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Hello soundies. Welcome to our sound for video session. Today is the 9th of October 2022. It's good to have you all here. Hope everyone's doing well. For those in the northern hemisphere enjoying a nice beginning of autumn.

Let's go to our agenda and take a look at what we have going today. So today first of all, we're going to take a look at a voice over that I recorded just last night and walk through how I would process it. We're going to use primarily audition and Adobe Audition and iZotope RX.

Obviously there are lots of other ways you could do this, but that's just how we're going to approach it in this particular demo. And then we also have some questions that were submitted ahead of time. So we'll take a look at those as well. Okay. And Danny's doing our switching for us today. So So thank you

Danny there. There she is right there.

All right. Well, why don't we start by taking a look at Audition here and let me just show you where we started. So just to give you some background on what this is. So Alan Williams who runs the Sound Speeds channel on YouTube has a podcast that he's doing right now and at the end of that, um he has various people record the outro.

And he asked me if I would do this, so I did this. And let me just um

I'm going to pull this up here. Let me show you where we started. I I just did the recording in my studio area where I have multiple sound blankets, so I have a table that I sit at with the microphone on a stand on the table.

Um the sound blanket There's a sound blanket actually on top of the table, so that um helps prevent any sort of reflections. There are sound blankets to either side of me, one in front of me, there's a blanket on the floor, and so it's a pretty good space for acoustically. And then, um yeah, let's just play this back so you can hear where we started from.

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question to ssp@soundspeeds.us.

That's soundspeeds with an this outro? Well, you can't. I'm recording this outro, but if you'd like to record the outro for a future episode, see the details in the description below.

Find Sound Speeds on social media and online at www.soundspeeds.us.

Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for more sound-related content. And what I mean is if you really want to learn something, you should subscribe. I learn new things from Alan all the time. One time, I was listening to this episode, and my mind was blown when he talked about phase interactions and

Okay. Just to give you some context there. So, we're going to fade that last bit out. That's intentional. That's where the script ends. Um so, we're going to just sort of fade fade that out to spark people's interest, hopefully.

You can see, first of all, we're peaking at about minus, oh, 13 minus 12, maybe, somewhere in that range. And so, that's is where we're starting. Let me just go back to the raw wave file, which looks exactly like this. So, the first thing I would do is we have a few things going on and I might take a look at the spectral view. Just pulling that up here. So, if you're in the This is the waveform panel here.

And I can just pull this up here to get the spectral view.

And this is not quite as detailed as it is in RX, but gives you an idea if we have any major problems. You'd be able to see hums and stuff like that. If having that visual reinforcement, which can be helpful sometimes. You can definitely just detect it there. But, what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually do the cleanup first and then we're going to bring it back into

Adobe Audition. So, for cleanup, I'm going to go to RX. And I just want to make a distinction here.

Adobe Audition is kind of unique in a couple of ways.

Probably the biggest way is that it has from the start, I think it actually started with this waveform editor. So, in essence, it just you can put an individual clip in here and you can process it. You can apply all sorts of whatever effects you choose to apply.

And it is basically destructive editing.

And that's that's actually pretty useful. So, first up, if you're going if you need a non-destructive workflow, make a copy of your audio files first if you're going to be doing a bunch of stuff in here and then saving it. So, that's the first thing to keep in mind. But, it also later they added this multi-track mode, which is very much similar to a more traditional digital audio workstation where you're working in a and I I would say mostly less destructive fashion, I guess. In other words, in most cases, you're just applying effects right on the tracks.

Never necessarily well, not usually processing the individual clips, but in any case, that's that's where Audition is coming from. So, Audition allows you to do full mixing in the multi-track mode. RX, on the other hand, and this is the thing that a lot of people kind of wish that RX did, but it's not um capable of doing is it's not for mixing. It is purely for audio processing and cleanup.

So, I'm going to go ahead and send this audio over to RX. And the way I did that, I came up to effects.

I've came into the uh VST3 plugins um iZotope and then went to RX 10

Connect. And then we just go ahead and click apply to get that over into RX, and this is where we start.

All right. Um now, there were actually multiple takes here.

I'm just going to be interested in this third take here. This is the one This is the good one that I'm going to go ahead and use. There's something interesting going on here. I don't know if you can see it really well. Let's go ahead and change the um um the spectral view. So, I go to spectrogram settings, and I'm going to change it to this crazy multicolor here.

There's quite a bit of low frequency stuff that's intermittent, which is weird.

Um so, we're going to have to take care of that. You can see the slightest traces of uh some sort of hum or something going on there, too. We'll clean that up as well.

Um I can't usually my eyes um as we say at work with amongst my friends there, this is searing my retinas. And so, I'm going to change this back to I think it's this one, the cyan and orange. Okay. So, we're going back to that.

Okay. And what I'm going to do here is just zoom in on the part that we're interested in processing here, which starts right here.

Okay. So, I'm going to go back to the waveform view, and the first thing I want to take care of is any sort of um breaths and mouth clicks and things of that nature. So, what I want to do here is I want to first check how loud we are. I I can boost this up just a little bit to make it easier to work with in terms of um just seeing everything. So, right now it's at minus 27. We can

Oh, and our true peak

Oh, it's Our true peak is really close to zero because of these claps for sync.

I'm going to go ahead and pull those down. So, I'm going to pop over here to the gain.

