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.

Louder Sound with Audition CC

Many people, when they first begin recording and producing sound assume that if you get a nice microphone and camera, you can produce great dialogue sound straight out of the camera, no need for post production.

I haven't generally found that to be the case.

Without getting into arguments over what kind of gear you need, there's the reality that when you record, you need to leave headroom when setting your levels. But then when you're done recording, your dialogue isn't all that loud.

I typically use clip gain and compression to even out my dialogue audio clips. Once I've got it all leveled out, then I loudness normalize the dialogue. Then my audience isn't straining to hear the quieter parts or riding their volume control to hear everything.

Psychologically, louder sound also sounds better (a complicated topic that I hope to understand better some day). I don't mean audio that's so loud that its all crushed and distorted, of course, just, clear, present sound.

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.