Trumpet sound in background... help!
by Beamer Films
on
Aug 13, 2009 at 10:23:31 pm
Howdy, all. I was on a shoot yesterday and a nearby trumpet player decided that it was his time to play while I'm doing an interview... There was nothing I could do to change locations or get "better" audio, so I moved forward with the shoot. It was far enough away to be distant, but close enough to annoy...
I've been utilizing the 3 band equalizer to try and pinpoint that pesky trumpet, but having no luck, to be honest.
I'm looking for advice... can anyone help guide me? I'm not real experienced in sound...
Re: Trumpet sound in background... help! by Ron Craig on Aug 14, 2009 at 2:09:06 am
I hate to make you feel worse but I don't see any way that you're going to have any luck removing that trumpet. Even if you were experienced in audio you wouldn't have any luck.
Just imagine that the trumpet sound is actually the sound of another person standing nearby, talking. You'd never be able to remove that second voice, right? The trumpet is no different.
If you have a narration/voice-over on this piece and you absolutely must use the interview, you might consider having the narrator very briefly call attention to the fact that there is a trumpet playing nearby during the interview. That "inoculates" you a little bit from your error.
And frankly, you have to accept this as an error in judgment and learn from it (as I have done so many times in my career). You say that you had no choice other than to proceed with the interview. Frankly, that is never true. Move the interview someplace far away. Delay the interview. Go talk to the trumpeter and ask for 15 minutes of silence. Do anything...but don't record trumpet playing during an interview. If you just accept the trumpet playing during an interview then what you have is a trumpet playing during your interview -- forever.
Re: Trumpet sound in background... help! by Vince Sanchez on Aug 14, 2009 at 5:40:08 am
I do audio post on a reality type show and you never know what's going to show up in the background. I've had several instances where there is music in the background, so what I do is add some music from our library and i can usually mask the offending music. The ear is easy to fool. If you start the music a little higher in volume and then slowly ease it down, the listener will only really hear that in the background. It the way our brain deals with the cacophony that's going on around us.
If your going to edit this interview you're definitely going to have to do something as the background music will jump all over the place.
Thanks,
Vince Sanchez
Intel Quad Mac 2.66
AJA LHe
HD link
OSX 10.4.11
FCP Studio 2
Re: Trumpet sound in background... help! by Beamer Films on Aug 14, 2009 at 12:46:13 pm
Thanks all. Glad for the thoughts and info. Naively, I was hoping there was a way to isolate the higher pitch tones (again, I'm no audio guru). Vince, I'll give your thoughts a whirl, though. I was trying that initially, and it worked until I hit a certain point.
I'll figure something out and make it work! Again, thanks for the help!
Re: Trumpet sound in background... help! by Chris Poisson on Aug 14, 2009 at 3:00:52 pm
There's a new feature in Soundtrack Pro which deals with removing certain sounds, in the tutorial they are removing or minimizing a bird, go to the Apple site and look at the new features tutorials.
