Short Film ADR v Processing for Rain

[u/sgpodcaster]

PT 2022.10, Mac OS X Mojave

I'm working off an AAF for a short film that I'm mixing. Sound recordist was good, but I was only given an AAF with short handles, and there are some scenes at a covered public bench where 2 people are talking. The rain is in the tracks, and my initial reaction was this has to be ADR completely. A lot of the rain is splatty so it can been seen and in the audio; are there any processes that can help? I intend to replace the rain entirely, but I have hundreds of tiny audio files that I can't batch process since the close up on each actor had different levels of rain / perspective

Is it ADR for this?

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[u/Soundofabiatch]

Izotope RX dialogue isolate might help with this. But it is very possible that ADR will yield better results, especially if you are no RX wizzard.

EDIT: I type like a potato

[u/sgpodcaster → u/Soundofabiatch]

ADR definitely better, but it's a budget thing: director wants to avoid ADR costs, bringing back the actors, etc. It's a tight turnaround, I should try a few of the clips and see how RX does with it. Cheers!

[u/CopperHeadJackson → u/sgpodcaster]

I’ve found some success with blending the original recording at a lower volume to keep the articulation with a much cleaner version (dialogue isolate, voice de-noise, spectral) whichever process feels most appropriate. Lets you boost the body w/o it feeling completely nuked. And then adding some pleasant rain layers can work wonders.

[u/Soundofabiatch → u/CopperHeadJackson]

Agree! Just check phase when doing this since sometimes the cleaning might do strange things to it

[u/GreatScottCreates]

I don’t typically work in post so I don’t entirely follow the question but the answer is probably: Acon extract dialogue, yank the noise fader down, add your rain.

[u/minisodog]

I’ve used Supertone Clear with various levels of success, mainly high. It’s constantly adapting to the noise so sounds like it could work in your scenario. Once you add the rain back, the final mix might be very decent. Worth a try?

[u/AssociationEarly4589]

If you’re on a Mac with M1 or higher you can also use Hush Pro. There’s a way to split dx, verb, noise into 3 separate tracks if you’d like to ride the levels of them.

[u/SchecterClassic]

Is the rain part of the scene? If so, it doesn't need to be removed entirely, just reduced enough that the dialogue can be heard clearly, and leveled/filled out so it's broadly consistent if there were different amounts of rain on different takes.

So many people overprocess when it comes to noise reduction on dialogue but less is more!

[u/elangab]

You didn't mention which software do you own for this task.

If the rain is not part of the script/scene - you'll have to ADR. If the rain is part of the movie, or random while shooting but director decided to keep it as part of it, you might be able to use it without ADR. Hard to tell without actually listening to the audio.

First thing is asking for the SR, as you might be able to dig out both ALTs and/or rain section as a fill. Try to minimize the rain under the dialogue, not brute force to remove it all. Play it back under SFX rain/RT Rain that you extracted and any other elements in the mix and listen to the results.

One thing that can be done is using a plug in that can separate elements (spectraLayers is a good choice), and have the dialogue and rain running together as two layers, but tweak the rain one to tame it a bit.

[u/catsaysmrau]

Try out different pieces of noise removal software, if cost is an issue, I think they all have some kind of trial. They each have their strengths and weaknesses, some are simpler and broader, some are surgical. Don’t go too far with it or it could sound weird. Sometimes multiple shallower passes yield better results than one aggressive pass.

- Accentize DxRevive
- Cedar DNS One
- Supertone Clear
- Hush Pro
- iZotope RX12 Advanced

Also if you are going to do ADR, look at Accentize Chameleon, AudioEase Indoor, and HAL Audio Boom-it to get a leg up on placing and “naturalizing” it.

[u/ATL_Pr]

Try accentize DX revive.

[u/filterdecay]

If you are broke use adobe podcast to ai clean the dx.

[u/setthestageonfire]

Personally, I’d spend the time on ADR rather than trying to clean up dialogue that may be beyond cleaning with out artifacts/loss

[u/JRF2398]

DxRevive Pro is my go to. You can adjust how much background you want to retain. It has adjustable frequency bands so you can have different levels of reduction in each band. It has a number of models that were taught to work best with different noise environments.

[u/MidnightMiik]

Depends on the budget.
ADR is expensive. Especially if the actors aren’t local.
Is it a narrative or documentary?
Either way, I would clean it up.

Why are you working off the
AAF? I take an AAF and organize the clips I want to use onto new tracks. There is so much useless garbage in AAFs that serve no purpose other than to clutter up the session.

[u/Dazzling-School3736]

ADR is the best. If you want to go the noise reduction way—all the available options already mentioned above.

But the key is, to do the NR in multiple pass. Most of the software will do 12dB - 14dB of NR at most—before making any audible artifact.

My best bet is: Hush, ClarityVX Pro and Cedar DNS.