And I'm going to reduce that by 10 dB.

That should do.

Okay, then I'm going to come back in over here. Let me zoom in.

There we go. Okay, now I have 7 and 1/2 dB of headroom. So, I can bump this to minus 23, no problem.

Okay, so we're going to change the integrated loudness. We're in the loudness control module here.

I'm going to go ahead and bump that up to minus 23 LUFS, so bump.

And there we go. That's going to make that just a little bit easier to manage.

And this is going to be for managing breaths and mouth clicks and things like that. So, let's go ahead and listen through and see where we start. There was a mouth click right there, just in my voiceover. Here we go.

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or voi-

Okay, that's the bad take. If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question to ssp@soundspeeds.us.

That's soundspeeds with an S at the end {dot} us. Want to record this outro?

Well, you can't. I'm recording this outro, but if you'd like to record the outro for a future episode, see the details in the description below.

Okay, we've got a few things to work on.

Here's a breath. So, there are a couple ways to approach breaths. I generally don't cut them out. Some people like to cut them out. I don't think that's a I I don't like the sound of that. I prefer to just attenuate them some. And so, typically what I will do is just highlight them.

Something like that.

And then I'll just use this gain to drop it by We don't need to drop it a whole lot.

Maybe let's go 6 dB on that. See how that sounds.

Here we go. a future episode, send a written, audio or

We could go maybe 10 even. a question for a future episode, send a written, audio or video question to SS

Okay, and then there's a mouth click right in the middle here somewhere. or video question to video question Right in here.

I think that's it right there.

So, we're going to go grab our mouth de-click.

Let's see what this does. audio or video question to SS audio No, that didn't get it.

I think de-click might be the one we want actually. audio or video question to SS

It's actually I think this is it right here. audio or video question to SS

Output clicks only.

Increase the sensitivity.

We can go to That's the default. Let's pump this up. question to SS audio or video question to Still not picking it up. Let's widen the click range. So, background

What I'm trying to do is get it to identify this mouth click right in here, and maybe I haven't selected the right area yet, but um there's a little bit of mouth click in there. I think it's either this right here or the first one here, one of those two, if I had to guess. So, I'm using and actually we can go we can change our algorithms as well.

I'm just going to go with single band for now, but let's um I can increase the sensitivity of the plugin. That's the detection. That's how how sensitive is at the um detecting the clicks and then click widening is how long the clicks last in milliseconds. So, you can actually increase that if you need to.

So, let's just play around here a little bit. I'm going to stop talking and just listen back and see what I can do to kind of narrow in on what what's going on here.

Audio or video question to SS

Okay, let's go to a different algorithm.

Audio or video question to SS

No, let's go to another one.

Audio or video question to SS

I doubt the low latency will get it.

Audio or video question to SS

Okay.

Let's try our mouth declick instead.

Actually, what we can do is switch over to the spectrogram.

See, there's more low frequency than high frequency. It looks like there.

Audio or video question to SS Hmm, no.

It's not doing it.

Maybe not quite so low.

I'm not actually hearing it. I think it may be there somewhere else. quest quest video quest video question video question

Huh.

Let's try reducing this. audio or video question to SS

Still very much there. or video question to SSP

Boy, that one's a tough one. or video question or video question or video question

Okay, well, here's one thing to consider.

You have to decide how much time is worth it for you.

We have a question? No, do you want yourself on the screen? Do I want myself No, I don't want myself on the screen. Thank you.

Um I'm What I'm just saying here is that there's We could We could hunt this down for a while or we could move on. Um it's pretty annoying, to be honest, uh to me, but the question is how much time do we really want to spend working on that?

And I'm actually even just having trouble figuring out exactly where it's at. So, let me just put my headphones on. I'm going to keep searching for a bit. quick quick quick It's not there.

Oops. Zoom out. video Uh it's in here. video somewhere.

Okay, let's go back a mouth mouth de-click. Audio or video question to Oh, we got it. Render. Okay, it was hidden in here. So, this is where mouth de-click is really useful versus de-click. Mouth de-click often times will not mess up the dialogue and so it can be useful. So, that actually was able to capture that.

Um so, really nice to have that feature.

Okay, we're going to move on. We spent a lot of time on that one. So, here we go. Audio question to SSP at soundspeeds.us.

That's sounds Okay, we got another breath here.

Now, you might ask, "Why don't you just use Curtis, the breath control plugin?"

Well, what I've found is that I have found it's extraordinarily difficult to get that to capture all of the breaths in a really transparent way.

So, when I'm doing something like a voiceover like this, relatively short,

I've got enough time to put some effort into it. I'm just going to come in and actually manually do this like this. So, let's go ahead and do a before and after. So, before sounds like this. s.us. That's soundspeeds and then after is like this. s.us. That's soundspeeds with an S at the end. s.us. Want to record this out?

Okay. So, breath is still there, but it's not so prominent and especially not going to be prominent once we as as prominent when we boost the overall level. So, we're at -23 LUFS right now.

I know looking at Alan's videos, he usually normalizes to somewhere around -14 to -16 LUFS, so we're still going to have to boost this up quite a bit.

So, in any case, we're going to that's why I'm taking care of these breaths now. So,

Okay, let's keep on going and see what else we have to clean up. Audio question or video question to SSP at soundspeeds.us.

