Removing footsteps, creaking floorboards, etc. from dialogue recording

[James Winslett]

Hi there,

Total noob to sound editing. Our team just got back from a music video shoot in Italy. We're not used to working with sound as we usually just use the audio track the artist provides us and just use the live audio for lip-syncing. This time though, as a bit of fun, we decided to experiment and shoot a short dialogue scene in the bar where we were filming to use at the start of the video. We had one camera for video and a second camera dedicated to capturing the audio - a Canon 550D mounted on a tripod, with a Sennheiser ME66/K6 mic mounted on the hot shoe and we recorded using Magic Lantern to override the camera's automatic gain control. Digital gain was switched off and analog gain set to 32dB.

We made sure to switch off the AC, the fridge, the cappuccino machine, etc. so there's no background hum, but unfortunately while the camera/mic setup captured the dialogue fairly clearly, it captured footsteps, creaking floorboards and cluttering crockery even more clearly and the dialogue gets a bit lost in the mix. I was wondering whether there is anything we can do in post to make the unwanted sounds a bit less dominant and boost the dialogue a little? We'll be using Final Cut Pro 7 and Soundtrack Pro. I've attached a sample of the audio so you can get an idea of what I'm referring to. I'll be adding room tone and trying to cut out as much of the unwanted noise as possible during the breaks in the dialogue, but I've no idea how to tackle the bits where they're talking. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

James

[Richard Crowley]

Good luck with that. It is what it is. A casual "reality" location shot with all the natural sounds of the environment.

It is pretty safe to say that you will NEVER get good dialog from any camera-mounted mic. If you want to use a shotgun mic properly, you need an experienced HUMAN boom operator who is listening to the sound on headphones.

I have only been doing audio for 40 years and video for 30 years and I have yet to see any situation where a camera-mounted mic was the optimal technique.

Your recording is typical of what one would expect from a casual camera-mounted shot. You could spend hours hand-tuning the track and attempting to remove the offending sounds one by one. Removing the sounds that are concurrent with the dialog is practically impossible. A high-end forensic sound application might be able to reduce them somewhat for better speech recognition, but not to entertainment-grade standards, at least not IME.

[Victor Nguyen]

I think you have to now have to do ADR and Foley.

[Allan Black]

I wouldn't waste time on that, get in touch with your contacts in Italy and see if it's worth redoing it on the cheap somehow.

Cheers.

[Tony Koretz]

First lesson. Never use a camera mounted mic if you want professional quality audio. A shotgun mic needs to be no more than 18 inches from the voice. Can't do that from a camera. The background sounds are in many cases louder than the voices in this sample you have posted.
If I received audio like this to edit, I would be thinking "Oh brother". I have had to work on stuff worse than this, and it could be made to sound a lot better than it is, but it's never going to be like it could have been if it was recorded properly in the first place. The crash that occurs loudly simultaneously with the dialogue at one point would be next to impossible to minimize without affecting the voice too much as well.
Your decision to make now is..do you want to redo this recording, or are you going to try to fix it to get roughly acceptable audio?

[James Winslett]

Ouch. Thanks for the advice guys. I think we'll just forget the audio then and go for subtitles instead :)