How to clean up location audio/dialogue in post?

[Ronald Lee]

Hi,

I"m shooting a documentary on a PDX10, following a guy on the street talking to people. I have a Senn G2 wireless set and it works great. I have the mike clipped in under his shirt, so at times, in order to get audio on him AND the person he is talking to, I have the levels set so that he just barely gets to the limit. But that means sometimes he will clip himself, or when the other person is far away, that person's level is not as loud. As you can imagine, there is a little bit of ambient noise on the other person.

I've also been shooting on the street with the on camera mic and there is a LOT of ambient noise this way.

I've done all I can to get the best sound I can, just wondering how I can clean up and sweaten the sound in post? I don't know Soungforge well enough to play around with the wav files. I am editing on Adobe Premiere, so I thought I would rubber band all the dialogue, so it matches better, but some sort of anti-noise/hiss filter would be great.

Or would someone who knows an audio editing program be able to clean it up? As an extreme example, a Sound Studio would be able to get perfect dialogue, right?

thanks

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Once you've induced distortion into the audio, there no longer can be "perfect sound" but merely a mask over what's there. You can use clipping restore tools such as those found in Sound Forge or Audition, but all these do is round off the squarewave so that while it's still not "perfect" it doesn't slam the ear. Were it me, I'd be slicing sections for each speaker, using Normalization on the quieter parts, and saving ambient noise from other takes to lay in where the transition from Speaker A (clean) to Speaker B (far away guy) takes place. So, you'd have 3 tracks of audio happening there.
1. Speaker A
2. Speaker B
3. Ambient sound track for masking transitions.