New wildflower film: California Poppies

Jay Gladwell · April 9th, 2008, 04:32 PM

Obviously, that wasn't enough.

Sometimes the wind is too strong and overpowers everything. That's when you go back and manufacture your own "clean" audio track.

Peter Rhalter · April 10th, 2008, 09:00 PM

To anyone else who may be also dealing with troublesome wind sound recordings, here is what I found. When I went back to the original audio files it seemed that the fur coat on the mic had done its job; the waveforms didn’t look, or sound, overloaded from the wind. There was, however, a good deal of low frequency noise there that—if there was dialog spoken over it—would have interfered with human voices.

The solution, as far as I can determine, is to run the wind audio through a high-pass filter (I have a Waves EQ plugin for this, but probably every audio program has this kind of filter) which cut out most everything below about 200hz. This eliminates the rumbling and leaves a smoother, if somewhat thinner, wind sound that probably comes closer to what movie-goers expect the wind to sound like. It also allows me to maintain the sense of locality that would be lost by using stock wind sounds.

Thanks to all those who offered comments and suggestions.

Best,
Peter Rhalter
www.parkfilms.com

April 9th, 2008, 04:32 PM	#16
Jay Gladwell Join Date: Jul 2002 Posts: 1,244	Obviously, that wasn't enough. Sometimes the wind is too strong and overpowers everything. That's when you go back and manufacture your own "clean" audio track.

April 10th, 2008, 09:00 PM	#17
Peter Rhalter Regular Crew Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: Los Angeles Posts: 192	To anyone else who may be also dealing with troublesome wind sound recordings, here is what I found. When I went back to the original audio files it seemed that the fur coat on the mic had done its job; the waveforms didn’t look, or sound, overloaded from the wind. There was, however, a good deal of low frequency noise there that—if there was dialog spoken over it—would have interfered with human voices. The solution, as far as I can determine, is to run the wind audio through a high-pass filter (I have a Waves EQ plugin for this, but probably every audio program has this kind of filter) which cut out most everything below about 200hz. This eliminates the rumbling and leaves a smoother, if somewhat thinner, wind sound that probably comes closer to what movie-goers expect the wind to sound like. It also allows me to maintain the sense of locality that would be lost by using stock wind sounds. Thanks to all those who offered comments and suggestions. Best, Peter Rhalter www.parkfilms.com