I am completely new to this aspect of film creation and I have one very basic question about what I would call an atmosphere "floor": I was on sets where they would record a few minutes of set atmosphere audio for that purpose, but our film plays entirely in an apartment. If I use the original sound we recorded on set it would kill the mystic atmosphere of the image right away, it sounds like being in a tin can. So I need to re-record all the sounds and they will all have a certain amount of "white noise" with them, so I guess I need to put a minimum level of that noise (what I call the "floor") if I don't want to hear the noise breathing in the background of the audio whenever someone speaks or anything is moved. If I record real audio in any real place it will also be JUST that, white noise. Is this how you would go about that "sound floor"? Or did I get the concept wrong from the very beginning? I would very much appreciate any hints, tricks or suggestions on this matter or any other things that you know might come up. Thank you very much and have a nice day.
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I can understand the confusion, especially in your current film situation. Typically, you should get background noise in outdoor settings. In an apartment, if there is extra noise it would most likely end up as a blooper cut or un-needed. But from my experiences, background noise just serves as a creative out as b-roll would. I can give an example of a film I did if you're interested.
Hi Tyrone, thanks for the answer. Do I get this right? I should get indoor sound from an outdoor location? And all the insects a.s.o.? And you say "if there's a little extra noise"... but if there's NO extra noise than I'll record just white "shhhhhhh..." right? So I should want to get that little extra, right? All this is indeed very confusing - sigh But YES, please, give me an example of a film of yours, because I'm still in pretty dense fog.. :D))) Regards, Phil
Lol, It's okay. This process is just a "creative out", but it's a good habit to get in to. The audio is there if you need it, but you don't HAVE to have it. Here's a short film that I worked on...note the ending and credits. All of that "noise" is recorded background noise. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RNY_ehWJbA&list=PLCEB018418E1BCEBC&index... Now in your situation, being indoors, I would get the audio just to start making a habit of it, but in all honesty, you're most likely not going to use it. Hope this helps -Tyrone
Did this help at all?
Honest or polite? :D I understand your point and the example in the movie, but our's is in an inner city apartment at night. So we have no noises at all. That's why, to my grief, my sound floor basically is a noise floor. But I'm getting convinced that I have no other way around it: I need to bring the "permanent noise" level to that of the vocal recordings... Hey, thanks anyway for your help and "perseverance". I appreciate it! Regards, Phil
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Buzz track, Wild track - different names for the same thing. You should aways record a wild track (as in, the room you are recording in when it is 'silent') Do that for a few minutes then you have your basis. Then when recording dialogue it should blend together better. Another option is to re-record the dialogue in a sound proof room and dub it over the top of the visuals.
There is also something that you need to look out for. In some recording equipment there is an auto level detector/feature. When the room is quiet the recording device boosts the record level automatically, making the background noise become foreground noise. Depending on the brand you should be able to turn that off OR some have a noise gate to block out sounds below a certain level. The best thing to to would be to look at the manual, and see if you have something like that at all. If so it should be easy to overcome. If you try to noise gate after it's recorded you can get rid of it when it's supposed to be quiet, BUT it will show up as soon as the dialogue starts and it becomes very noticeable. I do like what Steven suggested though, about re-recording in an anechoic chamber and dubbing it over. Even in a sound chamber you can still get a low buzz track, also check your electrical ground, sometimes that can make a buzz slightly higher then white noise. On a lighter note if you were confused before you should be REALLY confused now :)
Hi Stephen, James - thank you for your input, too. Now it's clear, there's no way around this. I was hoping in some kind of an inside know-how on how to avoid the "breathing" of the dialog and noises when NOT in a sound floor (buzz track). But I'll just surrender and put on that "white noise" up to the dialogs noise level. I tell you why that sounds so irritating to me: if you look at this from a photographers perspective it's like you had a lens with a small scratch in it and it produces a minuscule shine in an angle of the picture when the light shines in directly. Now, to avoid that anybody notices that small scratch, you take sandpaper and scratch the lenses glass completely opaque... :D))) Thanks everybody for their help and I guess I understood. Have a great day everybody. Cheers, Phil
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You know, I never thought of it quite like that, a scratch. Hmmmm
;( uuaaaa!!! despair
Just curious, what sound editing software are you using?
It's a good thing you didn't decide to do this before digital audio. The tape hiss used to be absolutely horrible, and no way to get rid of it.