That's soundspeeds with an S at the end. s.us. Want to record this outro? Well, there's a little shoot. Where did it go? the end.us.

Here we go.

So, we have a breath and a click all at the same time. So, I could actually come in here to instant process and de-click.

And well, now it's just a breath.

Uncheck that.

Manage the breath.

Want to record this outro? Well, you can't. I'm recording this outro, but if you'd like to record Another breath. outro, but if you'd like to record the outro for a future episode, see the detail record the outro for a future episode, see the detail

One thing to get used to in RX is that when you're playing, when you stop, it goes back to where you started. So, if you're trying to work quickly, one of the things you have to kind of train yourself to do, and I

I have to do this still, too, sometimes, is that you have to click where you want it to stop. So, if it's playing, see the details in the description below.

Oh, there's some more nastiness, mouth clicks. Let's get this breath. for a future episode, see the details in the description below.

Find sounds Okay.

So, we're going to pull up that instant process de-click.

Take care of that and that. Oh.

That was the opposite of what we wanted.

There we go.

Fi Sorry about that. Still need to get that one. There we go.

Find Okay.

Now we can get that breath.

Oops, undo. Undo.

We have to turn off our instant process.

Oh. Find Sound Speeds on social media and online at www.soundspeeds.us.

Be sure to sub- Ah, see, I didn't click again. Here we go. Oh. Find Sound Speeds on social media and online at www.soundspeeds.us.

Oh. Good grief. www.soundspeeds.us.

There we go. Okay.

It's funny you get muscle memory for the place where you spend most of your time. I spend most of my time in Audition, but there's that breath.

Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for more

Did you hear that click?

Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for more sound-related

Oh.

There is a There are a couple things going on here. Turn on notifications for and turn on notifications for more sound-related

Okay. Now this is tricky cuz notifications should have a There's a There's a C in there. It should have the cuh sound in it, but I have to be careful cuz there's also a click going on, too, it sounds like. So, let's uh

Let's go back. notifications for notifications for

It's odd. What causes the clicks?

Notif-

Notifica-

Okay, we're going to do an experiment. cations from notifications from

Whoa. Nope. notifications from

Where is that click? cations from cations from Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You got to turn off this instant process. That's a gotcha every time,

Sue. If you don't turn it off, you're you're starting to select things trying to find where things are going wrong.

That's going to create problems for you. So, let's go ahead and still looking for that click. Notifications notifications from

Notif- Okay, I think it's in there somewhere. So, we're going to get the mouth de-click again. It's before the C. It is, yeah. scribe and turn on notifications for more There it is. That mouth de-click saving us today. Notifications for more sound-related content and Ooh.

And there was a notifications for more sound-related con-

Just got to keep that mouth-de-click up.

For more sound-related content and

There, there it takes care of that mouth noise.

For more sound-related content and what

I mean For more sound-related content and what

I mean Okay, Danny's raising your hand. Yes,

Danny. We have a couple of comments.

Okay, let's go ahead and put the comments up. We're going to switch back over to the main camera for just a minute here.

Let's see what we've got.

Playhead back will keep the playhead where you stop. It's the icon to the right of loop.

Um okay, so where is that? Right of loop. So, if I look at my transport controls

There we go. That will actually probably be really helpful to me. And what I mean is if you really Yeah, okay. Thank you for that.

Who was that?

Uh That's Thank you. Brian. Hey, Brian. Thanks so much. Appreciate that.

Um Oh,

I think it was a little Okay, Shoji.

Question is the click before the area you're focusing on. Yeah, we got that. Yep, it was. You were right.

It was indeed.

Uh And the mouth-de-click uh is doing great for us today, by the way.

Love that. Christopher, you don't start with a phase rotation before leveling?

Not till we're Not No, because if we do any noise reduction, that's going to whack things out of phase again even more. So, I keep that before I do the the final compression. And if also if you use any Q that um is not linear phase, that will also knock the phase out some more. So,

Camille, thanks so much for two Pinot

Noir It's very nice. So, that's very kind.

Uh thank you very much. Much appreciated. Very much appreciated. Vincent, thank you so much. Uh pretty cool this seeing the waveform reminds me chasing down something on an oscilloscope after a fashion indeed. Um, yes. Yes. And best of wishes by the way Vincent on your restoration of the real the real machine there. That sounds like a really interesting project. Okay. Let's Do we have any others that we want to cover before we move on? Oh, iZotope is pretty cool. So much control and flexibility indeed. This is for the really surgical stuff. Would be crazy to even try this in the analog. You couldn't. I'm so impressed with iZotope.

Um, yeah. It's a It's a tool that is a lifesaver in so many ways. So, okay. I'm going to go ahead and take care of this breath and let's keep on moving. We're just about halfway I think.

So, we'll get this breath right here.

And what I mean is if you really want to learn something, you should subscribe. I learn new things from Alan all the

Go back.

Subscribe.

Should subscribe. I learn new things from Alan all the time. One time I

Here we've got that thing going again.

Let's declick that.

Whoops. Undo.

Turn off declick. One time I was listen

Now we have a breath that we're managing. Time. I was listening to this episode and my mind was blown when he talked about phase interactions and

Okay. We're going to do that fade out that I talked about. Again, this is going to be like people are going to be listening and then they're going to be like, wait, what was he going to say? Um, cuz it's going to fade out there. That's part of the script, part of the gag if you will.

