VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[cyclometh]

Hi VO-BBers- I seek some advice on how I can improve my editing speed by putting some of the more advanced features of my software to work for me. My primary needs are for editing long-form pieces, particularly audiobooks.

I'm using Cubase 5.5.2 and I generally will record individual chapters on separate tracks, then edit and export them individually. While editing, I keep a chunk of room tone on the clipboard and as I remove stuff I don't want in the piece (loud breaths, paper rustles, mouth clicks, etc) I replace it with room tone.

It occured to me that there may be a better way to do this by having a background track of just the room tone and having it play only when the foreground is silenced. That means that instead of cutting out something and pasting in and sizing the pasted audio, I can just cut out the pieces I don't want.

I've experimented with using sidechain sends to an FX or group track in Cubase to pipe the narration to a compressor that clamps down on the room tone whenever I'm speaking. This works pretty well, except that at points where I simply paused, the compressor still unclamps the room tone track as I can't set the threshold low enough to detect the difference between the "room tone" and actual silence- where there's no audio data at all on the narration track. This results in any part of the output where there's a pause in getting louder as the room tone is now doubled. If I tweak the compressor to avoid this, it sounds strange on the parts that it SHOULD be filtering on, because it's now taking too long to detect.

I also tried sidechaining to a gate, but it would only work opposite the way I desired it- gating the room tone when the input was silent and not the other way around.

If I can get this concept to work I can save myself a real ton of editing time- maybe up to 30-50%, so I'm really interested in any thoughts or suggestions.

Thanks!
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Corey "Vox Man" Snow
http://voxman.net