I recently purchased Izotope RX and I am blown away by it's abilities to remove noise and hum and such from recordings. It really is as good as what people have claimed it to be!
However, I just finished shooting for three days on a TV drama in locations that were really the pits as far as sound environments for clean dialogue go. The previous soundie told me that had been the norm for the last 7 months of shooting he had been doing with the show and as far as he knew they used Izotope or a similar software to fix this in post. He told me he would end up doing nothing on set other than ensuring good levels and room tones and forget about the noise in the back ground (Highways with trucks, cars and motorbikes, air-conditioning systems, generators etc). This seemed rather obscene to me.
The question arose in my head: The fact that I know that the final mix chaps (chapettes) have the ability to clean up my recordings, would I still attempt to get as pristine dialogue recordings as I could, given the environment I was subjected to or would I simply sit back and be complacent and put my faith in the final mix noise removal systems? My conclusion: I would try my utmost and record as if there was no noise removal system in place, as I have recorded for the last three years.
Dont get me wrong, I believe that Izotope RX is a god send for those days where location is the pits, but most of the work I do involves my sound going to some other place (not my studio) for post work and my name goes with it and I don't know if they will be able to fix the faults that I know are there. It just seems to me that the technology advances have a spin off and the newer sound recordists emerging out there have a lot of crutches they depend on, instead of learning the means to obtain a good product that needs very little or no post production in order to sound good.
Comments?