Misdirected Unidirectional Clean-up? at DVinfo.net

William Bloodworth · June 17th, 2007, 02:05 PM

Hey guys, thanks for clicking on this thread.

To bring you up to speed, I've been editing together what is essentially an amateur talent show in my spare time in hopes of getting it as professional looking (and sounding) as possible so that the people who took part in it will be happy with the recording. I haven't had much trouble so far, but I ran into a snag.

The stage was set up with a pair of boom microphones placed in front of it. We marked the ground with ideal light+sound places for people to stand, but given we had no rehearsals for the event and really no idea what each person involved was going to do, we set things up to capture as best we could with the tools available.

One of the groups on stage decided to stay on the far left (right above the steps, oddly enough) while delivering most of their lines while one of their other actors was at the center in the well-microphoned area. As a result, many of the left group's lines have a very strained and metallic tone to them. I think it's because the unidirectional microphone was perpendicular to them and picking up as much from them directly as it was from the wall-bounce behind them, but regardless I'm trying to clean this up using post filters.

I'm not as experienced as I would like to be with sound clean-up (I'm one of those chronic abusers of "Normalize") so I don't really know what filters and tweaks, if any, could be used to make this sound less terrible. I can't get them in for rerecording because this happened at a convention and it wouldn't be worth the trouble to track them down and get them to come in for something this trivial, but I try to get the best out of every project that I'm involved in and I'd really like to compensate for this issue somehow.

Any suggestions are appreciated!

June 17th, 2007, 02:05 PM	#1
William Bloodworth Tourist Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Raleigh, North Carolina Posts: 4	Misdirected Unidirectional Clean-up? Hey guys, thanks for clicking on this thread. To bring you up to speed, I've been editing together what is essentially an amateur talent show in my spare time in hopes of getting it as professional looking (and sounding) as possible so that the people who took part in it will be happy with the recording. I haven't had much trouble so far, but I ran into a snag. The stage was set up with a pair of boom microphones placed in front of it. We marked the ground with ideal light+sound places for people to stand, but given we had no rehearsals for the event and really no idea what each person involved was going to do, we set things up to capture as best we could with the tools available. One of the groups on stage decided to stay on the far left (right above the steps, oddly enough) while delivering most of their lines while one of their other actors was at the center in the well-microphoned area. As a result, many of the left group's lines have a very strained and metallic tone to them. I think it's because the unidirectional microphone was perpendicular to them and picking up as much from them directly as it was from the wall-bounce behind them, but regardless I'm trying to clean this up using post filters. I'm not as experienced as I would like to be with sound clean-up (I'm one of those chronic abusers of "Normalize") so I don't really know what filters and tweaks, if any, could be used to make this sound less terrible. I can't get them in for rerecording because this happened at a convention and it wouldn't be worth the trouble to track them down and get them to come in for something this trivial, but I try to get the best out of every project that I'm involved in and I'd really like to compensate for this issue somehow. Any suggestions are appreciated!