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Removing Panavision 35mm mechanical sound?


jgbsound

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Howdy everyone,

Soooo, I'm still working on that WWII movie and am pretty close to completing. however, I just hit a scene with some extreme closeups and I can hear the camera's motor/film sound pretty well.  I seem to remember back in film school they used a blimp/barney to dampen the sound but I'm pretty sure they didn't use one on the shoot.

I've created (more like hacked together) some Room Tone so I can cut in and out between dialog bits, but it feels clunky.  Then I got thinking about it more and was wondering what the big post guys do when they want to remove the camera's mechanical sound?  

Short of ADR which I suspect the director would probably not be into because the performances are really good -- plus there's nothing really wrong with the sound other than the camera sound.  I did try some BNR (iZotope's RX5) and that helped a little.

I don't normally edit films shot on film so this is new to me.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

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Film camera noise is very tough to deal with electronically--as you've heard it is pretty broad band.  I'd encourage you to keep chipping away at it in Izo since you have and know it.  Are you getting a buzzy kind of sound, or can you really hear the perfs going by?  If the latter you might also experiment with declicking.  We used to be able to dial a bit of camera noise out with the old UREI "Little Dipper" parametric EQ, used gently, so an EQ plug that can get very steep and deep might be helpful.  If you get desperate, I'd email a sample to the dudes @ Cedar Audio in the UK--they have helped me on some really gnarly scenes in docs many times.

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Hi Phil,

I'm hearing the actual mechanical sound of the film sprockets. It's not a constant hum which would be easier to remove since RX5 really works well with steady state background noise.  I'll give declicking a try.  I hadn't thought about that.  

Thanks!

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  • 4 weeks later...

If the performances are really good you could just leave it in. Sometimes the processing can take away from the performance. There's a great scene in The Ides of March where George Clooney and Ryan Gosling are talking in the back of a restaurant really quietly and menacing. During the whole scene you can hear the camera rolling if you're paying attention to that sort of thing. Most people never notice that kind of sound since it is so consistent. I'm sure there's more examples out there.   

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Gee, call me crazy, but if they can afford Panavision cameras and shooting on 35mm negative, then they should be able to afford ADR.

Well, maybe they can afford it, but simply don't want it. I can understand that. Really good performances can be difficult to recreate in the sterility of an ADR studio
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  • 2 weeks later...

My Cedar comment was not re DNS2, which is kind of a dumbed-down Cedar by audio post standards.  I've generally found that what Cedar can do themselves on their own in-house proprietary systems exceeds any NR I've ever heard Cedar users be able to do.  RE ADR vs compromised location sound and actor perfs, I too have found that directors usually really want the location sound to work, and I usually agree.

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On 10/8/2016 at 3:22 PM, Philip Perkins said:

My Cedar comment was not re DNS2, which is kind of a dumbed-down Cedar by audio post standards.  I've generally found that what Cedar can do themselves on their own in-house proprietary systems exceeds any NR I've ever heard Cedar users be able to do.  RE ADR vs compromised location sound and actor perfs, I too have found that directors usually really want the location sound to work, and I usually agree.

Interesting. I didn't know that Cedar would work on files with problems, if that's what I am to understand. I imagine this is a fairly costly service, (but that's always relative to each different perspective, too). 

On 10/9/2016 at 0:26 AM, atheisticmystic said:

Seems like True Detective had a load of camera noise...or was I halunicating again ?

best

 

Sucks to just hallucinate camera noise, when there are so many other better things to hallucinate. : \

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No, actually Cedar Resto has always been very reasonably priced, and pretty fast.  They are great about doing a short sample of what they are able to do, so I can take that back to the director and see if they want to go ahead.  The price isn't free but it isn't ultra high either, esp for a must have line in a doc.

 

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On 10/11/2016 at 8:37 AM, Rachel Cameron said:

Interesting. I didn't know that Cedar would work on files with problems, if that's what I am to understand. I imagine this is a fairly costly service, (but that's always relative to each different perspective, too). 

Sucks to just hallucinate camera noise, when there are so many other better things to hallucinate. : \

Touché, Rachel; trite and pedestrian is no way to be psychotic...I'll up my dose.

best

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