Silhouette Lighting Look Quick Howto

In some of my previous microphone reviews, I’ve used silhouette shots to take the focus off of me, and naturally help viewers to focus on the sound. In this episode, we quickly run through how to achieve the silhouette look with lighting and a tiny bit of post processing in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, or Final Cut Pro X.

Shooting an Interview

B&H Photo put together one of the most helpful pieces I've seen on shooting interview/talking head style pieces. The coverage of audio is a little light due to time constraints (I'd add that a cardioid condenser mic is probably the best choice for indoor/studio interviews) but great info overall.

What Have I Learned This Year (about making films)?

Dave Dugdale over at LearningVideo.com had the clever idea to interview several of his friends and acquaintances at NAB on what they have learned over the last year. Dave and I met up for lunch while at NAB which was not our first time talking but first time meeting in person. He's every bit as genuine in person as you'd gather if you've been following his site and YouTube channel. And if you have't, he's certainly worth following. I'm also honored that he'd ask me what I've learned this year!

https://youtu.be/p3GRZ2WWWiU

Dialogue Audio Compression (Slightly More In-depth)

Still have a lot to learn but feels like we've turned a corner and are getting better sounding results for my video projects.

Compression of dialogue audio requires a bit of finesse to be effective. While learning, I've sometimes ended up with over compressed audio sounding something like this: Audio clip with a regular clip control law compressor

So first, why compress dialogue audio? So that the purpose of your film or video is served. The audio should help tell your story without making it hard for your audience. It allows you to loudness normalize to the established broadcast standards or recommendations so your audience doesn't strain to hear or experience the pain of audio that is too loud or distorted. For those that will watch or listen on mobile devices with earbuds, they can hear your project clearly.

We've covered audio compression in previous episodes but kept the description super simple as a start. That approach is a good intro but sometimes it doesn't work out very well and your audio ends up sounding over-compressed, sort of crushed and un-natural. So in this episode, let's look at a couple of things you can do to prevent that crushed sound.

First, check to see if you even need to compress your clip. Most of my footage needs just a little bit of compression so that I can loudness normalize for mobile and computer viewing. In audition, loudness normalize and see if your peaks get clipped. If not, no need to compress.

Compression graph: Axes = input level and output level and threshold

First and most obvious thing: Don't use a crazy compression ratio. There's no way it will sound natural. I like to stick to 2:1 per pass.

There's still a potential problem: Compression is applied in a pretty abrupt fashion, right at the threshold

One solution: Soft knee where the compression is applied more gently over a span of amplitudes (dBs, or loudness levels). And this can result in a more natural sound.

Unfortunately, Audition doesn't come with a compressor plugin that has a soft knee feature. Adobe, that'd be a really nice addition. :)

However, Audition supports VST plugins (or on Mac, both VST and AU). Here I'm using Izotope's Ozone 6 "Dynamics" plugin which is a really nice, though somewhat expensive option just to demonstrate how it works. There are gazillions of other options out there, some free, others at a price. If you have a favorite compressor plugin with a soft knee and an RMS "control law", let us know in the comments below! I've also included a link to one or two free options.

Speaking of "control law", what is a control law? This is how the compressor knows when to start compressing. Most compressors work based on peak control. They watch for peaks that hit or exceed the threshold and then start compressing. However, another option is an RMS control law. Without making the explanation too complex, this is essentially a way to average out the signal so that the compression starts its work in a more natural way--its isn't so fidgetty. This can also help to keep the dialogue sounding more natural vs. a peak based compressor.

Attack - how long the compressor waits after the waveform has exceed the threshold before it begins reducing the amplitude (or volume in laymen's terms). For dialogue, I keep this quite short, 20 ms or less, often right at 0 to 5 ms. We keep this short because we don't want too much of the peaks getting through since we are trying to loudness normalize.

Release - how quickly after the waveform has gone back under the threshold that the compressor stops reducing amplitude. I often set this between 80 and 150 ms. If you set too short a time, you'll bet a pumping sort of sound, and if set too long, you'll compress everything. Fancier compressors have an auto release which tracks the waveform and releases at the right time adaptively.

Then we loudness normalize and set to go!

Remove Echo/Reverb from Dialogue Audio

Ever find that your dialogue audio recording ended up with a lot more echo, which is technically called reverb, than you remember hearing when you were shooting? It happens. Many of us shoot on location and you often get less than optimal audio. Here’s a look at two plugins that you can use in Adobe Premiere, Audition, and just about any other digital audio workstation app for editing audio to reduce that annoying echo or reverb sound and make it sound more like you’re having an intimate conversation with your talent.

