Really Bad Dialogue Recordiing

[dansoundmix]

Hi. I usually deal with editing and mixing short form material, but every now and again, I'll mix some long form, usually in the reality show genre. Having had some experience with some really low budget reality shows of the past, I've heard and dealt with my share of poorly recorded and sounding dialogue.

Today I happen to be working on a live sit down interview style show with about 6 guests who have each been mic'd with lavs. I was warned that the audio was badly distorted at times, that the sound mixer only provided a mono mixdown and no individual tracks and no camera mic either.

So I get the AAF and also come to find there are a few places in the beginning of the show, where people's mic's weren't on at all, and in addition in some instance when 2 people are talking there is the worst distortion I have ever heard. There is almost a robotic quality to it. I've uploaded an example of it for your listening pleasure and was wondering if anyone has ever dealt with material like this before.

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/sh...RwNVhnmnLTBBfc

Thanks,
Dan

[lode]

Thats... impressive. The sound mixer was obviously on top of that! ;-)

Never heard it that bad, no. You might be able to fix some of the problems wit RX. Probably not though.

[Ray JB]

Sorry that is a lost cause

[Artis]

Wow! That sounds amazing.
This distortion doesn't sound like usual clipping. Sounds like someone have already tried to do some bad noise reduction.
Maybe try what Zynaptiq plugins can do for you, but fortunately, i must to agree with Ray JB.

[Ray JB]

Are you sure this is the original sound? Because I deal with production dialogue every day and that does not sound like it is original stuff to me... Normal analogue distortion from the average mixer never comes in that flavour!

Unless the location sound person was using a digital mixer of some sort to produce the robot like artifacts, but again it's beyond the valley. There is so much aliasing etc it sounds like someone has had a go at trying to "do something to fix it" in post (ie: the picture editor) before it's got to you.

Can they re-export you the project but go right back to the original sound from the day?

[simon.a.billington]

That is one of the weirdest things I've head happen.

It sounds like its getting "bit crushed". Possibly what ever was happening at the time was clipping the digital converters. That's my best guess.

If you open up the wave in the editor it looks fine, nothing looks squared or distorted. So its possible the problem even happened prior to the converter and was recorded as is. Was it a digital mic perhaps??

Anyway. I agree with the guys. Unfortunately the distorted parts are beyond salvation. You'd have to consider dropping it, rerecording it or doing something magical with ADR.

[dansoundmix]

Thanks for everyone's input! It was late last night and I just wanted to confirm how bad it really was. I'm not sure what or how the production mixer did get those results but obviously there were a lot of things that he didn't do correctly as well some things that you never should do. I'm curious if they paid him because he was hired apparently and not just an intern on the production.
I did land up using RX on it a ton and basically just made it a different flavor of really bad. I'm assuming they might edit out those scenes entirely.

Thanks again!

Dan

[Vedat]

Sounds like the equipment and talent of the location mixer were sub-par.