Um, oh and there's one more breath here we didn't cut sure I think. Let's see that. Phase interaction or maybe not. blown when he talked about phase interactions and okay not

All right. So, there is our first pass through. I think we're in pretty good shape there.

All right. So, we can close that and that. Let's go back to our spectrogram view. We do have a fair bit of noise and we also have this again, I don't know if that's a breath that created that. That's weird. It look at this right here.

Low frequency all across that section right there.

Really sort of odd.

And then once I start talking it kind of lessens some. In any case, what I'm going to do here is we're going to do a just a touch of de-noising and I am just going to use the simple voice de-noiser because this is a pretty straightforward one.

And we're going to put it in adaptive mode, dialogue, gentle, 60 B of attenuation. Let's see how it does.

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question to

SSP. Before I do that, this is sounding um a little bit mid-rangy to me and I'd like to take care of some of that. So, I'm going to pull up the EQ.

Now, when I was talking earlier about um with Christopher, your question about not doing the phase rotation earlier on,

I'm actually doing it later on because

I'm going to turn off the high-pass filter here. Um there are a couple of different things. You can put this EQ that comes with RX in analog mode or digital mode. Digital mode is actually a um linear phase EQ, so it shouldn't mess with the waveform symmetry, whereas the analog can. So, for example, if I turn it on to analog mode, and I set this high-pass filter, well, that's way too high, to let's say let's go to 70 hertz.

And I'm going to go back to the waveform view so you can see what happens.

So, let's go ahead and apply this and watch the the peaks here.

Notice how they got even more asymmetric. Now, I'm nearly clipping right here. Just undo that really quickly just to see the difference again. So, here's without a linear phase EQ.

Here's before.

Now, if I change it to digital, watch what happens. Go ahead and render it.

It doesn't change the um asymmetry at all. So, that's one thing to keep in mind as well. Well, that can make a difference. And I'm not going to apply that high-pass filter just yet. What I want to do here is I think there's a bit of additional kind of resonance in the somewhere in the 1 kHz to 2 kHz. Let's go ahead and punch that up and then we'll we'll sweep it back and forth and see where it's at.

So, I'm going to boost that. 9 Oh, come on. 9 dB. There we go. Not minus 9 dB, plus 9 dB. There we go.

Tighten the Q by a lot, quite a bit at least. And we're going to go ahead and play back and sweep this. Let's go ahead and see what we get here.

We'll start here.

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question to ssp@soundspeeds.us.

That's soundspeeds with an S at the end. us. Want to record this outro? Well, you can't. I'm recording this outro, but

Okay. Let me pause and explain to you what I'm doing here. So, what I'm looking for is I'm looking for frequencies that are pretty that are quite prominent um in the mid-range here. And I know just I know from a fact from my voice in a lot of experimentation I've done, depending on the microphone I'm using, we're often going to pick up a lot of 1 kHz and a lot of 2 kHz. And in fact, if I move it to 2 kHz, I I only pump it up by 90 Well, only 90 dB is quite a bit, but if you push it more than 9 dB, everything is going to start whistling.

So, you don't want to do it beyond that, but again, notice here as I play this, um what happens at 1 kHz and 2 kHz. And

I'll I'll do it with and without.

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question to ssp@soundspeeds.us.

That's soundspeeds with an S at the end,.us. Want to record this outro? Well, you can't. I'm recording this outro, but if you'd like to record the outro for a future Okay.

So, what I can do from there, note it noting that there are some sort of resonances there at both 1 kHz and 2 kHz, I can actually um just reduce it a little bit. So, let's just pull that down by 3 dB.

And let's open up the Q again to two.

So, we get a nice kind of wide um fairly gentle. We don't want to go too crazy here.

Get another band here. We'll take this one up to I think it was around 980.

And again, we'll change the Q to two.

And let's cut it by just 3 dB or so. Okay. So, let me play this back and uh do it and then bypass it so you can hear what it sounds like with and without. Here's with.

If you'd like to record the outro for a future episode, see the details in the description below.

Find Sound Speeds on social media and online at www.soundspeeds.us.

Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for more sound-related content. And what I mean is if you really want to learn something, you should subscribe. Okay. So, you'll note how that kind of just takes a little bit of an edge off of the the vocals there, which is actually um helpful.

Little smoother sounding, so let's go ahead and apply that. Okay, there we go.

It did drop the overall level just a touch. In fact, if we come back into our loudness control, we remember we we set it to minus 23. Uh it didn't actually affect the loudness overall.

Um but it did bring the peaks down just a touch, but uh

I think we're good there. Now, we have some S some S issues going on here, too.

Let's look at our de-esser here.

Um here we go.

Okay, I'm going to pull that over here.

And we're just going to start with a preset, to be honest. Let's do basic.

We can actually darken or let's control vocal sibilance.

And all these do, these are just literally changing some of the settings here. So, if you look at the default, the default threshold is at minus 12.

The the the basic reduction control. They just change those around. They change the cutoff frequencies. Cutoff frequency is a below this is this de-esser's not going to do anything. It's only going to look at frequencies above this.

Um you can tell it to act faster or slower. This actually basically like a compressor, but only for the sibilance frequencies, so you can tell it to work a really fast attack and release or a slower attack and release.

