So I've been working on a feature film project for a few months now and I had to use Rx at my school to get rid of some really bad humming noises that were in a few scenes. I don't have Rx at home and the scenes that I worked on are little by little regaining the humming noise again. Is there anyway to stop this at all. It was why I used Rx in the audio suite in the first place, to create new files, without any of the unwanted noise. Do I have to buy Rx in order for the noise to go away, try to EQ the new noise coming in or find some other way to fix this?
2 Answers
Files don't degrade. Not like that anyway. Though I could see it being the backbone of a pretty wicked sci-fi story.
What's happening is that you're obsessing over the noise. The more you obsess, the louder it gets in your head.
Also, careful not to fall down the EQ rabbit hole. One touch here, leads to one touch there, and next thing you know you've got 5 Q10s piled top on each other, and you have no idea what you were trying to get rid of in the first place.
Sometimes there's only so much you can do with "fixing" location sound. The purpose (in the absolute utilitarian sense) is in telligibility. If you can understand what's being said, and it's not too ugly, you're good to go.
Then you have to move on to the sound design side and get into covering it up with more pleasant sounding stuff.
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I'm actually kind of intrigued by the idea of this in a sci-fi story...also, great answer. There's a reason why a lot of soundies (and certain astute directors) secretly cringe every time they see those "special spots" in their films.– JamesJul 28, 2012 at 19:44
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1all true, but wouldn't 'bit rot' be a great virus?– user49Jul 29, 2012 at 6:54
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@James, I was thinking of something along the lines of a Johnny Mnemonic kind of thing, except that everyone has had large chunks of their brains replaced with SSDs. What they didn't realise was that the chips start taking on organic charcteristics and begin to rot inside people's heads. And suddenly you have an entire population of Alzheimer's sufferers... dun dun dun! Aug 1, 2012 at 10:52
Building on what g.a.harry said above, and if you're the main sound editor/mixer on the project, I might recommend beginning layering in your BGs, if you haven't done so already. It's obviously different when you're part of a larger crew in a traditional professional situation when you don't want to A. step on anyone else's toes B. make someone else's job harder down the line. But I've been in your situation before, and I was focusing on the DX a LOT on the front end. Spent countless hours with C4 and Q10 getting this super clean sounding dialogue, and then ultimately, once I laid in my BGs, realized I could get away with having a lot more of the natural "noise" in there.
Additionally, I offer that depending on the types of hums, you may even be able to go back to your raw audio files and use notch filtering. This normally works for me, with the exception of grounding buzz. That's when I break out the RX.
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