You can’t always remove all of the reverb, but you can definitely minimize it in most cases.

Audio Hiss Noise Reduction

https://youtu.be/1lIjFBG6w58 Sometimes I find that my audio has audible hiss in the background. This is often what is described as a noise floor and is the hiss produced by your microphone, preamplifier, cable, or possibly other things. In any case, it isn’t an awesome sound.

In this episode we look at one way to reduce that hiss in your dialogue audio without affecting the dialogue and we’ll use Adobe Audition CC (2014) to show you how.

The clip with the hiss was recorded with a RØDE NTG-2 shotgun microphone, compressed and loudness normalized to -19 LUFS (since it was a mono file, this is the perceptual equivalent of -16 LUFS for stereo files). I hadn't really noticed this much noise in this mic in the past. And this was all recored as I'm starting to evaluate the new RØDE NTG4+ which I received a few days ago. So far, I'm wondering if maybe there's something wrong with my copy of the NTG4+. RØDE is arranging for an engineer to contact me so we can figure out what's going on with this new mic so it may be a few more weeks before we can publish that review.

Dialogue Audio Compression

https://youtu.be/swdCWYskbpA How can you get clear, clean, present dialogue audio for your film or video projects? There are several things you can do but one of the fundamental things is to use a compressor. An audio compressor levels out your audio so that the loudest parts are not too much louder than the softer parts. Once you have compressed your dialogue audio, you can then apply a variety of other effects and at the end, loudness normalize it so that it is loud enough for playback for your audience.

This is another case where I used my trusty old Shure SM-58 and Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP (audio interface) to record voice over. Not a horrible choice for that, I think. I use the real-time DSP compressor on the Focusrite so that I don't have to do quite as much work in post to get the voice over cleaned up and loudness normalized. Very old-school of me.

Avoiding Glare on Glasses: Lighting for Talent with Eye Glasses

If you shoot interviews or talking heads (or just about any kind of video), you will run into cases where your talent are wearing glasses and your lighting glares off of the lenses and distract like crazy. In this episode we cover a few quick strategies for reducing that glare. http://youtu.be/B_RJ7tViw2g

How We Learn to Create Better Film and Video

I'm not an expert. Sometimes I think my YouTube videos confuse some people into thinking that I think I am. That's a mistake on my part. I'm not sure whether re-branding is the right strategy to make it crystal clear to everyone that I'm just a photographer that's learning to make better videos and films. I do some professional photography work and some volunteer video work. But I'd just like to make it clear: I'm no expert--just a guy doing his best to learn and improve. Traditionally, before the Internet was around, most people that became good filmmakers had one or more mentors, people with whom they got to assist in person and frequently. The learning process works pretty well this way for most people. If I could learn this way, I would, but it simply isn't practical for me at this point in my life.

Now that we have the Internet, many of us turn to it for opportunities to learn about filmmaking in our free time. This is an opportunity that simply didn't exist 25 years ago. And it is amazing in so many ways. But it isn't perfect. One way it differs from a mentoring relationship is that there typically is not immediate feedback.

I've been posting videos about the things I've learned over the last several years and that helps me accelerate my learning in ways I could not have imagined. Thanks to many of you and your comments, encouragement, and questions, I'm a little bit better at making films today.

So what prompted this little soapbox? Every once in a while, someone shows up on my YouTube channel leaves a comment that does nothing to facilitate learning for them or for me or for anyone else that visits the channel. And some times people leave comments that aren't very kind, but that make me think and in the end, help me improve. In one case on one of my color grading videos, one guy that evidently does professional color grading himself suggested that because I said, "You can think of lift, gamma, and gain as your shadows, mid tones, and highlights controls..." Because of this, he suggested that I should clearly not be doing DaVinci Resolve tutorials. This comment gave me pause.

While I disagree on his assessment that I should stop doing tutorials, I did learn something from his comment so I'm glad he left it. Technically, I was not totally correct. Lift, gamma, and gain are a different from shadows, mid tones, and highlight controls in some important ways. So his comment led me to research this in more detail. Now I understand that lift, for example, makes changes primarily to the shadows, but also affects the rest of the luminance range to a lesser extent--sort of an elastic effect to the overall luminance that is weighted at the shadows. Same for the other two controls but weighted at the mid tone and highlight ranges of luminance. I'm not sure when I would have come to that more detailed level of understanding if he had not said anything.

So while it can be painful to get these comments, my hope is that I will use them to improve and learn. It would be cool if they were all stated in a constructive, considerate way, but I'll take whatever I can get.

And for those ridiculous, off topic, and rude comments like, "F*** you, blue eyes!" I'll just delete those and move on with learning.