Soundtrack Pro-Question
 

I shot a short film a couple of months and we used TASCAM HD-P2 recorder. After I imported the files to my computer I found one of the critical dialogues in between there is a sound of a car passing by. I am wondering if in SoundtrackPro there is a tool I can minimize/avoid the car noise passing by. I tried the EQ, Denoiser, Reduce Noise, etc.. none of these worked. Is there any other suggestions. Please if you can walk me through it with the steps. I guess for next time maybe I should use a mixer with the TASCAM HD-P2.

Thanks in advance

Is ADR not an option for this particular scene? It's the only way to guarantee clean dialogue at this stage.

A mixer is a good idea but it won't help prevent this situation. If the sound of the car is under the dialog, there's no filter in the mixer that's going to eliminate it. If the noise is between two speeches, just replace the sound will room tone.

Obviously too late now, but was no one monitoring the sound at the time?

iZotope RX could probably deal with it
http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/rx/

but it could be cheaper to do ADR or a pick-up.

How about dialogue editing? Have you got alternate takes you could lift clean dialogue from?

Thanks everyone.

I think I will get the actors to record their lines. It is not a big deal.

What advice do you recommend on the set in terms of Audio?

The thing is I do the directing and cinematography. Maybe I should get a set of headphones to listen to the recorder.

OK, I'll stick my neck out here, but what about having a sound person on set? You already have enough to do, if you get a sound person, they have one job and only one job. Getting you the best sound possible. That means monitoring the audio so that you don't have issues like this. Now, you can monitor the audio too, but when somebody focuses on the audio they will hear things that you might now hear because you are too busy doing other things.

On larger sets, typically the Director, 1st AD, producer, script supervisor and sometimes many others are given a comtex receiver and headset. The sound mixer provides them sound using a comtex transmitter (the audio comes from the mixer's sound equipment). On smaller sets, usually comtex equipment is not available, so having somebody focus on audio only is critical, so you don't run into these types of things.

Wayne

Thanks Wayne for the feedback.
Unfortunately, I had a sound person on the set but he did not do a good job. He told me the sound that he captured was excellent. I guess I was stupid to trust him. I should have checked. Anyways, I learnt my lesson. Thank God it was not a feature film. But for my next film I have to be careful.

Is the car noise ongoing under the dialog or is it between two lines?

WOW!!! That application is amazing. Very pricey, but amazing. They expect to have plug-ins for your favorite audio apps available soon which will be free to purchasers of the stand-alone app.

Thanks for posting. iZotope makes same good quality audio processing stuff.

-gb-