need help cleaning up audio for movie

[hoodleehoo]

I am mixing audio for a feature film and need to clean up the audio. The audio isn't horrible, but it's not great either. We used a boom mic straight into a zoom recorder but no pre-amp (despite my strong recommendation). There is a prominent electrical noise in all the audio. In the cases where the boom guy was able to get close enough there's enough separation in volume that it's workable. But, some of the actors were very weak voiced and sometimes the boom guy didn't get close enough so the noise is an issue.

There are also some shots where a/c or outside generators (or loud a/c units) really muddy up the audio and sound like white noise.

I've used soundsoap 2 and haven't been too happy with most of the results in the past as the outcome sounded weird. Removing narrow frequency sounds like audio cleaning products always show in demos is one thing, but removing electrical noise or a/c noise seems to be all over the frequency spectrum and seems to be really difficult to remove.

I don't restore any music or anything like that, I only need it to clean up film audio. Should I get RX advanced, or would RX2 be sufficient? There's a huge price difference between them! Thanks!

[John_Toolbox]

Ugh.. been there done that. The good old "re-recording dialogue doesn't sound as good" director. Turd polishing is not my niche and I'm sure someone with a lot of experience with these type of plugins can get better results. The last time someone handed me a gig like this they wanted it done in a week and the audio was HORRIBLE. In many cases the audio recorded by the camera was cleaner than the boom. If I remember right I didn't get much better results with RX than soundsoap. I forget which version I was using, but there is a pretty generous amount of demo time for them. I would try the demo for both and see for yourself what works best before buying.

[hoodleehoo]

Well, the audio isn't horrible so it's not exactly turd polishing. It's more like trying to make crystal that's too foggy clear. lol

[nst7]

I have limited experience with noise plugins, but I found that the Waves ones seemed to have the least artifacts. You might try demoing them.

[philip888]

I use iZotope RX 2 Advanced. It works very well. They have a demo version you could try.

[ondruspat]

Now you know why they re-record a lot of dialog in big league movie making!! They use the field recorded dialog as a guide for plugs such as Vocalign, and replace the dialog with stuio recorded material.

Of course this lead to the art of Foley, etc., since you now have to add "natural" sounds and ambience to this.