And uh the threshold is just when you start kind of cutting in, when it starts to make a difference there. So, let's go ahead and start previewing here, and uh let's see what we get here.

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question

Also, keep your eye right on here. This is the reduction it's doing on the S's, and that's how we kind of kind of tune our threshold. question to SSP at soundspeeds.us.

That's soundspeeds with an S at the end dot U.S. Want to record this outro?

Well, you can't. I'm recording this outro, but if you'd like to record the outro for a future episode, see the details in the description below.

Find Sound Speeds on social media and online at www.soundspeeds.us.

Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for more sound related content. And what I mean is if you really want to learn something, you should subscribe. I learn new things from Alan all the time. One time, I was listening to this episode and my mind was blown when he talked about phase interactions in

Okay. So, let's go ahead and apply that.

Okay. And let's listen to this bit.

This is after.

If you'd like to ask a sound related question for a future episode, here's before.

If you'd like to ask a sound related question for a future episode,

Okay. Probably a little harder to hear when you have that amount of time between.

But the preview and bypass I hope gave you a pretty good idea of of the differences there. So, it's just taking the edge off of those S's. You don't want to take too much off because then you end up with a lisp. Um you lose all the S's and it doesn't it's harder to hear the um the the articulation. So, you don't want to go too crazy with a de-esser, but you do want to kind of just pull off the edge or the the edge a little bit so that it's not too crazy. Okay, do we have any questions? Danny's going to pull a couple things up on the screen here for a thoughts on the breath control plugin instead of gain reduction.

I have had the hardest time getting that dialed in especially for longer bits of audio. So, I almost always I for something special like this, we go in and we do it manually. I do it manually.

On my YouTube videos, I used to use breath control and um people complained that they could hear some heavy gating.

Um and that could be, you know, a lot of things. But what happens is if it doesn't pick up all the breaths and so some of them get reduced and some don't and it just is really awkward now, frankly. Uh either Emma or I go in and we actually reduce them manually for our videos on YouTube, too.

Um so those are some things. I think if you're not quite so close to a mic as well, you don't get as much um the prominence of the breath seems to fall off just a little bit. But my thoughts on breath control is I if I'm doing something that I really care about, I generally don't use it.

And maybe it's just ignorance on my part in terms of how to set it up, but I have not been able to get it to to work really reliably from breath to breath.

I currently use RX 9 Advanced. Do you think RX 10 is worth upgrading to? Well, depends. I mean, it only has a few new features. It's not a lot. Um so there is a text or a a speech-to-text feature, which you'll see here. I'll

Uh let's see. Let's do this here.

Yeah, it's it's checking. What it's doing is taking the speech here and converting it into text so you can actually select individual things.

If that's important to you, yeah, this could make a difference for you.

Um but I I don't know. For me, it's it's pretty rough still. Like it doesn't do the greatest.

Like if you'd like to ask us down relief to question for a future re-past, send a re- It's not um and maybe it's my articulation isn't very good.

But it's my my general sense is that it doesn't do really well unless someone speaks very clearly and certain voices it works better with than others. That's one thing. There's also this um this repair assistant. I don't generally use this. I usually do things manually, but if you wanted it to quickly um you know, just tell it, "Hey, here's some audio, learn and tell me what I should do." So, it's it's actually training the repair assistant right now.

Let's see what it says in terms of de-clicking and de-essing and de-reverb and de-clipping and de-noising. You talked about this quite a bit a few weeks ago, didn't you? A couple weeks ago we covered this, yeah.

So, it's saying a little bit of de-essing, definitely some de-clicking, de-noising a little bit, even a little bit de-reverb, which I it's not how I would generally approach it. So, some people love this, that's great. I I, you know, encourage you to try it, but I it's it's definitely I think better in 10 than it was in 9, but I still don't find it like it's not changing my life. It's not changing my workflow in a big way. And then they've also upgraded some of the other modules to a small extent. I believe, for example, the de-hum, the dynamic de-hum now is um made so you don't have to select a like a training portion of audio. You don't have to have like silence with nothing but hum and then apply it.

Um it can actually figure that out even amidst dialogue. So, that's been a little bit more advanced. So, if you're cleaning up a lot of hum, um that could be useful for you as well, but beyond that, I didn't find it to be a super compelling upgrade from 9.

Okay. Where were we? Okay. K Horsford. Uh general question based on this demo, could it be that for those who might be interested in basic VO clean up that the iZotope RX Elements would be good enough? I think so. Yeah, I think you could do a lot of this and it also depends on which digital audio workstation you're using.

So, if you already have Audition, I think between that and RX elements, you should be in a really good spot.

Definitely.

Shoji, when doing surgical repair of clicks and breaths, why not just attenuate the artifact versus using iZotope? Um what iZotope does is it actually for breaths, it's attenuating. So yeah, you that's that's exactly what you can do with breaths and that's generally what I do with breaths. With clicks, it's a little different. With clicks, the click is still there if you don't actually repair it. What iZotope is doing is it's actually changing the waveform. It's not just reducing it. It's actually changing. It's resynthesizing what it thinks should be there if there wasn't a click.

So that's what it's doing and that's that's the power of RX there. So that's my general thinking. Shoji, it's a good question.

I wonder how much easier it would be to see this in a 3D cumulative spectral array. Everything gets so crunched in 2D.

