Making Everyone Sound In The Same Room

[Bill Hollweg]

Good call Julie!

Placing someone with a ton of reverb far left or right and a tad lower in volume can hide that a bit! <have tried that myself >

But the best is to get people to "eat their mics" from the get go which will save alot of these headaches later.

[AuralStageStudios]

	Quote:	otomo
	Hey, I'm at the editing stage of things...and I have a bunch of files that really sound like they're different. What are some good trick for making everyone sound to have the same frequencies and in the same room? I've got some with hiss, some clean, some with a lot of range, some that sound like a tunnel. Some farther from the mic when they recorded, some closer. A wide range in other words!

Like everyone has said so far, there really is no easy way. Above that, the best you can do is clean up your worst sounding material and then match everything else to that. I highly recommend getting a retake on the tunnelly tracks.

There is no decent way to remove reverb. You can clean it up some by gating the heck out of it and then popping a light plate verb on it, but it's still going to sound off.

Be careful not to do too much noise reduction, as it can completely remove natural room-tone elements and leave a warbly sound in your track. That said. room tone and ambience are definitely the key. You're going to want a room tone that gives the sense of space of the room your characters are occupying.

I usually dig out my zoom h2 and hit a good quiet location that has the sound space I'm looking for. If you can get a few hand claps in that space you can use the impulse on a convolution verb to really set the scene.

As Julie suggested, if you roll off all off the frequencies under 70Hz it'll clear out the bulk of any low-end (60Hz) hum. Rolling off everything above 12 kHz can help, but at the risk of losing some of your breathing room.

Reverb is always going to make voices sound more distant, so use it very sparingly and use a room verb or a tight plate verb which tend to be less hollow.

As Bill suggested, you want to get your actors closer to the microphone, though I advise against "swallowing" or "eating" the mike as it will artificially add more bass to the voice, something we call the proximity effect. You can use the proximately effect does have it's uses though, so play with it.

Best distance for miking is 3-5 inches from the mic. We call it the "rule of thumb. Make a thumbs up with one hand and place the thumb to your chin. The microphone should be roughly the the distance from your thumb to the outside of your pinky.

To reduce the bounce from a verb heavy room, you can pop a rig like this together. On the fly and on the cheap, a milk crate and some eggcrate mattress will do just fine.

[Bill Hollweg]

the cool thing about satilite AD is that you get to meet people from all over the world and have them in your productions. The down side to sat. AD- is that you end up dealing with everything from 5$ mics to full blown professional sound equipment. And being the mixer- you try and make everyone sound good- which is a challenge. From too much echo/reverb in the dry lines to tinny mics and ones with a bass end that would blow a hole in the walls of Ft. Knox- there's always something to challenge the mixer-and I enjoy it as tedious as it can get-LOL

That all said- I like Goldwave for matching reverb/echo in dry lines. I do it all by ear (choosing the one with the most echo- and try and match everyone else to that VA so it is not an obvious thing that takes the listener out of the scene when one VA is echo/reverbed to heck and the rest aren't.) and spend a fair bit of time doing so- would be great if a quick fix existed etc- but it's also rewarding when you get everyone sounding good etc.

But like AuralStageStudios said- retakes are a key- especially if you have an outdoor scene and a VA sounds as if they have their own personal 20ft long metal box on their head...
;-)