VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Zak Miller]

[moved to CHAT 10-20-10 10:43 T—db]
I have been asked to remove the echo in a voice track from a video. I have some ideas on how to reduce it, but am looking for any advice or suggestions from past experience.
I know that crap in means crap out, but I have gotten some of it out with out mucking up the voice over too much so far. I just need to get that extra little bit out to make me happy.

Thanks in advance! Zak

[imaginator]

...i assume you've tried various settings with a compressor/expander/noise gate? bill campbell created a setting for me in adobe audition which i use on some of my voicetracks. i tried it once on a live "hall" lecture to boost the presence and it cut too much of the reverb so i had to undo it for that particular project. might be what you need. wanna send me a sample?
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rowell gormon
www.voices2go.com
"Mr. Warm & Friendly Voice...with Character!"
Rowell Gormon's Clogged Blog - http://voices2go.com/blog

[Zak Miller]

What I have done is by using EQ, reduce the freqs that pick up the 'roomy feel' and bounced the 'muddy' file. I then brought it back into ProTools and added the bright back in. It seems to work, and I have gotten the voice back to about what I would think is 90% on the good side. I sent it off to the vid editor and they are putting ears on it. If they decide it is better than what they have now I am done! If not, I will tap you for suggestions on fixing what I have done. thanks for the reply!

[Lee Gordon]

If you find a good technique for removing the echo, please share it with us.

Also, let us know how to get the toothpaste back into the tube.
_________________
Lee Gordon, O.A.V.
Voice President of the United States
www.leegordonproductions.com
Twitter: @LeeGordonVoice

[asnively]

Wow. That's tough. I'd re-record it. Less work. Send the script over to me and I'll quote them a nice price on completely echo-free voicetalking.
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the Amy Snively family of brands for all your branded thing needs.
Amy Snively
Faff Camp
FaffCon
TalkerTees

[Zak Miller]

So, I pulled some old tricks out of my bag and brought the audio from crap to 90%! The client called me yesterday evening and said everyone was blown away that I could make it work!

Here is how unpro these guys were...

About 1/3 of the way in to the recording you hear the boom guy DROP THE BOOM MIC! and then you hear the mumbling cussing and a small heated exchange between two people! All the while you can hear the lady speaking in the background! hahaaa

How did I do it...

The mic was way in the back of the room. This created a ton of low end room rumble.
I backed out all low end on the track with EQ. Added a bit of compression/and harmonics to squish everything together. Processed that mix. Then started to add a bit of mids and slight highs to bring the voice back to a normal cleaner sound. Each time I gained an inch, I processed the track and saved the setting.

Sounds easy, but it took 2 hours of tweaking to get 45 minutes of audio to sound like you were sitting in the room.

Lee, I have yet to figure the toothpaste out, but when I do you will be the first to know! haha

[asnively]

You are a genius!
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the Amy Snively family of brands for all your branded thing needs.
Amy Snively
Faff Camp
FaffCon
TalkerTees

[Zak Miller]

Why thank you Amy!

(I do however think genius is a stretch!

[Mike Sommer]

In short there's really no way to completely remove echo, because you're often removing the same frequencies you need. You can rent a Dolby CAT43 unit, or a Cedar DNS, the side benefit of these units is echo smoothing.

What you can do is make a copy of the track and set them side by side, and reverse the phase on one of the tracks. If everything is lined up, upon play back you should hear nothing. Then on the reverenced phase track you start reducing the the EQ in the upper mids and work out wards in both directions until you hear just the voice or the audio you want to keep.

This is no different then what you did. But what you can do is move the tracks a little bit to mask the echo effect a little more.

Then on the output master bus use expansion; this is the opposite of compression (Expansion is usually part of a dynamic processor). Think of compression and expansion as photography. Compression is like a wide angle lens so you can see the whole picture, all the detail outside the periphery of a normal lens (the echo in this case). Expansion is like zooming in on a particular subject; the voice of one person and not the echo.

In short:Expansion can basically thought of as a noise gate, as noise (echo) is pushed down below the dynamic range.

Set the expansion threshold level just above the level of the echo, then adjust the ratio to 10:1 or higher. This causes the output level to drop dramatically for relatively small input level decreases. But for loud sounds it will start pumping. But you can mitigate this with decay controls to make it sound more natural.

Another trick you can do, if you have volume animation on your DAW, you can set (ride) the volume to reduce the trailing of the echo even further.

Over all, it may never really sound right, which is why ADR was invented.

If you have protools you can use this handy dandy little plugin:
http://www.tacsystem.com/en/products/softwares/000563.php
_________________
The Blog:
http://voiceoveraudio.blogspot.com/

Acoustics are counter-intuitive. If one thing is certain about acoustics, it is that if anything seems obvious it is probably wrong.

[panright]

What's the expression -- "garbage in/garbage out' ? -- sounds like you did a lot of magic on that...
_________________
Perry Anne Norton VO
www.perrynorton.com

[Zak Miller]

Thanks man, the client was very happy, so I am happy!

Mike, Thanks for the tip on the phasing. I played around with it this weekend, and wow! Wish I'd known that last week!

[asnively]

That phasing trick is brilliant! I hope I never need it, but thanks Mike!
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the Amy Snively family of brands for all your branded thing needs.
Amy Snively
Faff Camp
FaffCon
TalkerTees

[bobbinbeamo]

Mike- Amazing info. Like Amy, I hope I'll NEVER need to do that.
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Bobbin Beam
www.bobbinbeam.com
blog.bobbinbeam.com