FUBARed Production Audio - Three Strikes and You're Out?

[dLee]

I'm finishing the sound design (using Vegas 6.0c) on a no budget inde film and one
scene is particularly troublesome. It was shot on location and has resisted my best
efforts to filter.

Shot in the freezer aisle of a grocery store, it has compressor noise, non-continuous
store muzak and low dialog levels. I think of it as "Three strikes and you're out."

I don't have Sony Noise Reduction 2.0, but I've tried all the noise filtering plugins
in Cubase SX2 and Vegas.

I've gotten close with Noise Reduction in Audacity which allows one to sample the
noise and then create a custom noise profile. That method removes most of the
problems but creates new ones that I'll call digital artifacts - metallic bleeps and bloops, sounding like remnants of the store muzak in the same frequencies as the dialog. This occurs even with the most minimal filter settings that the software allows.

I also created a file of just noise (i.e. the spaces between the dialog) and used it
to create a custom noise profile. It resulted in the same problem.

The director tried ADR but handed it to an amateur as technically inept as he is and
the ADR was botched - and - no time for a redo - Festival submission deadline is Jan
15.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to use it as is, because the stubborn noise / artifacts
are in the same frequency range as the dialog - and - the muzak is a moving target.

I'll upload some samples to an FTP site if requested, but I can't set it up until
tomorrow (Monday, Jan 8). I'm unsure that if I downsample the audio to MP3 for sane
file sizes, that the filter response will be the same.

If anyone has some ideas, I would appreciate hearing them.

Thanks in advance.

[Soopafresh]

Post the audio somewhere....

[dLee]

Thanks for posting Soopafresh.

A 9sec. 1.33MB sample is available HERE

Sorry it took so long. I released the first version of the mix and I'm getting a lot of notes. I'm buried.

[Soopafresh]

Got it.... Checking it out right now.

Most of your noise is in the very low end of the spectrum, below 70hz. Have a look

[dLee]

You're right, the compressor noise is mostly on the low end.

It's pretty easy to filter it into the background, but then the muzak pops out.

The muzak is both a copyright problem and also reveals a time discontinuity due to editing.

[Soopafresh]

Impossible to identify the muzak, besides, you should mask the residual noise with some background effect/mood music. I'll post a sample momentarily.

You can get royalty free loops at www.acidplanet.com Here's an example taken from their 8-pack sampler (on the front page). This is really quick, so levels aren't adjusted, but you can get a taste of how you can fool the listener into the "feel" of the scene.

16bitlowcut4.mp3

[dLee]

You're right, the muzak is not very apparent in the clip I uploaded.

Unfortunately, later in the 2.5 min. scene, "We Can Work It Out" and a Journey (I think) song can be clearly heard.

[Soopafresh]

That's when you'll want/need to turn on your denoising, but mask the gurgling sound with something big and distracting. Here's the same background track with a Convolution effect.

deep.mp3

Your only other choice is to get the actors back in and loop it, but your deadline is too close. Trying to take the background out completely is like trying to get an oil stain out of a T-shirt. The only way you won't be able to tell is if you dye your T-shirt the color of the oil stain

The trick is to come up with a simple repeatable melody, as in the examples. That becomes a "theme" that you can repeat whenever you want to add drama or mask noise. All movies do it, Dr Zhivago won an Oscar for it.... And how many times does The Pink Panther repeat that short little ditty....

[Cornucopia]

You could try a Noise Gate (aka LowLevel Dynamic Range Expansion), combined with Dynamic Spectral Noise Reduction (Burwen type NR--dynamically adjusts passband width depending on signal strength), and VERY SMALL amounts of your Broadband digital footprint NR...

HTH,

Scott

(Sheesh, didn't anybody think to ask the store mgr. to temporarily turn off the muzak? I feel for you, having just finished posting an indy film in Dec.)

[Soopafresh]

Good ideas, Cornucopia. Here's some good info on the spectral range of the human voice, and areas to cut and boost.

http://www.geeksandgod.com/blog/2006/09/01/audio-series-eq-part-1

[Cornucopia]

Problem is mainly with the muzak, as the compressor could be filtered enough and then masked with the louder voice sounds (Burwen filter helps here--funnily enough, so does MP3 compression!), but the spectral content of those muzak tunez pretty much matches that of voices (since it does have voices in the mix). Anything that might mask the muzak would mask the voices. And the discontinuity is the hardest part--at least compressor noise wouldn't be a problem there.

If you have a VERY CLEAN AND GOOD VOLUME copy of each of their voices somewhere else, you could try running those thru a spectrograph to find the formants with which to match a series of passbands. Kind of like a static vocoder working on itself...

You never know (although my guess is that this would take a while).

Good luck,
Scott

[Soopafresh]

Something tells me dLee has the Espresso machine going 24/7 this weekend

[dLee]

The adrenals are already burned out - so is the espresso pot.

I will definitely work my way through all the suggestions from Soopafresh and Corucopia, but I really like the technique used in 16bitlowcut4.mp3. The dialog is much clearer.

I've been a fan of ACID since version 3. Very easy to come up with something unique.

I'm still looking for some very clean and good volume dialog in the production sound.

Whoever did sound had a few unusual techniques.

For example, I've got one scene where the mic is pointed at the actress' back while she's speaking and the ocean, 200 yards away, is louder than she is.

The story goes that they did ask the market to shut off the muzak, but they wouldn't. Since they got the location for free, there wasn't a lot of leverage.