Adobe Audition 2015.1 Includes a True Peak Limiter

Dialogue not loud enough for your film or video project? Using Adobe Audition? Good news! In the 2015.1 release of Audition, Adobe added a true peak limiter! This means that you can use the “match loudness” panel to make your dialogue audio loud enough and at the same time, not worry about the audio peaks clipping and distorting.

This is a great little timesaving feature. Thank you Adobe!

Sennheiser MKH50 Microphone Overview: Super Cardioid Mic for Indoor Dialogue

What are the best microphones for recording dialogue indoors? I’ve been using the Audio Technica AT4053b for a little over a year with very good results. But one of the microphones often used in productions with a decent sound budget is the Sennheiser MKH50 super cardioid condenser microphone. A few episodes ago we compared these two mics and found that there was no clear winner amongst viewers, at least when recording my voice.

But when would you want to move up to a microphone like the Sennheiser at $1,200 USd? Let’s take a closer look at this mic and see which circumstances and for which types of voices it works best.

Dialogue Audio Compression: Threshold and Ratio Settings

I’ve still got a lot to learn about dialogue audio processing and one of the things that has tripped me up quite a lot is compression. I often seem to struggle to compress the audio enough so that when it is loudness normalized, it sounds transparent instead of crushed, doesn’t clip, and is loud enough.

For web, the recommended loudness targets are -16LUFS and -1.5dBTP.

This episode is a little more in-depth and assumes you have already watched our previous episodes on loudness normalization and compression. If you haven’t, you can find them here:

RODE NTG4+ Shotgun Microphone Initial Test

https://youtu.be/ZGftygBBOhE Very excited that the RODE NTG4+ Shotgun mic arrived! I have just gotten started putting it through its paces and so far, it seems like a worthy upgrade to the NTG2.

A couple of months ago you all voted on what you wanted to cover next and one of the things you voted for was a review of the RØDE NTG4+ shotgun microphone. This is RØDE’s next generation enthusiast shotgun mic and it has a few interesting features:

- The + version has an inbuilt lithium battery that can power the mic for 150 hours - A re-designed microphone capsule (which I think sounds a bit more natural than the NTG2 - Electronic buttons for high pass, high frequency boost, and -10 dB pad as well as mic power

A full review will follow in the next few weeks.

I will be getting my hands on a Zoom H4n to use as part of the review because I know that many people use this recorder. Some found that the NTG2 didn't seem to have output strong enough for the H4n so I want to see if the NTG4+ helps with that.

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.

Dialogue Audio Post Processing for Film and Video

http://youtu.be/VcMOBrdbHgk

I always do at least some post-processing of my dialogue audio. I think some are under the mistaken impression that you can just buy a decent mic, record, and publish and you'll have awesome sound. That can be fine for quick-and-dirty videos, but if you really want good dialogue audio, you’ll need to do some post processing.

This is an evolving process as I learn, but this is what I do currently to get pleasing, prominent, good sounding audio that plays back reasonably well, even on mobile devices. For TV the only difference would be to normalize at a lower loudness (-24 LUFS).

This is what I do in Adobe Audition. This is a pretty manual process but gives you lots of control over the final sound. If you willing to sacrifice a little control for a quicker workflow, you can try using Auphonic.com to automate the process.