This may be a very niche question, but I work a lot with dialogue, and speakers have a natural tendency to trail off in volume at the end of their phrases. I'm just wondering, at this point, are any of you utilizing a plugin or AI to automate volume for end of phrases, or do you still do it manually? Is there anything where I can set it to boost (x)dB in relation to the general volume range if there's, let's say, a 1 sec pause at room tone after a phrase to compensate the speaker trailing off. Or are we all just modifying key frames as needed?
When I'm mixing dialogue films, this is all done manually for me, and it doesn't take that long to do, plugins like vocal rider or powair never really worked out the way I wanted and I found myself still fixing things afterwards.
I have an 16 fader daw remote and basically have touch automation set on every channel, if I need to do anything I just pull the play head back a few seconds, automate it, let go and it goes back to where the fader was already. Before I had a daw controller I did the same process but with my mouse on the fader.
When I work on podcasts, the ambience isn't as much of a problem and I'm not worried about it as much, so I just clip gain a bunch instead
I was guessing most of you either have coached talent, better recording situations, or are doing it manually. I'm an old man now, so I didnt know if the kids tricked skynet into some good editing solutions or if we're still needing to edit key frames/ride faders for some of this stuff
You can use vocal rider plugins to get there, but this is also where compression comes in. Squishes down the loud bits so the quiet bits can come up. Combine the two and you can use less compression to get the same amount of leveling.
Yeah, I work with compression as much as possible, but I have a lot of remote recordings that are super noisy, and compression can bring out a lot of low end issues trying to compensate for speakers trailing off in the rest of the recording.
Probably would advocate for better recording techniques at that point. Dynamic mics reject more noise than condensers, and room treatment helps. There's only so much you can do. maybe try a noise gate to reduce the silence after fast release compression
Yeah, I would advocate for better recordings, but I'm interested the academic realm, so studio perfection is a minority of what I deal with. I do noise gate a bit around -55dB
Izotope makes some good noise reduction plugins so you can compress more aggressively. It might be what you need in your case if you are already working with less than perfect material. But that stuff degrades the audio the more you use it. I prefer to avoid it if i can help it. My last bit of advice is to maybe filter out problematic frequencies with an EQ and then saturate the clean frequencies you have left to reintroduce harmonics into the area you cut. But really if you care about this stuff i'd really just be coaching your voice talent to get the best recording they can. You don't need a fancy studio to talk closer to the mic. You could even get an omni dynamic mic to lend out, something like an Electrovoice 635a you can put your lips right on the grill and there will be no proximity effect because of the way it's built. Weather reporters would use this mic to report the news in a hurricane and you can hear them clear as day.
I do it by hand if/when it needs to happen.
Vocal Rider never quite works how I want it to, and AI solutions I think are generally clownish.
I do it manually, either via clip gain if noise/ambience isn't an issue (or if I want to hit the compressor harder) or otherwise via track level automation. I wouldn't trust a plug-in or AI tool to do this job, there's too much context and subtle variables that need to be considered (like the perceived volume of the words/phrases immediately before and after).
I figured as much, I came back to the industry after 13 years of craft brewing, and while some things are way more advanced, some things haven't changed. I have had no need at all for AI tools, so I'm not fully versed in what is possible yet. I do use iZotope Rx quite a bit, and Audition because their filters and spectral editor get most of the job done.
upwards compression ? ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression#Types
Manual is the way to go if you want it to sound good. Pain in the ass, but it gets results.
It’s the way they’re speaking, their performance.
I wouldn’t change it
Check out dynassist. I run that as a first pass to get dynamics in the right ball park , then lightly compress and automate if needed after.
Dialogue editing always manual, there is no substitute. I prefer clip gain automation, but you can also use volume automation.
I believe it depends on source, on desired effect, on goals.
Mixing standard dialogue I usually go for very light compression, and if the natural fade is coherent with what's on the picture (diegetic they say now) then usually light defects on natural sound are processed by the brain as normal and are not noticed. In this case I only touch manually the few extreme cases. But if there's ambience and natural room tone, then you have to take care otherwise stuff can become obvious.
If it's something you only listen to, then probably you can go a bit deeper with compression which should help with most cases and then retouch manually again what stands out. Or maybe you can more heavily denoise and now you get a bit more freedom in your edits.
And if you have even a light a soundtrack underneath, that changes all again, coz you can also go way more aggressive as the st will mask a lot, and you take the necessary measures again.
So as you see, there are different examples and you choose case by case depending on what makes sense to you and the material you're working with.