Well, um I I don't know. I mean it it depends on what you're looking for.

But I find between the the waveform view, if we go to the waveform view to the spectral view, I find between those two I can generally figure out what I need to figure out. Because what I'm doing here for for example, when I go to the spectral view, I'm looking to see if there's a noise, I want to know where that noise is in terms of frequency and stuff at the bottom here is lower frequency. Stuff at the top would be higher frequency. But I know for example here, I've got something funny going on.

If I look at that same portion in the waveform or the um yeah, I'm just in the waveform view.

I don't know what that is. Like a little um I don't know if it's a breath. Let's listen. Let's hear.

I don't know. I'm not sure what that is.

But uh anyway, between those two I usually can find what I need to find.

Okay. Well, let's see. Let's Let's keep going here. We need to um wrap this up here pretty quick. So, let's let's go back Oh, we've got another question. Shoji, great live tutorial on cleaning up the audio. Thanks. You bet. Thanks, Shoji. Peter, are all clicks generated by the mouth or some from another source? I sometimes get some in my throat when I'm taking a breath.

Or actually, it's probably up in my nasal area. So, some is in the nasal area, some in the mouth.

Um you can even get some from the throat. Um but a lot sometimes I get this thing where I take a breath and there's something that happens in my nasal area that also makes a noise. So, that's what some of them are as well.

I keep wanting to finish one time with at Bandcamp.

Yes. Um that that's funny.

All right, let's just wrap this up.

We've got uh a little bit more to do here.

I think we're pretty good there. So, I think it's now time to do a little bit of de-noising. So, we're going to go back over to iZotope. Sorry about that.

Okay. So, let's run through with a preview here. If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question to ssp@soundspeeds.us.

That's soundspeeds with an S at the end.us.

Okay. I think that's good. We're going to go ahead and apply that.

See what that did to our trace here. Here's before.

And here's after.

Not a ton, but uh there was just a little clean up. I just when I was listening to it, it just seemed to seemed a little bit cleaner. Then I'm also going to come in here and we're going to get that EQ again. This time we're going to reset everything. Let's go back to default. I'm going to get this high-pass filter on at about 70 hertz and we are going to do a 24 dB per octave digital and my hope is it will clean up this business here.

That's especially going to affect people that are on um Actually, that's not going to affect us. That That's a bad take, but the good take that looks looks quite a bit cleaner there now. Um for people that are listening back on really, you know, things with subwoofers and stuff, you don't want that business down there. It's just going to drive them absolutely crazy and in some regards, those are the people you need to take care of them most because they can hear it all. Um so we could do another pass of that and that's just getting us nice and clean on the low end there.

Let's just listen back. Make sure we're good there.

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question to SSP at soundspeeds.us.

Okay, I think that's going to work for us. Let's go back here. Okay.

Now, let's get the loudness where we want it here. So right now we're sitting at minus 23.3.

Again, Allen generally masters his

YouTube videos somewhere around minus 14 to minus 16. Let's get around minus 16.

And that's going to That means we're going to need to get nine 1.047 like seven eight and a half dB of headroom so that we can bump it up to that level. So that means we're going to need to control some of these transients and these peaks here.

First though, right now I have only about 4 dB of headroom if I come into the phase rotation and I do adaptive phase rotation. That should earn me another probably another dB of headroom is my guess. Let's see what it does.

Mhm, about a half a dB. Okay, we'll take it. And then next I need to do some compression here. So, what I need to do is come into my plugins.

And I need to select my plugin. We are going to use can use our audio units.

Uh, okay, let's No, let's go back to manage our plugins.

I don't want that.

I don't want any of these.

Oh my goodness, it's going to go through every single one of those.

Okay, what I'm going to do is we're going to do the

We'll take this back to Well, wait a minute. I don't want to waste everyone's time, but I want to get out of this. How do I get

Oh, it's it's It's actually scanning for them right now.

I haven't actually used this since I got the new version to do this kind of thing. Okay, so let's go ahead and send it back to Audition.

So, send back. Let's go back to

Audition.

Come back up to effects, VST3, iZotope

RX 10 Connect.

And we will say apply.

Okay.

All right, so here we have our audio.

Now, if I do the amplitude statistics, we're at -23.4. Good, that's what we expected and our true peak is -4.4.

That's what we thought. Okay. So, I'm here in the waveform view.

And what I'm going to do is we're going to compress this. So, again, I need somewhere around um

Let's pull up our compressor.

That's fine. Okay, here we go.

So, right now I need to manage these these peaks here. So, this one is peaking minus what? 4 and 1/2 right there. That's the biggest peak right there. And I need somewhere around 7 and 1/2. So, I'm going to put the threshold for the compressor. Let's go ahead and turn the EQ off. I don't need that. Let's go to the compressor.

I'm using the top of this window here.

I'm going to go to maybe minus eight. Let's set our threshold to minus eight.

Okay. And let's set our ratio. We can do something around Let's do three to one.

Going to make a very fast attack.

Fastest it'll go. Going to put our start our release at around 500. We can probably shorten that, but we can start at 500.

And let's listen through and see what we get here. So, I'm going to pull this up and let's play and hear what we get.

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question to ssp@soundspeeds.us.

That's soundspeeds with an s at the end {dot} us. Want to record this outro?

Well, you can't. I'm recording this outro, but if you'd like to record the outro for a future episode, see the details in the description below.

