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Old 07-09-2022, 01:55 AM
kol12 kol12 is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2015
Location: New Zealand
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Default Re: Post Production - where to start?

Quote:
Originally Posted by nednednerb View Post
Hi, that edited file now is louder than the original, but it seems like you mostly used RX, but did not do any manual editing.

At 55s for instance: "Definitely, uhh, so..." - usually when I edit a podcast or narrative flow, I would edit out the "uhhh" and perhaps also the "so...". That's because this is a moment where typically the speaker was thinking of what to say for a second, was being recorded, and said "uhh, soo" simply to segue into the next thought or start off. The uhh, so... would likely sound "less professional" to the average audio professional at least. Leaving these extra words and transitions in is "more natural" but when you clean up the uhhs and it's otherwise left "sounding natural", that's a much better finished product.

Also, in the 8 LUFS increase in your edit (it is more loudness standard now), you also brought up the breath noises. Again, in music or some audio, a little breath can be very very natural. However, in dialogue, the closeness of the microphone tends to exaggerate the breaths in a recording compared to what our mouths and ears would "notice" in person in the air at a normal speaking distance. Therefore, you might experiment with removing "extra" noises that are off script/ off topic just to get good at sewing together the remaining audio so there are no sudden absolute silence and you keep some nice ambience.

To do the breath and ummm removal, I would on a good day start that process in Pro Tools, doing a simple "edit" where I chop out what I don't want, fill the ambience, crossfade everything nicely (in PT I use a combo of manual fades and batch auto fades), basically to make it flow right. THEN I take it into RX to make it sweeter. Sometimes a workflow makes sense to RX first, but usually I like to "manual edit" first off, to get the desired arrangement of words and just what I want included. If I can manually edit out a noise without much fuss, I'd usually do that instead of RX.

It's actually quite amazing what you can do with manual editing. Instead of sending audio back for rerecording, I have at times chopped out the correct syllable or even couple letters sound from another place in the audio, and sewn it into place to make a correction. That's getting advanced, but an idea of what a "good" editor might be doing behind the scenes.

Ultimately, this version of your edit sounds a bit "mixed" to my ears, but most of the noise and distracting extra words are still there.
I used very little RX in this and it actually was mostly manual editing... Have a look at my Pro Tools session in this screenshot: https://www.mediafire.com/view/edsgz...final.jpg/file All of the line breaks are where I made cuts. I actually edited out a lot of um and ah's... But yes I did overlook that one where Kyle starts speaking.

The reason I increased the loudness was because it's my understanding that podcasts should meet a loudness standard of -18/-16 LUFS. The original audio measured around -30 LUFS...

If the audio has to be boosted to meet a loudness standard won't the increase in breath noises be inevitable? If breaths cannot be edited out manually should they be attenuated in RX?

Last edited by kol12; 07-09-2022 at 04:15 AM.
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