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Posted

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!

Posted

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.

Posted

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!

  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

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.   

Posted

What else is going on in the scene?  Maybe you would have an easier time masking it with another sound, a worn out ceiling fan, or a quiet motor humming in the bg to obfuscate the camera noise just enough to be unidentifiable?

Posted
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
  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Yeah, I've worked with directors who will move heaven and earth to use the production track, if at all possible. We all know, ADR is hard to get right, especially when it's emotional and the performances are really good.

Posted

Parroting the DNS-2 comment. I bet it would do wonderfully; perhaps a rental of the device could be the answer? With a Panavision budget, that might be within reason. 10-4 on conleec's comment, regarding heavily emotional dialog.

Posted

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.

Posted
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. : \

Posted

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.

 

Posted
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

Posted
5 hours ago, atheisticmystic said:

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

best

I was feeling low today, and that really cracked me up. Thanks, Steven.

  • 7 years later...
Posted

Hey all, it's been a good eight years since this topic was touched. Curious if anyone's found a particularly effective insert/software for removing camera motor sounds?

 

Context: Currently on a film with a fair amount of close ups (and camera) in quiet atmospheres. As others have mentioned, director would prefer to avoid ADR if possible, but if them's the dice then...

Posted

I haven't done post work in a year now and I also don't have much experience with mechanical camera noise... but I was pretty impressed by the results I got with Izotope RX9 (I think they just released version 11 now) when doing dialogue editing on a feature last year. Some new tools have been integrated over the last years since this discussion started and I thinks it's worth trying.

 

I found Dialogue Isolate to be pretty powerful especially when it comes to preserving the natural sound of the voice when applied resonably. I think this plugin rather looks for speech and seperates it from anything else as opposed to identifying the noise and then attenuate it from the speech (which also colorates the voice too much in my opinion). For me it usually works pretty well with NR up to 6db without much coloration.

With Spectral De-Noise you could easily let the plugin learn from a few seconds of only noise and then it kind of works like a spectral expander. But if you run the reduction to hard there's audible losses of fidelity in the speech and you can hear the threshold pumping.

I've also had nice results combining the two with easy to moderate settings. It doesn't do wonders and you always have to resist doing a little more reduction in order to not make it sound unnatural. But with well recorded dialogue it can make the difference between audible noise and little noise that noone will hear in the endresult.

 

That being said, RX doesn't guarantee anything and I'm always suprised by the capabilities but also the limits of this software. I wouldn't want to rely on the possibilties of post when shooting so it might be best to do some tests beforehand. If you get people convinced to do that...

Posted
1 hour ago, Olle Sjostrom said:

You should def try Supertone Clear. Supertone Clear
It's the best "CHEAP" no nonsense plugin I've heard so far. Izotope is bloated I think.
The other option is the plugin Hush Hush | AI-powered tools for dialogue repair (hushaudioapp.com)
Which honestly I've never tried, but the demos sound AMAZING. 

Hey Olle, thanks for the lead on Hush, I'll give it a try and report back. Supertone's Clear, totally! It's been a great addition to the kit (h/t to Jeremiah Moore for cluing me to it). Between that, RX (yep yep, @Sebi), and a few others it seems one can do a pretty decent job removing the camera's motor whir. Glad to hear about any other new additions. It's been a wonder seeing the recent sound isolation developments. 

Posted

De-noising is primarily a post activity, but I am very happy with the SDNX plug-in on my 888.  It's great for consistent hums and drones, but it's not so effective with clicks/scratches.  I use about -3db of noise reduction on the mix track and leave the ISOs unprocessed.  Most of my work doesn't go through audio post, so doing some noise reduction on the delivered files can be a big deal for those who notice.

  • 3 months later...

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