4 Steps To Make Your Dialogue Sound Like It Was Mixed By a Sound Professional
You’ve managed to finish shooting, and you’re ready to start carrying out the last touches. What comes next?
Easy: now it’s time to make your audiovisual project sound as good as you possibly can. After all, audio is a tremendously powerful tool that can help your project be more impactful and really stand out in today’s highly competitive marketing. It’s definitely not something you want to overlook.
Now that you’ve got your project to picture lock, you’re ready to dive into the myriad of layers of sound design; however, before you recklessly devote yourself to it, it’s really important to become familiar with the basics first, and that means making sure that your dialogue lines are clear and clean.
If you don’t know how to do that, an audio post-production studio can definitely help you out. But be that as it may, it always comes in handy if you’re acquainted with the process. We’ve compiled a broad overview of the steps you should follow for this to be completed:
- Noise Reduction: removing unwanted background noises, such as cars or planes passing nearby and electrical hum
- Equalization: boosting or cutting certain frequencies to make the dialogue sound as good as possible
- De-Essing: pulling out harsh sounds
- Compression: balancing out the mix so that all dialogue levels and all voice lines sound and remain consistent throughout the whole project
The important thing to note here is that, on their own, the aforementioned aspects don’t always make a drastic difference; however, when they’re properly done all together, it allows your audiovisual project to reach higher levels of dialogue clarity.
Noise reduction
Noise reduction is literally removing unwanted noises from your dialogue tracks.
The most important thing to note here is that it also affects the quality of your dialogue. The more noise you need to get rid of, the worse the source material would be. It’s not pleasant at all.
The strategy that works best when it comes to noise reduction is to capture clean sounds on set. It sounds terribly obvious, but today’s “fix-it-in-post” mentality does more harm than good. While on set, make sure to turn off all electrical devices while you’re shooting. Aside from that, it’s also wise to test all sound gear at the location before shooting beings.
Equalization
Once you’re done with the noise reduction process, it’s time to start adjusting a few key frequencies to make your dialogue sound clean and crystal clear. There are three main frequencies you should focus on:
- 80Hz: anything at or below this point is normally disregarded, as nothing in this range is going to make your dialogue sound better.
- 250Hz: This is where the vast majority of human voices live. This provides you with enough space and bandwidth to do edits and apply other effects.
- 4,000Hz: This is where you add sparkle and brilliance to your dialogue tracks and where they really stand out.
De-Essing
The vast majority of today’s modern microphones are balanced on the equalization side of things, although they tend to have an “essy” feature to them: they overemphasize sibilant sounds like “shhh” or “ssss”. And when these sounds are captured and land on your dialogue lines, it becomes a highly unpleasant thing to hear.
That’s why a basic de-essing plugin is a must. With the plugin you can select the frequency you would like your dialogue to sound, and edit it until those sibilant sounds are less obvious.
Compression
Some audio professionals say that the biggest difference between an editor’s mix and something mixed at a professional audio post-production studio is compression. The difference is diametrically opposed.
In essence, compression limits the dynamic range of your dialogue lines and your tracks in general, bringing the peaks a bit down and making every audio track sound balanced in comparison to the rest of the tracks.
Although the information above is a broad oversimplification of how you should treat your dialogue lines, being acquainted with these aspects can help you get more quality irrespective of whether you’re working on your own or with an audio professional at an audio post-production studio.
It’s also a good idea to explore some plugins, especially de-essing plugins and compression plugins, and start trying them out for your next audiovisual project, but don’t overdo it! Remember: the best results always come from subtle tweaks, so be careful with the tools. Get familiar with them, but don’t ruin the work you have done.
If you feel like you’ve been exploring the plugins, making tweaks, but the mix is not getting any better, it’s probably because you pushed them too far. You can either start everything fresh from scratch or work alongside the sound pros. It’s worth it!
