slightly reduced the volume. I then added automation so when the next scene showed Dracula the EQ went back to normal and it was clearer and felt closer. EQ is also used to take unwanted room tone out of recordings. If you find that one frequency that resonates and adds a weird buzz or hum Corrective EQ can be used to clean up the sample a bit but my first response to cleaning audio is with a De-noiser.
De-Noiser:
A De-noiser is a tool I use all the time when editing dialogue. Spectral de-denoising sometimes seems like magic. Whack an RX voice de-noise plugin on a channel and it takes your audio, listens to it and filters out most of what is unimportant in real time. I'll give you an example this is a voice clip without any cleaning up.
This is the same line cleaned up with a de-noiser.
It's subtle but it removes all the background noise, slight hisses and most other unwanted sound. Mr Taylor said in his article something that still resonates with me today.
The main thing to note about noise reduction is that it inherently diminishes the quality of your audio. The more noise you need to remove, the worse the source material is going to sound. It sucks, but there’s really no such thing as a magic bullet when it comes to removing unwanted noise. It’s always going to be a tradeoff. (Taylor, D. 2017)
So really your goal is to record dialogue without needing to use a de-noiser but in reality there's usually going to be some kind of noise you need to strip thats where understanding how to use one of these types of plugins is essential in post production projects.
They're pretty simple, well the above one is anyway. You can either leave it on adaptive mode which is always listening and cutting out noise or you can feed to a piece of 'silence' from your sample and 'teach' it your background noise by pressing learn. After that it should cut out everything you need it to. Noise might not sound that bad on base recording but adding compression and boosting levels also boosts background noise so watch out for that.
Compression:
Compression for dialogue is pretty simple but I'll give you an extreme case that was in our session. Theres a line that is yelled well more screamed near the end of the trailer that I obviously had to compress otherwise it would dominate the section of the trailer. This is the compression I used...
Pretty simple set up only difference is the quick attack which quickly pulls the levels down rather than slowly ducking it making it blend better.
"Basically, a faster attack makes it less noticeable that compression is being used, whereas slower attack times can make it super obvious." (Taylor, D. 2017)
And here is the difference between the two lines one with compression one without.
The difference is plain as day and you can see why compression is essential in dialogue editing.
Reverb:
Reverb is the final gadget in my utility belt for this project and worked wonders in adding more 'real feel' to my voices. Obviously whether you realise it or not every space has a different sound. If you talk to someone in a bathroom vs being outside in a field you're going to hear a noticeable difference in how your voice reacts in that space. For post production reverb plays a key role in making a voice fit a scene. To do this you use a reverb plugin like Space. It's relatively simple to set up, first you attach it to a Auxiliary track and send your voice that you want to add reverb to it. Then you adjust the reverb to match the space they're in and automate how much reverb or which reverb you want at any one time. The best thing about space is you can see the actual space the reverb was captured in. Want to make them sound like they're in a forest choose one of the 3 different forests this team captured reverb in and use that for your project. In my photos you can see my session on top with my sends and auxs controlling my reverb. Luckily our video only really had two spaces used, a forest or outdoors and a vast stone castle. So you can see my Outdoor RVB and Castle RVB channels, they basically stayed the same and to change the amount of reverb I changed the sends rather than the aux's. Below my session you can see the space plug in set up with my forest and my castle. The bottom picture is the San Sabino Cathedral in Bari Italy where the Space team captured a reverb return and put it in their software. I used this for the castle parts as it had the most dramatic and fitting reverb on the whole plugin. Over all this is my very simple reverb set up and you can imagine this being much more difficult on a larger scale.
Conclusion:
Hopefully you got something out of having a glimpse at my pretty simple post production dialogue editing signal flow. My biggest advice is keep it simple and record the best take you can, it'll save you a lot of time during the editing phase. Thank you for reading and feel free to leave me some feedback or advice =)
References:
Taylor, D. (2017). 4 Simple Steps To Make Your Dialogue Sound Like It Was Mixed By A Pro. [online] Story & Heart Blog. Available at: http://blog.storyandheart.com/blog/4-simple-steps-to-make-your-dialogue-sound-like-it-was-mixed-by-a-pro [Accessed 25 Mar. 2019].
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