Making talking little less flat (adding echo?)

[B-Twien Bytes]

Hello all,

Must admit that audio isn't my strongest point...so that is why I am asking this here I guess

Is adding echo "a way to go" if I would like to give an extra touch to my dialogues? So the sound becomes a bit
more alive?

If yes, any Avid Media Composer user out there? who can give me a hand on how to do that (step-by-step)?
If no, any other suggestions on how to accomplish what I wrote above?

Thanks for any input, appreciated!

[Vianty]

Are you talking about movie sound? The sound is better be natural. If there's no echo on the location, why add it? The result would sound awkward, unnatural.

[netmask56]

Don't go overboard with fx on dialog, "less is more" however the iZotope plugin Ozone has a range of facilities including a Harmonic Exciter
which adds something equalisation can't match - add a little bit of compression and you have that added feature to your voice over.

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozone/

There are some freeware and shareware harmonic exciter's around - google..

[B-Twien Bytes]

@ Vianty

Yeah, movie sound...ok, I see what you are saying...No other tips than to make it more "vivid"? Just leave it the way it is...

btw: there are two clips shot with my internal mic, with one especially I am not quite happy...there is too much background noise ... can I try to lessen the background noise w/out lessening the greetings / voices?

[greymalkin]

first of all, "alive" and "vivid" really aren't technical terms so it's hard to understand what you are asking, especially without a sample.

noise reduction/equalization are the first things you should look into, with noise reduction being number.

[B-Twien Bytes]

@ greymalkin

You are right about the non-technical terms...it should be some thing like pseudo stereo, so the sound/voices are not in the center but going a bit to the left and right...if that at all says some thing Like I said in the beginning, sound (terms) is not my strong point in all of this...still a lot to learn on that part.

I will start looking into "netmask56"s suggestion, b/cause that sounds like what I need...

[greymalkin]

that's fine, but you may want to at least do a noise reduction first otherwise you'll be "exciting" the noise as well .

[netmask56]

@ greymalkin

You are right about the non-technical terms...it should be some thing like pseudo stereo, so the sound/voices are not in the center but going a bit to the left and right...if that at all says some thing Like I said in the beginning, sound (terms) is not my strong point in all of this...still a lot to learn on that part.

I will start looking into "netmask56"s suggestion, b/cause that sounds like what I need...

If it is classic voice over ie you don't see the speaker then the dialog should come from the dead centre - applying stereo fake or otherwise to dialog only makes it difficult for some listeners to concentrate. Clean up your dialog first with a high pass filter set around 80 to 120Hz to get rid of rumble and low frequency wind components. However wind noise often causes secondary noises further up the scale and are difficult to completely remove. If you have a background effect and or music you can run the dialog track through a downward expander or noise gate ie it reduces the level between the words by around 6db - this increases the apparent separation between words and noise