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Why don't we have noise reduction built into our field mixers by now?


Chris R

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I've been learning Izotope RX 4 for awhile now.  I can't imagine using something like it on location to be honest.  I first started monitoring on Sony 7506s and was shocked how many artifacts I missed with the phones that I use all the time in the field.  I switched to Sennheiser HD280s just for working on noise reduction and I could hear artifacts that I was missing.  This is in a quiet room with no distractions.  I strive for zero artifacts and if I go beyond that I back off until they go away.  Its too easy to be fooled into thinking something sounds better simply because the background noise is mitigated.  I listened to a video on the Cedar site that was demoing their noise reduction and could plainly hear some artifacts with my 280s.  I'm sure you wouldn't hear them on speakers but on headphones they were there.  

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Bernie touches on one of the most fundamental reasons for not employing sophisticated noise reduction processes in production. Regardless of whether we use the common SONY 7506s or any one of a number of other headphones for our monitoring, we are seldom in the proper monitoring environment or equipped with the proper monitoring tools to make the decisions necessary when trying to clean up dialog recording in the field. Through years of experience we learn how our monitoring in production translates ultimately to the theatrical screen or television (and now, of course, to our iPhones, iPads and computer screens) so we have been able to deliver the tracks that are needed to complete the project in the hands of often many others in post. I know what everybody is saying, "Hey, I'm on jobs where there is NO post production" --- well, that's all to often true these days but it doesn't make it right! Anything we can do to lessen the burden on the production sound person, convincing the production that it is an unrealistic expectation that one person can do the production work, the post work, deliver a finished product at the end of the day, these are the things that should concern us. The technology has enabled productions to streamline everything but one of the casualties of this is an overall diminishing of the creativity and quality of the product.

I somewhat reluctantly support the implementation of some of these new tools (post tools being used in production) for those jobs where there really is no post production, though I would hope that it doesn't continue to encourage productions to bypass the historical and proven methods of work. The other reason to support at this time is that most of these processes can be employed in typical multitrack production in a non-destructive manner.

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