dead air!!! HELP!!!
 

Hi,
I'm just finishing up a short film and I'm having some audio issues. There is no music in the short and in additional to the actors lines there is a strong voice over. The film has a film noir type of vibe.

My biggest problem is that I didn't shoot with great mics. I used a crapy sony wireless, the XL-1s camera mic (pointless, I know) and a Iriver lav set up.

The silence is very important and I have some dead air noise on both the VO and the lines. I took room tone and tried using that to bed it but some of the dead air still pops on. I've played with some audio filters (I'm working with adobe premiere, I have no other sound programs) but really have no idea about sound editing.

Does anyone have any tips where I should start? Where would you start noise gate or equalizer setting? Is there a filter that I would have that I'm not thinking about?

Please Help!!!!
Thanks for any help ahead of time!!!

An important rule is to always monitor sound. It's just as important as looking through the viewfinder to ensure proper framing. Knowing the quality of your audio, especially when audio goes bad, is invaluable during any production.

That said, you might want to go to that same location and record additional environmental sounds to fill in the dead spots. It should be possible to use your edit system's audio tracks to build a convincing audio environment. Then have your talent ADR their lines.

Not sure what you mean when you say there's a problem with "dead air" but "dead air" should mean "absolute silence" which is not hard to fix. If you mean there's loud bursts of static then you'll have to cut out the noise and replace it with your new audio environment, VO and ADR.

What you need to do isn't difficult. Just tedious.

If it's film noir why wouldn't it have music? Film noir movies like chinatown etc. love stuff like smooth jazz.

If what you mean by 'dead air noise' is unwanted noise between lines or VO passages, you'll need to apply a 'noise gate' filter to the audio. You will adjust the threshold of the noise gate high enough to get rid of the noise, but not high enough to clip the beginning and ending of desired audio passages.

-gb-

Remember you can use the same audio clip over and over again in the timeline. Set up a separate track - premiere allows as many as you need - dedicated just to the room tone. Trim the room tone clip so there's no silenceat the start or end, so if looped it would sound continuous with no gaps. Put as many occuarnces as you need to the entire time reuqired, under the other tracks and covering all the silences. Lets say we have Jack and Jill talking. Set up three tracks:

1: jack-silent-jack-silent-jack-silent
2: silent-jill-silent-jill-silent-jill
3: roomroomroomroomroomroom

Good explanation!

Ty Ford