Get the Echo out!

[jhorsley]

I hear this recently in some Audio post mixes: "Get the echo out of this room!" I'd love to hear what other folks do to make an unpleasantly "echo-ey" room more dead.

Here are some things I've been doing:

-riding the volume of the dialog - ducking the volume between sentences, to lower the volume on those unpleasant reflections.

-sometimes after the right EQ, the room sounds better, even the the "echo" is still technically the same level.

Thoughts?

Joachim

[bigbadhenchman]

I'd love to hear what other folks do to make an unpleasantly "echo-ey" room more dead.

ADR

[SimpleNatureSpirit]

Maybe that is what the client is talking about, make the room sound better rather than remove the echo. A simple trick that just might work:
Duplicate the audio track and reverse the phase of the dup'd track. Now put an EQ on the original track and lift out the primary vocals (with either raising or lowering the curve for the vocal gain freq's). and see if it sounds better. Buss the results to an aux track and continue the processing there. You have a few choices; expander or even a doubler and further EQ'ing. Be very careful with compression, however, that will bring the echo back. I mension doubler to overtone the original echo at either half or equal delay. With doubler, you will also get a wider feel to the audio and if you need distance also, then ad a little verb. If you need closeness, you may have to go as far as gating (yuck) the audio with very carefully defined curves.

[Noiz2]

Something that has worked is the compressor by Elemental Audio - Neodynium. Because it splits the audio into four parts by volume and lets you compress or expand each differently you can expand down the very quiet parts of the track (usually the Room echo) and boost the dialog at the same time. It doesn't work on everything, if your echo is as loud as the dialog for instance, but it has worked really well a number of times.