Spoken word - remove room?

Digital Perfomer in the context of television/film scoring and post-production.

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dickhauser
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Spoken word - remove room?

Post by dickhauser »

I have a poetry reading with that darned "room" echo in it. I'm clueless about how to minimize it. Any suggestions would be useful.

Oh, I have iZotope RX (already used it to remove a high pitched hum in the audio) so if anyone knows settings they'd be willing to share, I'd appreciate that also.
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azusa749a
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Post by azusa749a »

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Last edited by azusa749a on Tue Feb 26, 2008 12:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
stephentayler
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Post by stephentayler »

I would have a look at Sonnox Oxford Transient Modulator

http://www.sonnoxplugins.com/pub/plugin ... ansmod.htm

It has a great way of dealing with ambience and transients. I have never tried it on a voice, but I have experienced dramatic effects on instruments and drums. It is similar to the SPL Transient Designer, or the Logic Enveloper. Sonnox have a demo available if you have an iLok.

Of course nothing is going to be completely successful if the speech is fast and a lot of words are run together.

kind regards

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Dwetmaster
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Post by Dwetmaster »

Sometimes I can work miracles with a simple gate
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Re: Spoken word - remove room?

Post by Phil Jeffers »

dickhauser wrote:I have a poetry reading with that darned "room" echo in it. I'm clueless about how to minimize it. Any suggestions would be useful.

Oh, I have iZotope RX (already used it to remove a high pitched hum in the audio) so if anyone knows settings they'd be willing to share, I'd appreciate that also.
Yep, use a gate, but as a downward expander - experiment with the threshold and you'll be surprised how much natural pre-delay and reverb you'll lose.
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Post by pounce »

i'd even try some xnoise to see what other room ambience you can kill with it.
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HCMarkus
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Post by HCMarkus »

Multiband expansion (Waves C4) can do some pretty cool noise-reduction, and might give a cleaner result than a simple expander.
kazuya
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Post by kazuya »

Try a notch EQ to cut out some of the specific room tone. Use a really fast gate. If it sounds to hard and cuts off the voice to fast, add a very very very small room fx.
Maybe cut off the room by hand very sharp and add the room fx.
Don´t compress to much.

Hope something helps...
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monkey man
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Post by monkey man »

The easiest, cheapest and quickest method would be to gate the spoken word, IMHO.
The release time will be critical for the ambience-removal effect.

Remember that you don't need a 100% (full-range) gating; by reducing the reduction amount from infinity to something barely audible, you'll lessen any unnatural artifacts imposed by the gate itself.

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Dwetmaster
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Post by Dwetmaster »

monkey man wrote:The easiest, cheapest and quickest method would be to gate the spoken word, IMHO.
The release time will be critical for the ambience-removal effect.

Remember that you don't need a 100% (full-range) gating; by reducing the reduction amount from infinity to something barely audible, you'll lessen any unnatural artifacts imposed by the gate itself.
...And then you put everything into a room using Altiverb to make sure it sounds natural... :wink:
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monkey man
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Post by monkey man »

Correct, Dwet! Just be sure to select the correct room. :lol:

Or, if your deadline's flexible, you could wait for DP's new-fangled converb.

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Radiogal
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Post by Radiogal »

This is were WAVELAB comes in and can help u. PC only yes, but still WAVELAB has unique features.
Wavelab 6 can take away room acoustics.. and does it well too.
Check out Steinbergs home page. I think the mid-level-priced Wavelab Studio 6, for just not too much money, offers this great feature.
Forget about Steinbergs other software.
WAVELAB is so different anything else. And it´s VERY intuitive!!!
For me I use it mostly for post production for converting, editing and mastering, ISRC, UPC/EAN, CD text coding, Leveling, production sheets and prepairing CDs for production. Also radioshow editing and broadcast converting. The more u use it the more u need it.

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gref
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Re:

Post by gref »

Radiogal wrote:This is were WAVELAB comes in and .... The more u use it the more u need it.

DP and Wavelab work side by side in a perfect combination in my studio.
WAVELAB ROCKS! There's nothing like it on MAC unfortunately.
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ttoeda
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Re: Spoken word - remove room?

Post by ttoeda »

I work a lot on voices rather than music. Some files/tapes I get has the problem you are having. I do the gating as many suggested here and add a hair of room reverb to it. The end result would be a voice sound that is natural, not the usual super dry sound and the reverb masks unnatural gating. The reverb needs to be real sounding room or small hall, maybe in your case. The trick is it should not sound the reverb is added at all. It should sound as if he/she is talking in an acoustically nice space with very little room sound.

Good luck!
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Radiogal
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Re: Spoken word - remove room?

Post by Radiogal »

WAVES R-Vox has beside the special narrowing/comp/boost effect also a great gate function that can tighten up the voice very well from room acoustics. I always use this feature working with projects like audio books.
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