Find Sound Speeds on social media and online at www Okay.

That's sounding pretty good, actually.

Go ahead and apply that.

See this is closer to minus six now.

This is interesting because right here at the start get pretty loud.

Find Sounds Find Sounds Find Sounds Ooh, sorry.

Um we can actually just You can actually manually do this. Sometimes I try to do no no more than minus three dB, but if I do that, let's see how it sounds now.

Just highlighted that portion, reduced it by 3DB. See the details in the description below.

Find Sound Speeds on social That's actually going to work okay for me, I think. Let's scan the whole thing again.

Actually, let's scan just the part that I care about, which is this bit.

Okay, we have 6 and 1/2. We're getting close. We have another transient here. Let's see what this one's all about.

I learn new I learn new I learn new I learn new Okay, drop that by 3DB. bribe I learn new things from Alan all the time. One Okay.

Again, highlight that, scan the selection. We're at 7 and 1/2, pretty close. So, what I'm going to do

I think this is our last one right here.

But, but, but

So embarrassing.

Uh, okay.

Drop that by 2DB.

You can't. I'm recording this outro, but if you'd like to record

Okay, where are we at now? Do we have enough headroom?

No.

I think at this point, uh, right here is what we're looking at.

Now, for transients like that, I'm okay limiting those just a touch. So, what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and set the loudness now. Now, there are a couple of approaches we can take. We can actually just boost this up.

Um, but I don't want to do that because

I don't have a limiter set right now.

Um, so what I'm going to do is we're going to do the match loudness. So, I'm going to come back to this file. I'm going to take that and drag it down into the match loudness panel here. If you don't have that, you come up to windows, match loudness, make sure there's a check next to it. Drop it here. Now, we have to get our settings for that. Pull this down and pull this up. Okay, so we want to go to let's say minus 16 LUFS.

I want the max true peak at about minus 1.5.

And this is going to do a little bit of limiter here.

It's going to look ahead 12 milliseconds and release 200 milliseconds. Okay, that's good. Let's run it.

Okay. Now, this is going to be too loud to play back here.

Um what I'll have to do is if I play it back here, you all are going to be not too happy with me. So, I'm going to pull the fader down.

See how it sounds now.

If you'd like to ask a sound-related question for a future episode, send a written, audio, or video question to ssp@soundspeeds.us.

Okay. I think that's generally how I would approach it. So, with that, let's go to the chat, see if we have any questions, and then we need to get to our uh Oh my goodness, we're We need to go to our questions that were submitted ahead of time right now. Okay, so let's do it. First up, Rob didn't have so much of a question but a request. I'd love to hear how you might treat the clip differently if you were including it in a larger mix, say for a commercial commercial where the voiceover needs to cut through the music, sound effects, etc. Versus something destined for an audiobook or other spoken word project.

Rob, let's do that next week. I think that's a great topic, and I'd love to cover that. So, let's come on come back to that one next week. Um but it's a great point. Um what we would probably do is we would pause instead of doing the loudness normalization here after I'd done the cleanup on the voiceover, then we would mix the music and the sound effects.

Get them to the kind of the right levels and make a enough of a hole in the music for the dialogue to cut through, and then we would loudness normalize at the end. So, definitely be coming back to that. All right, next is if dual mono is okay just for a podcast, lectures, etc. and don't need true stereo, which generally you don't for spoken word, are there any downsides to always using the minus 20 dB pad setting on the Rode

VideoMic NTG?

I mean, it prevents clipping and I can always use RX 9 to bring it up to a particular loudness units full scale level. Am I missing something or should I just leave it at minus 20 dB since I only need dual mono?

Okay, I think you're talking here about the Rode VideoMic NTG, and I normally wouldn't use that pad for spoken word, so I'm I guess we need a little bit more information on what you're recording into from Are you going

USB into your computer or are you going 3.5 mm out of the microphone into a camera? Um give me a If you wouldn't mind providing a little bit more information, I would generally say don't use a minus 20 dB pad for for dialogue. Generally shouldn't need it. A minus 20 dB pad would really be for like recording really loud music concerts, things like that. So, let's talk a little bit more if you could send a little bit more information. Um I'll also email you back and and we'll talk through that.

All right, next up from Andrew, I have a question on replacing sections of audio with room tone. I edit my files with Adobe Audition and iZotope RX and then import the file into Final Cut Pro. I need to keep the length of the audio clip unaltered when doing this. I don't use time code when recording my audio.

Sometimes I want to replace breaks between phrases with clean room tone, but I'm unsure of the best way to do this. Is there a simple way to cut and paste a section while I'm editing in iZotope while keeping the audio tracks uh length unaffected or is there another method you recommend such as using Audition to lay down room tone on another track to overlay sections that

I've muted. Andrew, it's exactly the second one that you listed there. That's

I don't know if a good way to do that in iZotope RX. That's again, it's a cleaning app. It's not really made for mixing and what you're talking about there technically falls, at least in my mind, in the realm of mixing. So, um that's definitely something you do in Audition. And in fact, um let me just Do I have time to really show I don't know if I really have time to Yeah, you would you would put the room tone on a separate track. You would you would do a some sort of fade in and then cut the portion of the dialogue track that you want to pull out and replace with that room tone. That's basically all you do there.

