Looking for references

I am looking for a postproduction facility to improve tricky clipped audio issues and overexposed/underexposed images...and which can offer reasonable rates so I can stay within my budget. Does anyone have good experiences with a particular company?

Thanks.

C.

www.plastercitypost.com

Call Michael Cioni. Let him know I referred you thru this site.

Dunno what deals they can give, however.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

Thanks, Shane.

edit: Never mind, we aren't exactly in LA...

- A Midwest Hoser

Where in the midwest are you?

deb

<<<tricky clipped audio issues >>>

That's one of the four horsemen that signal the end of a production. The other three are very low level, echoes, and white noise (rain).

I tried to rescue a clipped segment from an editor on the forum and I used all The Usual Suspects including the Adobe Audition Fast Fourier Analysis and Bessier Waveform Reconstruction. It reconstructed the sound waveforms as best it could, but the show never got any better than ratty 2-way radio or "aircraft" quality.

All these rescue tools are best when you almost don't need them--or said another way, by the time you realize you need them, it's too late.

Oddly enough, the best quality I got was switching to the wrong microphone. It was a multiple microphone shoot and the "wrong" microphone usually had far better sound than the one connected to the actor talking. What killed those scenes was all the performers talking at once. Does at least one camera have sound from the up-top microphone operated in Auto?

"Wave Repair," which is widely reputed to be able to cure problems like this, is actually designed to cure the opposite problem. Wave Repair (from my conversation with the author) is designed to recognize a vinyl record pop or click as not belonging and remove it with minimal damage. Apparently, he gets this request all the time and admits that the name of the program could have been better chosen.

Good luck. If they succeed, come back and tell us how it was done.

Koz

--Cinefile--

Oh, hi. Didn't recognize you. That comes with rapidly advancing pewter colored hair.

If you do find a house willing to take this on, send them the same clips that you gave to me. If they can help those, then you win--and do write back. That will suddenly become the busiest sound house in the country.

Koz

Quote
Koz noted:
That comes with rapidly advancing pewter colored hair.

Yours is advancing? Mine is receding.



Scott

<<<Yours is advancing? Mine is receding. >>>

The color change is advancing, but there are no other great changes. My hair comes from mom. Her dad died in his 80s with a totally full bush of hair.

I didn't go back in the gene pool any further.


So yes. Cinefile is the poster that I completely failed to help earlier with overloaded and distorted clips. I was at it for days and I could change the damage, but I couldn't reduce it. The only tools that have any hope at all of dealing with this need to recognize the characteristics of the performer's voice and put it back to normal when it becomes damaged. As near as I can tell, it's not possible to simply reconstruct the waveforms. They either sound muffled as the sparkling, lush vocal qualities vanish, or the harshness and grittiness simply change to different harshness and grittiness.

Of course, there is the additional burden that only one performer can be there at once, and somewhere in the clip, the performer has to be OK.

I wasn't pleased to find that the software package did what it claimed--it really did restore the mssing waveform peaks. The problem is the new work doesn't have a lot to do with the old work--especially if the damage is great.

You know how the MP3 process works by analyzing the performance and deleting stuff that isn't going to be audible anyway? That's the kind of tool and analysis that's going to be needed here.

Koz