yet again another sound question from me

B

brettzdamn

Ok i just received my zoom h4 and was conducting some tests with it. I noticed that when imported to my pc the sound on my zoom is alot lower then the sound my camera produces with the internal microphones. So when i was in adobe premiere looking at the audio clips i raised the dB and it made the audio track louder. Does any one know what dB stands for? Also does this effect the quality of the audio or just the volume? Thanks in advance for any one who can help me!
 
Last edited:
Sort by date Sort by votes
In Premiere there should be an audio suite processor called "Gain" or "Normalize" (I think it's clip - audio options - audio gain). I don't know if it "learns" the gain of the clip or not, but you can increase by a percentage. So if you make the gain 200% it will be twice as loud.

One thing that can drive you crazy is when there is a very loud transient in the clip. Say that you have a scene where a couple is arguing, but quietly. She gets up into his face, very quietly says "Fuck you," turns around and slams the door on her way out (the door is the loud transient). He then very quietly mutters "Bitch" under his breath. You can barely hear the dialog, but the door slam already peaks out at zero dB. You cut the door slam out of the dialog and increase the gain of just the dialog. The dialog could be -46dB, so you can try pushing it up to -20dB or so. Just keep in mind that everything associated with the clip also increases in volume - the background noise (AC, fans, etc.), the crew member with the stuffy nose, that one loud fill light and the footsteps would now do credit to a brontosaurus. You correct these problems with noise reduction (NR), EQ and volume automation as well as some judicious dialog editing. But that's another lesson.

Class dismissed.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
That's why one of the first things I do is stripe the dialog, cutting clips and dropping them into a dx stem with each actor getting their own track. I only drop dialog here and feather the head and tail of the clip.

The door slam (if it's the one I decide to use) goes into the fx stem (sometimes on it's own track), and again feather head and tail.

And then it's pass after pass with tone running below it to look for noise that stands out and cleaning the noise as needed.

Striping the dialog early in the process helps reduce the amount of time I would spend cleaning noise out of segments I won't be using anyway.

But man is it boring for my wife since at this stage I usually work with the studio door open and she gets to hear 3 second phrases repeated over and over until she's ready to puke. Me: "Hey, honey, which phrase sounds better, this one.....or this one", Her: "Dangit, her mascara flecked a bit on her eyelid" My wife is a make-up artist.

Alcove Audio said:
One thing that can drive you crazy is when there is a very loud transient in the clip. Say that you have a scene where a couple is arguing, but quietly. She gets up into his face, very quietly says "Fuck you," turns around and slams the door on her way out (the door is the loud transient). He then very quietly mutters "Bitch" under his breath. You can barely hear the dialog, but the door slam already peaks out at zero dB. You cut the door slam out of the dialog and increase the gain of just the dialog. The dialog could be -46dB, so you can try pushing it up to -20dB or so. Just keep in mind that everything associated with the clip also increases in volume - the background noise (AC, fans, etc.), the crew member with the stuffy nose, that one loud fill light and the footsteps would now do credit to a brontosaurus. You correct these problems with noise reduction (NR), EQ and volume automation as well as some judicious dialog editing. But that's another lesson.

Class dismissed.
Click to expand...
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Alcove Audio said:
As as far as dynamics go I hate 99% of the music recordings I hear because they are overly compressed. I don't know where you're getting those squashed mixes, but whoever is doing it ought to be shot. With the exception if a limiter on the DX stem I very rarely use dynamics processing in my mixes. I will use a compressor on individual sound clips that I need to pop out or to tame an unruly sequence. My biggest "fault" is that my mixes tend to be overly dynamic, if anything; a large percentage of my clients seem to want a narrower dynamic range, so that is what I give them. And in the end, it's the clients wishes that pays the bills.
Click to expand...

Alright! Nice to see someone else who thinks like that. So much of todays music is brickwall limied and compressed so hard you can hear digital distortion and it is very fatiquing to listen to. Compare the waveforms from an album like "Dark Side of the Moon" with most of todays music recordings.
I am not suggesting we go backwards to then, but somewhere between the sounds from those days of tape and pre-DAW and todays overly squashed sounds would be good.
Unfortunately, most 'clients' are used to the horrible dynamic-less stuff they now hear everyday, and when they do hear something that 'breathes' and has dynamics they think it should be louder and more squashed because that is what they are used to. I agree we should shoot the loudness wars engineers!
I actually sum all my music mixes OTB and with a small amount of hardware compression (half to 1 dB) and no limiter on master buss. Then in mastering later there is room for more compression and limiting. But I still try to keep some dynamics. maybe I am old fashioned. I also don't like the current trend of having vocalists so present and in your face they may as well be singing with their lips by you ear. It's not natural. In the real world unless someone is whispering in your ear it doesn't sound like that. But I am digresssing here.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
@gp - That's exactly what I do, except I also separate each character into either noise (when the production sound is bad) or perspective (when the production sound is good. The problem is that 99% of the folks who ask us audio questions don't get room-tones, so the in-between stuff is the room-tone. I just try to keep it very basic for them.

@rocksure - The whole point of digital audio, at least originally, was noiseless recording - no tape hiisssssssssss. Then we could all hear the incredible beautiful subtleties that was buried under the noise. I am immensely in love with the classical recordings of the last five years or so; digital technology, combined with the latest generation of tube technology and microphones, has yielded some truly stunning recordings. Films have also gotten a tremendous boost from digital audio technology; the sonic depth and scope is breathtaking. It's a shame the way digital audio has been abused.

@ROC - If you want to have a heart attack listen to a current recording of Haydns Symphony No. 94, the "Surprise" Symphony. Welcome back, by the way...
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
Alcove Audio said:
@gp -
@rocksure - The whole point of digital audio, at least originally, was noiseless recording - no tape hiisssssssssss. Then we could all hear the incredible beautiful subtleties that was buried under the noise. I am immensely in love with the classical recordings of the last five years or so; digital technology, combined with the latest generation of tube technology and microphones, has yielded some truly stunning recordings. Films have also gotten a tremendous boost from digital audio technology; the sonic depth and scope is breathtaking. It's a shame the way digital audio has been abused.

...
Click to expand...

Interesting that you say the latest generation of tube technology when talking classsical recording. There are some engineers, who when you talk 'classical' who won't use preamps etc with tubes or transformers in them because they say they color the sound too much. In reality every mic or preamp colors the sound to some extent, just some more than others.
Digital audio certainly has made big strides since the early days.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top