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James: Promise you won't laugh: I am using GarageBand! :D)))
It could be worse. You could be using windows sound editor. :) I almost forgot you can use graphic equalization to try and find what frequency that noise floor is at and try and lower just that frequency. It will change your overall sound tone though. I'm not laughing because I'm using a 12 year old software package. With a pc from 2004. It works very well, but very slooooooooooooooow lol
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Phil - I was in a Half-Price Books store, the other day, and, in their software department, saw a couple copies of noise reduction software by a company called Izotope. I'm sure there are other companies out there with similar tools, but I happen to be familiar with Izotope because of plug-ins they make for Pro Tools, Logic, etc. The copies I saw at the book store were a simplified consumer version aimed at people who needed help with noisy home videos, podcasts or what have you. When you say, "white noise," it sounds to me like you're talking about, either, noisy microphone pre-amps or atmospheric room noises like air conditioners, refrigerators and so on. It's always good practice to turn those mechanical things off, while shooting scenes with sync, but sometimes you can't. These noise reduction programs work like this: You use a small sample of room-tone (it can be a very small sample, like a second between an actor's lines) to "teach" the software what you consider to be "noise." Then you select the portion of the recording you want to clean up, and the software processes it. It really is almost that simple. You learn different techniques for improving performance the more experience you have with it. Also, consider this. Depending on the overall mood you are trying to set, you might add noise to your scene in the form of artificial ambience. Sometimes, after you've stripped away all of the noise between the lines, you still have some of that breathing noise when the actors speak. You can make it a whole lot less noticeable by giving the audience something else to listen to. If it's a city apartment, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to hear traffic out in the street. Birds, crickets, trains, air conditioners, wind... Find something that works and subtly mix it in.
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There are several ways to minimize or remove the "room sound" from dialogue, depending on the nature and level of the noise. Steady-state noises like air conditioners are easier to remove than the reflective sound of the room itself (essentially a short reverb). There are a few good plug-ins to remove this sort of sound, some free, some rather expensive, with varying levels of effectiveness and ease-of-use. "ReaFIR" (which comes with REAPER, a free and very excellent DAW) has a setting which allows you to analyze and remove steady-state noise, for instance. A combination of noise removal and 'room fill' can do wonders for a quiet dialogue scene! *edit: looks like Timothy got there before me ;)
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Someone said it was a good thing you didn't have to work with tape noise there was no way to get rid of it, this is not true, also lots of what was mentioned above in the form of 'tools' to get rid of noises you don't want like actors breathing and pops when they speak all point to a poor boom man or inexperienced site recorder. The 'buzz track" you are talking about is a way of overriding something you do not want in the background but you certainly do not want it as a constant in the background. "White noise" by definition is the same sound as static between stations on the radio, random frequency fluctuations at various intensities. "Pink noise" is all frequencies at the same level and is very useful to your site recorder when setting up the equalization for live recordings. A good pink noise generator, equalizer and some time alone on the fully dressed set with the recording equipment (different microphones cables and equipment) will bring magic to your sound track if your sound man knows what he is doing. When his preliminary work is done rather than you sampling a second or three between shots and leaving the software to figure out what to get rid of and what to keep, the site recorder will give you about 5 minutes of ambiance audio that can be mixed in and repeated at whatever level you need to create the 'soundscape' of the set. Likewise he will have every microphone lead equalized both in frequency and in sensitivity so all the actors have the same background, same apparent volume and will sound natural in the room. The Ambiance track (buzz track to some) also allows you to bring it forward (louder) in the mix for emotional effect or character reaction. This is the basis for a surround sound track done the old fashioned analog tape way. I often say, and I still claim I can do more with a boom mic and a decent portable recorder than most guys with a studio full of software and monitors. Sound was an art, now every high school in the country churns out kids that think being a sound guy means clicking the mouse on the red circle not even knowing what the red circle, single triangle and parallel lines all mean and why they are universal recording symbols let alone know how to get 'the sound' they need because there is always a three second sample out there they can run in a loop. Do they know why it is called a loop? Sounds to me like you need a sound guy.
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Wow, overwhelming feedback! Thank you very much Jim and Cap. I do appreciate your input a lot and will answer when back in the office (i'm on a cellphone now and writing is quite painful..) thanks again so much.. Ttyl, cheers, ph.
