Basic Sound Mixing/Tweaking

"A Lost Hope" nears completion. Only a couple things remian: recapturing a piece of footage and reinserting it into the movie as our original edit had it and recording and dubbing the dialogue for one scene.

We shot this scene in perhaps the one spot of all of Daytona Beach that fit what we wanted. The only problem is that it also happened to be at the end of a runway. So during the scene, while the video is fine, the audio is unusable, as there are airplanes flying overhead every thirty seconds or so.

We've already recorded a dub once in my room and when the audio's inserted you can plainly tell that it's been shot inside two feet from the camera.

Since neither myself nor my codirector have any experience in audio mixing, our current plan is to rerecord another dub in the original location and just space out the takes between the airplanes. Does anybody have any experience with sound mixing and specifically sound mixing with Soundtrack and FCP4? I'm still learning the program and haven't yet dived into sound.

Also, incidentally, there are points in other sequences where there is a high pitched noise that's probably the result of machinery, high enough that it's right on the line of being audible or not. Probably some people wouldn't here it, even though I do. How does one mix that out?

All help is appreciated, and with any luck, "A Lost Hope" will be completed within the week.

 

Can't answer your mixing question because I use Sound Forge and Vegas Video. But as to the filtering of noise try a plugin like Noise Reduction 2.0. That's a wonderful plugin for eliminating noise. It uses Direct X technology to work with many sound editing programs.

Keith

 

For your first question, you should use the dub dialogue instead of going back on site to do another recording. Just run a few filters through and add some background noise (maybe the beach noise you got from the original).

The second question is simpler, run a pitch filter and cut out the pitch frequency (if it's high enough), otherwise you might have to kill it manually (which involves lots of tinkering).

 

Which filters should we use? We went through each of the ones FCP offers systematically and couldn't get anything approximating what we wanted, and in most cases couldn't tell a filter had been applied at all. Perhaps we just weren't using them right?

 

I disagree with Zamboni as to using a dub mix. More than likely if you do that it's going to sound completely different than the rest of your previously recorded dialogue. Your best bet is go back there a little earlier in the day when the planes are not running as often and then re-record the dialogue, unless you plan on re-dubbing most all of the dialogue anyhow.

Depending on the frequency of the noise, you'd use an EQ filter to filter out the general frequency of the noise itself. NR2.0 though is easy in that you sample the noise and you tell it to remove the same throughout the recording in in only the spots you want it removed.