"Warming" voices

[Anton Dembowski]

Does anyone have any suggestions for "warming" flat/cold voices? After removing heavy humming background noise with Sound Forge's Noise Reduction I am left with flat/cold dialogue. I'm in post without an option to reshoot.

Thanks,
Anton

[Steve Leone]

dude, what a total bummer!!...I am assuming that you tweaked Sony NR to remove only the bare minumum and leaving most of your program un-sullied???
if you have already done all you can in that department I'd try :
EQ it (parametric)
wave-hammer
Sonic Maximizer
there are mic modelers out there that may warm it up

is it possible to do ADR on your dialog??? I know its time comsuming and abig hassle, but you would get the best results (ever see that Mandy Patinkin Spot for lowering cholesterol??? yup, ALL ADR)

[Jon Fairhurst]

I made a number of suggestions regarding audio post in this thread. Hopefully some of these suggestions will help.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...oise+reduction

[Anton Dembowski]

Thanks for the sympathy!

I've definitely tried my best to follow the Douglas Spotted Eagle approach of repeated iterations of Sony NR passes with isolated samples and low DB removals. I've also tried the blunt trama approach of taking a large band sample and a heavy DB removal. The upshot is the dialogue is still crystal clear, just hallow/flat/cold.

Thank you for your triple suggestions of the Parametric EQ, Wave-Hammer, and Sonic Maximizer. I'll try those right away. I'd also understood that Adobe Audition can perform frequency targeted NR, so I'm going to try and look into that.

I'm definitely a fan of an ADR overdub (used with real satisfaction serveral times on this production). Unfortunately in these scenes I no longer have access to a principle character.

Thanks again,
Anton

[Anton Dembowski]

Hi Jon,

Wow, that's an extremely well written dialogue-saving techniques summary. I've tried to dig into audio books in the past but they often lose the forest for the trees. Thanks for that link, I'll be holding onto that list for other general audio issues. In particular I'm eager to try your trick of creating a heavily Noise Reduced dialogue track for overdubbing.

Thanks again,
Anton

[Jon Fairhurst]

Anton,

Let us know what tricks you end up using to spice up your dialog. I'm always interested to know what techniques sound the best to others.

[Anton Dembowski]

Hi all,

I tried all of your suggestions and I'm much happier with my results now. I ended up finding the most success by returning to the source and experimenting with the NR.

One thing I'd overlooked was targetting an ideal sample for the NR. My troublesome clip included background chatter, so the samples that I'd taken for NR had originally removed some of the principle's dialogue. I went to another clip with a cleaner sample of the offending noise for my NR sample, then applied this sample to my troublesome clips.

I ended up using a combination of Sonys NR and Adobe Audition's NR. Jon, the frequency breakdown helped alot with Audition, virtually eliminating the offending background noise.

I have artifacts which I am going to cover with either music or background foley chatter.

Thanks again,
Anton