De-breathing Interviews?
 

What is the opinion on de-breathing interviews?

I have a few people that seem to breath loud. (Lav on the chest, not air hitting the mic.) I can take some of the breaths out but I'm not sure if I can remove all of them because the words are too close. I was thinking the sound track may help to subdue them. BTW, this is not a doc about lung disease.

I do this for voice overs - its quite easy because I controlled the speech pattern during recording. I'm just not sure about the interviews. Do you normally try to clean up the interview?

Yes I take out breaths that can be separated from the dialogue. I use Sound Forge and clean every interview clip. I zoom into the audio and remove or reduce the level of the breathing wherever possible. There is not much you can do with breathing during speech only at the beginning/end of the word or in between pauses. Yes a music track can help if it fits your interview and isn't overpowering.

For interviews I try to remove only what sounds really bad. For really bad breaths, I replace with a bit of room tone stolen from somewhere else in the interview. A lot of times, I can just put cuts on either side of the breath and slip it of frame. For ones that are tough to remove or that sound awkward if cut, I just pull the level down a bit during the breath. In my opinion, it's possible to get carried away with removing breaths. A lot of times music and ambient sound track can mask a lot of what sounds annoying when you just solo the interview sound. For narration, I scrub that stuff of all breaths.