best workflow to limit audio?
by wherewolf
on
Mar 27, 2007 at 3:58:21 am
When editing VOs where the talent's voice frequently changes from loud to soft (and back), what's the best and fastest method to keep the audio consistent? I've used blades and 4 frame crossfades in the past, but this takes too much time. Rubberbanding/keyframing is even more tedious. A friend showed me a trick using a compressor filter and a limit filter/then applying the paste atrributes to everything. This cut my editing time by a ton, but the compressor in FCP makes my talent sound like a guy doing local car commercial. Any suggestions?
Re: best workflow to limit audio? by rcPics on Mar 27, 2007 at 4:29:23 am
Do you have a good mic/preamp and compressor for recording to begin with? FCP's compressor is pretty basic and can work for some things, but you'll obviously get better results using higher quality software-based compressors in audio programs/DAW's or a quality outboard unit.
If you can only work with what's already loaded, you need to play around with compressor and limiter settings to get where you want. Some people just slap the compressor on and set the ratio to 3 or so...makes things too squashed most of the time. So you should really look into what compressors and expanders/limiters do and how to work with the ratio/attack/release/threshhold settings. Yes, it's still time-consuming, but that's what the work requires, and it's essential to understand these things for broadcast audio when you're tryting to prepare audio that'll play on a variety of systems....from full-on entertainment 7.1 surround to little mono TV speakers.
