Mike!
First off I can’t believe how helpful you have been to me these past few weeks. Editors don’t usually spend too much time with audio because we’re frankly not that good at it. You’ve been teaching me that it doesn’t take that much more time doing it right vs doing it good enough…
Now, I was wondering if you could teach me this. This is another example of the type of audio we deal with. Man in a crowd at a baseball game. We can hear him ok by himself, but if I mix a with with a bit of music, he quickly gets lost. Is there something to be done to this file to make him stand out more?
NBC appreciates what you’re teaching me!!! Or at least they should.
You could try isolating him with EQ and pulling him out and into compression to make him stand out and even dip the music at the same frequency range to enable him sit better in the mix. It should sound less cluttered.
Well what I like to do is if you’re editing in a DAW, send the audio of the man speaking to a bus channel. Then add a compressor to your music track and key your bus to the side-chain. That way the signal of the man speaking automatically lowers the music level. Mike has previously covered this in a video a while back, hope this helps: Sidechain Compression Duck Music w/Voice Over (Sidechaining) - YouTube
There are some quality answers for you here @Pendamonium. I agree, use EQ, noise reduction will degrade the quality of the speaking voice too much in this instance to be usable.
@Hot_Jazz_Chick has created a nice sounding EQ setting in her audio example.
Go and get Izotope’s RX6 Standard Audio Rescue software.
Can’t recommend it highly enough. It is expensive though so if you have the work for it, it will pay for itself in no time.
It should be in everyone’s toolbox for repairing audio.
The interface is intuitive and you’ll find it saves so much time.
On the Audio track @Mike I used FabFilter Pro Q2
in order to “see” the problem with the Baseball commentator.