Removing Environment
 

I've been assigned to the post production audio on a project recently. I was unable to be at the shoot to boom and monitor the sound and without going too much into it, I'm surprised how much can go wrong if someone else is left to it. :(

The house where the scenes were shot was pretty much a metal box, few wall coverings tile and wood floors, sparse furniture- you know the story.

So there's all this room on the tracks because of improper mic placement. The director was reviewing the footage with his partner and his partner made the comment about how [live] it was. I knew that he was talking about the roominess. The director said, "that can be taken care of in post". Then he looked at me and asked, "right?".

I've never heard of a way to take the quick predelay and short reverb trails off of a program.

Have you, DVinfo.net?

There is virtually no way to cleanly do this in post. At that point, you should have looked the director in the eye and said "there is virtually no clean way to remove this in post." The director doesn't know what can or can't be done in post, apparently, and so put the onus on you, which is not fair. If there had been a pink elephant in the middle of the room, would he have asked the editor to fix that in post too?
If you can't reshoot, I'd suggest examining ADR, depending on how bad the room is in the dialog.

Using compression, some light noise gating, some underlying room tone mixed back in, you can reduce the amount of room, but it will still not sound "right." Sometimes, using a convolution reverb like Sony's Acoustic Mirror can help too, but it's still far from being optimal.

Thanks, Douglas Spotted Eagle. I really though not. Just wanted to make sure I didn't turn out the moron when there's a "dampening plugin" out there someplace.