Emre Safak
November 11th, 2006, 04:33 PM
I am trying to find a way to make my DVDs sound better, by which I mean to bring clarity to the dialog. I studied some commercial DVDs, and realized that the dialog is always clear no matter how quiet the actors are talking. On my projects, by contrast, sometimes it is difficult to hear the actors when they are shouting, due to noise. Usually this is beyond my control, but I do my best. I judiciously apply noise reduction, but I still can not avoid noise without grotesquely distorting the character of the speech.
Just to put it into numbers, I took some statistics from a kitchen scene. The RMS value of the noise floor is -32dB, whereas the dialog is -19dB (maxing out -0.87dB). In other words, the noise floor is 13dB below the dialog. Is this an acceptable value, or am I shooting in especially bad conditions? I just listen to it and it sounds amateurish, unclear, and I find myself helpless. I considered gating out the noise but that makes the remaining dialog sound noisy. Maybe I should gate out just some of it?
Just to put it into numbers, I took some statistics from a kitchen scene. The RMS value of the noise floor is -32dB, whereas the dialog is -19dB (maxing out -0.87dB). In other words, the noise floor is 13dB below the dialog. Is this an acceptable value, or am I shooting in especially bad conditions? I just listen to it and it sounds amateurish, unclear, and I find myself helpless. I considered gating out the noise but that makes the remaining dialog sound noisy. Maybe I should gate out just some of it?