Easiest way to add room tone in track gaps?

[V5V]

Originally Posted by amagras

What about sidechain compression or gate?

For a minute after I read that I was thinking "WTF is he talking about?" but then I got it.

Put the room tone on another track. Insert a gate that's triggered by the original track. Whenever there's audio on the original track the room tone will be muted, and when the original track is silent the gate opens and the room tone plays. Clever. Time-saver compared to other methods, too.

I don't have Pro Tools on this machine anymore so I can't try this, but would it work to paste a long region of room tone over the entire track and then use "send to back" or "place behind" or whatever it's called? Would the original regions pop back up on top of the room tone, or does "covering" the existing regions (rather than just overlapping one end of them) wipe them out?

[V5V]

Originally Posted by V5V

[...] would it work to paste a long region of room tone over the entire track and then use "send to back" or "place behind" or whatever it's called?

Update: Nope.

Originally Posted by V5V

[...] does "covering" the existing regions (rather than just overlapping one end of them) wipe them out?

Yes. Any paste operation that covers both ends (ie. start and end) of a region results in that region being replaced with the pasted material. The pasted material then can't be sent behind the original region.

[joachim]

You could object-select the cut dialog clips and move those over the continuous room tone clip. As said in post #3.

I do not like the send-to-back-method; there is no crossfade.
I prefer :
cut the dialog clips, while leaving some material left and right,
cut the roome tone with the same amount of material (extending over the left and right boundaries of the gap in the dialog clips, but not up to the actual "words" ,
edit-group those tracks,
insertion before those clips,
Tab Tab Shift Tab F, Tab Tab Shift Tab F, Tab Tab Shift Tab F, ... .
This shortcut sequence can be assigned to a programmable keyboard, with or without something like Autohotkey.

[simon.a.billington]

RX 4 Adv does have a plugin that'll analyse room noise in order to synthesise room tone artificially.

It's not perfect, but I think it's aimed at those situations where you can't find a long enough region to work with. So it's certainly good in a pinch.

Generally though it's best you do build up your own tone from snippets of audio.

If you had a big enough project it may even be worthwhile rendering your tone to clearly labeled files so you can reuse them in other scenes.

[tanjerinepost2]

How about looping your room tone to the length of you scene. Display only your dialog tracks and room tone track, set your grid display to clips and markers , grid mode. Select your looped room tone, edit menu ' separate on grid' . This will then then seperate your loop at all your dialog boundaries and delete all the clips that lie under your dialog clips. And if you use something like keyboard maestro you can set up a macro to extend and fade each clip. Also you used to be able to have your dialog on one track and your room tone on the adjacent track and have them share the same voice...but don't think you cxx do this anymore!

[pfaujas]

Will do like #13,
Take your track duplicate it, cut the first one leaving only your dial, fading in/out all clips. That becomes your Dial track
On the duplicate track, cut off all the dial, fades in/out all the clips.
Then clean this track of unwanted sound. That is your Sync "room tone".
Then open a 3rd track and loop your nice room tone that the mixer will bring in or not if needed.

[simon.a.billington]

For the dialogue you could get away with a noise gate, if set up properly it's as effective as deleting the room tone..but MUCH faster.

If the dialogue is too erratic you could always try Vocal Rider to do a bit of transparent levelling before gating the dialogue.

That would make the gate easier to setup and on the plus side the dialogue gains a kind of transparent compression and push in the overall presence and energy of the track.

[jeremiahmoore]

Just tried this on Mac - works great!

option-shift-B is "send to back"

Basically you over-edit tone onto the cut DX gaps, then send the tone behind, which reveals the tone.


YET ANOTHER way is: Object-Selector-Drag DX onto Tone

On track adjacent to DX, set up tone for entire section of dialogue (any number of clips with or without gaps between. Then select DX clips w/ object selector, and drag onto tone. Batch fades, and voila.


-jeremiah

Originally Posted by Dan Smith

Use the above advice to make room for the room tone. Then I'll paste the tone onto an adjacent track and roughly trim the clip (Cmd + t) to be a little longer then the gap, drag the clip over that gap (and thereby the ends of the clips) and then send the clip to back. I think it's alt + shift + b. But its in the edit of clip menu I can't remember off the top of my head. I'll check monday. I hope this makes sense, this makes the process ultra quick for me.

Good luck
Dan

[jeremiahmoore]

Just tried this on Mac - works great!

option-shift-B is "send to back"

Basically you over-edit tone onto the cut DX gaps, then send the tone behind, which reveals the tone.


YET ANOTHER way is: Object-Selector-Drag DX onto Tone

On track adjacent to DX, set up tone for entire section of dialogue (any number of clips with or without gaps between. Then select DX clips w/ object selector, and drag onto tone. Batch fades, and voila.


-jeremiah

Originally Posted by Dan Smith

Use the above advice to make room for the room tone. Then I'll paste the tone onto an adjacent track and roughly trim the clip (Cmd + t) to be a little longer then the gap, drag the clip over that gap (and thereby the ends of the clips) and then send the clip to back. I think it's alt + shift + b. But its in the edit of clip menu I can't remember off the top of my head. I'll check monday. I hope this makes sense, this makes the process ultra quick for me.

Good luck
Dan