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Over recent years, I have received numerous projects from filmmakers who are working with minuscule budgets. In their efforts to save money, they often overlook the importance of hiring a qualified sound recordist and boom-op. They bring in their buddy, a musician who records his own band, not realizing the two jobs have almost nothing in common, or they put the boom in the hands of whichever grip or P.A. is willing to hold it. Worse yet, given the example of all the reality shows on television, they forego the boom entirely and hang wireless lavs on each of the actors, expecting everything to turn out great. By the time these projects get to me, the filmmaker's main question is, "Can you save this audio?" In the case of this message thread, I'm under the assumption that the film is in the can (so to speak), and the audio is recorded and in need of repair, so it's a little late to suggest hiring a better recordist or purchasing better recording equipment. The question at hand is how to make the existing audio sound better, and you'll find the solution in my previous reply and, perhaps put more eloquently, in Jim's. Fix it as well as you can and chalk this whole thing up to experience. Next project, you'll find the solution in Cap's reply and, perhaps put more eloquently, in the final statement of Jim's. Get a qualified recordist and a person who is skilled with a boom (sometimes it's the same person), and you will rarely find yourself facing this question again. Just a note: I realize I'm not saying anything new, here, but I think this is worthy of reiteration. One project I had to "fix in the mix" was a documentary featuring once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to interview certain celebrities, one of whom had passed away before the project even got to me. It's hard to imagine a filmmaker putting so much time, effort and money into a project without considering the importance of every aspect of production. Sound, in particular, is one of the things often overlooked by independent filmmakers. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. You can pay a price for a qualified location sound recordist, or be prepared to pay four times as much to fix it in post. (Sorry Phil. I don't mean to accuse you of anything. I wish every filmmaker, in general, would get this message. When I become king of the world, I'll see that they do.)
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the sound guy makes sense, I always do this too when i am on the ball-"On set as a recordist, I always record 1-2 minutes of room tone in each setup for editing later." this is good reminder for the future as i do all the roles often in filmmaking, camera, audio, etc.
Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audtion) was always my choice for recording or fixing sound. Although SoundForge came in a close second. I've done extensive recording of audio, much more so than any video. There are ways to kill the noise floor (gate) or keep normal levels (turn the AGC - OFF) . There are so many ways to effect audio nowadays. Pop and click filters, sibilance filters, Autotune? Noise floor sampling and inversion can really take your audio to new levels.
After so many really great comments I realize, I wasn't able to describe what my initial problem was. ouch! - Earlier on in an answer to James H. I used the image of the lens and the scratch, but now I know that even if it made you laugh it wasn't understood. That's why I made a grafic now to explain the issue. It is about "lowering the over-all quality of the sound to maintain continuity" or "am I unaware of a technical trick you might know". The grafic is here: http://europhoto.us/s16/noise-floor.jpg My point in the picture is this: in the number 1 pic we habe the spoken audio with a given noise level. In the edited version the non-continiuous "ffff" is perceived as some kind of breath. We are aware of it because it is not continuous. In the number 2 picture we will no longer hear the breathing of the noise but the entire film will now have a "FFFF" layer and the over-all quality will be lowered quite a bit. The idea is to give the green "stripe" on the picture a quality of it's own (like traffic in a city, or a the breaking waves in a shot at the shore) But this is exactly my problem: In a horror movie, in an apartment at night, in a scene without music I cannor imagine a low level other-than-noise-sound to be that green layer without drawing attention or breaking the "4th wall". I hope I got the picture across to you and maybe you have some ideas on a possible noise source that could go "undiscovered" but maybe it's just exactly so: Lower the quality to a sustainable level, period. But again, thanks a bunch to you all ! Cheers, Phil
i think your answer here is to do a voice over. It is very common for the actors to repeat their lines an an otherwise silent location for just that scene to achieve the silent background for effect.
What they are recording is called "room tone" or ambience. There is a difference. Room tone is the specific sound of a location by the way it's shaped. It's the natural sound of a location. Every location has a natural sound when everyone stays quiet and listens. The protocol is, sound department asks for everyone to "be quiet while they record room tone", about 30 seconds worth . Then in post, it's used to add a 3 dimensional quality for the overall sound of a scene especially with dialogue. Particularly, to "bridge" cuts together. Also, if there was differences in ambience between shots it's used to level or balance out that difference. It's hard to describe here in a post but better if you can experience it. Here is a good example: http://vimeo.com/24028843