Tuesday, 12 April 2016

How Can I Reduce Audio Spiking?


During the process of post-production, I have noticed that a couple of clips have some potentially permanent audio damage - it seems that the audio looses a vast amount of quality when a character raises his/her voice, proving too loud for our clip microphones (the boom poles manage to monitor a raise in voice well). For example, a prime example is during Chantelle's final interview, where she shouts about Jordan not apologising to her. She becomes angry and her voice appears to 'spike' - this method on how the microphone is too close to the character's mouth, leading to this muffled audio quality.

This is very unfortunate to hear, as it means to fix it properly, we would most likely have to reshoot, which for now is too late to do. However, I've attempted to research into methods into reduce this problem - perhaps not removing it completely, but reducing the audio from 'spiking' so it isn't as noticeable. Nonetheless, I came across a YouTube video by someone called Stan Arthur, who explains quickly how to remove and reduce this problem, which you can see in the video below:



After watching the videos, I attempted to fix Chantelle's audio problems by following each of his steps. The video explains that you should simply alter the audio gain and use the 'normalise all peaks to:' tool, in which he recommends to set the peaks to -3dB. Nonetheless, after applying this to Chantelle's audio, it appeared that the spiking can still be heard, so I eventually reduced the peaks to -8dB. This appeared to be the best level that reduce the audio spiking the most without making the rest of the clip seem quieter in comparison to the others.




Below you can see how the levels of the audio drops when you alter the peaks:

Original Clip. As you can see, the graph raises as her voice raises



Edited audio levels - you can see how the levels have dropped and the range is
now much smaller before the lowest and highest frequencies. 

Conclusion


To conclude, this quick method did help to reduce the audio spiking, however it didn't remove the problem completely like I expected. However, by finding out about this 'audio gain' tool, I've now used this tool to an advantage to make sure all the levels throughout the timeline are matching - they have roughly the same high and low peaks, so that whilst watching DownStage, we don't have any difficulties with audio being too quiet or too loud at some points. Nonetheless, this has been a great learning curve for my next production - it is crucial to make sure that the sound operators don't let this level spike to cause problems such as these.

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