So, okay, with that let's go to the chat and see what we've got going on in the chat.

Mark, uh I've always seem I always seem to have a lots of reverb in recordings even with sound blankets and boom mic placed as close as possible to subject.

Tips for RX 10 uses.

And here's the And there's a follow-up, it sounds like. Normally end up in rooms with lousy acoustics that clients want me to use. Yeah, almost almost always the spaces for video shoots are or filming sessions are chosen by people who care more about the visuals than the audio. So, they almost always choose it based on its visual visual characteristics versus its audio characteristics. I always seem to have lots of reverb. Okay. So, um And here's another bit. I'm using both boom and lav to try and pick the best of the ISOs.

And I'm willing to bet that in a lot of those cases, Mark, that the lav actually has less reverb on it than the boom mic does. Boom mic will almost always pick up more of the reverberation. So, um let's go back into RX. I don't have a great clipper enough time to really run through it in a lot of detail, but um depending on which version you have, there is the uh dialogue de-reverb, which is the easiest one to use. The trick with D

Reverb is this, is it and I think the the the strategy that I usually use is

I'm just trying to take the edge off of the reverb. You're never going to remove it all. If you do, push it hard enough to remove all of it, you're going to have dialogue that sounds like the person's talking into a pillow, which is not a great sound. So, I generally wouldn't do that, but the Dialogue D Reverb is the easiest one to use and I would probably, you know, maybe 6 to 9 dB of attenuation or reduction. You can uh, adjust the sensitivity to try and get the right uh, amount there. You can also try some ambience preservation. That's generally sometimes a lot Well, a lot of times people are going to want to reduce that as much as possible. And then you can just experiment with the different algorithms to see which one works best for the particular clip you're working on. But, that would be my my first approach. There's also a uh, where's the other one?

There's also this D Reverb here, which is a little bit more um, complex to set up and allows you to dial it in a little bit more, but you can start with the presets here. Maybe do some light vocal processing.

And you can actually change the the low the how it responds to the low frequencies, mid frequencies, high mids, and the highs.

Again, dial in how much reduction you want to do and how much artifact uh, smoothing you want to do. And you can also have it enhance the dry signal. In other words, what it identifies as the original signal versus the reverb, you can have it actually I think it's actually in boo- it's actually it's actually boosting those levels of the non reverb. So, it's uh, this one I've always found a little bit more fiddly to work with. This one is a little bit easier to work with, but again, it's a light touch is the is the strategy that you'll want to take here.

So, if you've got both of those options, I'd go with the dialogue D reverb option. Okay.

Mark, anyone know if Resolve has a similar amplitude analyzer as Audition?

Um it does have a loudness meter, but it's not an offline uh meter like in

Audition. So, Audition you click a button and it goes through the entire clip.

Um in in our in um Fairlight, you actually have to play through that entire thing to get the same the at least the loud the integrated loudness for that clip.

So, it works a little bit differently. That's that's another thing that I like about Audition and actually RX is that it um allows you to do all that like those calculations offline. So, you don't have to listen through the whole thing. You could just click a button. It still takes some time, but it's not as long as listening to the whole thing.

So, I don't think that

Resolve has that same thing.

Okay, here's the last one. All right, Danny says this is the last one. From

Matt. What do you think of the huge sale B&H has on Earthworks Ethos? I got a second just because it's on sale for $399.

Wow, that's a really great price for the

Ethos. That's the microphone incidentally that we're using today. Um it's the it's the microphone that sounds probably closest to my voice of all of the microphones I own including all of the ugly parts of my voice.

So, um yeah, that's a great deal. Thanks for alerting us, Matt. Appreciate that.

That's a really good deal. $400 basically for a mic that normally is what? 700 I think.

So, good. Okay. We have one more. Okay, Danny says one more. Um if you have a Deity S-Mic 2 and

Audio-Technica 40 43B for indoor shoots, what would you choose especially for a very untreated room?

Would you recommend Samson CO2?

Samson CO2 is a much noisier mic than the other two, so probably would not be my first choice. Um Oh, oh. The 4053 Oh, you mean to say S mic 2S. And the S mic 2S is actually a little bit on the noisier side, too. I'd probably choose the Audio-Technica. And you might have to do an eight some EQ in post depending on the voice that you're recording with it. It has It has a little bit of a high shelf, so it tends to be a little bit on the sibilant side. Um so, if you're working with a voice that has a lot of sibilance, you'll probably want to use a de-esser.

And tame those a little bit, but I would probably use the Audio-Technica. Would be my first choice amongst those three.

Okay. comment. And one more comment.

Mark and Curtis, Fairlight now does analyze the whole clip for loudness.

Right click and select analyze. Thank you for that, Rob. So, you can get that. It doesn't have all of the same um stats. I think it has the true peak loudness and the and the loudness units full scale. It doesn't have some of the more um the other metrics that Audition also has, like the DB true peak Oh, no, sorry, the um

DBRMs max, DM DBRMs min, so on and so forth. I don't know if those are important to everybody, but um it does have a little bit more. So, thank you for that reminder, Rob. I appreciate that. Okay.

It's time for everybody to get out there and make some great sounds. So, thanks for joining us today. Hope everything is going well for you.

Hope you have a great week, and we'll talk to you again next week. Take care, everybody.

It's really soft.

Mhm.

Mhm.