Zoom Meeting: audio "cleanup" & processing tips?

[EGS]

I've had a few gigs during the pandemic of people sending me Zoom Meeting recordings to "clean up" & process. I've been doing the usual EQ/comp/gate/exciter/noise reduction/etc as needed. But has anyone here found any new "secret sauce" for this? The real problem, of course, is that the Zoom audio codec sux. Plus horrible mics too far away from the voice. Sometimes I've even resorted to adding a room tone ambi track to help mask the overly processed VO.

Help!!! I need to polish a turd!!! Thanks!!!

[Darryl Ramm]

After the problem has happened? Sorry no silver bullet suggestions.

One thing I've helped people for is to get better mics/preamps (I'm looking at my SM7B on a Yellowtec mic boom driving through a Royer dBooster, that works so well, but a short Sennheiser shotgun mic works great for more out of view recording... all depends on how good audio folks want) and/or get them to use headphones or earbuds and then turn off Zoom and other echo cancellation etc. (watch out for multiple things in the chain doing signal processing). Also had to remind folks to try to get a quiet environment, turn off fans, close a door etc. interesting how much our brains suppress background noise while we are in an environment.

And of course get folks to try "original sound" with "high fidelity" settings. That should help. See https://eastcoaststudio.ca/zoom-high...-audio-podcast.

[EGS]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

After the problem has happened? Sorry no silver bullet suggestions. ...

Bummer. As I expected...

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

...And of course get folks to try "original sound" with "high fidelity" settings. That should help. See https://eastcoaststudio.ca/zoom-high...-audio-podcast.

Thanks for the link!!! I'll pass this along to the people doing the Zoom recordings!!!

[albee1952]

Maybe the iZotope cleanup tools and/or a De-reverb plugin?

[EGS]

Originally Posted by albee1952

Maybe the iZotope cleanup tools and/or a De-reverb plugin?

Yes, sometimes that helps! No matter what I do though, it sounds pretty lousey to me. I think Zoom just crushes the signal quality a lot so that it's less data to stream. I'll hope the stuff in Daryl's link help some.

[Darryl Ramm]

The funny part of this to me is several tech consulting clients of mine have come up with largely ad-hoc zoom recordings and wanted to say make marketing or internal training pieces out of them. "But we need to just clean them up first" and in each case I look at them and it's not just the audio that needs cleaning up but the content, presentation style, clarity of message, etc. And in each case that did lead to a healthy discussion about how if they want to do this better they could use the zoom recording to drive ideas for a pitch video or podcast... and by the way you know your marketing team has a group that can help you do that... which did help drive some nice content. I saw that as really great: giving folks tools and letting them try stuff and then having an idea that yes this is harder than it looks, but them being willing to get help and do better.

[EGS]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

... And of course get folks to try "original sound" with "high fidelity" settings. That should help. See https://eastcoaststudio.ca/zoom-high...-audio-podcast.

I'll ask them to try it! Here's another article about "High Fidelity Music Mode": https://blog.zoom.us/high-fidelity-m...audio-on-zoom/

[louschmidt]

For cleaning up background noises, I usually try different approachs depending on the material using noise reductions, de reverb, eq, and gate, but in many of these plugin combinations, I use Waves N1 on some parts of the chain. It's a really simple plugin (just one fader) and sounds really good.

[louschmidt]

For cleaning up background noises, I usually try different approachs depending on the material using noise reductions, de reverb, eq, and gate, but in many of these plugin combinations, I use Waves N1 on some part of the chain. It's a really simple plugin (just one fader) and sounds really good.

[EGS]

Cool. I don't have that plug but I'll check it out. Have you ever tried it with a zoom meeting specifically? Can I do things that RX doesn't?