Client: Various
Project: Audio repair
Audio engineer: Asgard Mendizábal
 

Two of the main problems that an audio engineer fronts while working a tv show, a documentary or any audiovisual that includes interviews, is the ambient and the recording operator's skills and disposition.

 

Sometimes the producer choices an accurate place without background noise, but obviously it's impossible to control incoming calls or that dummy that came in hitting the door.

 

Sometimes, after a great interview, at the end of it, the interviewee (a little sorry about it), asks if it wasn't a problem that the mic fell off a little into his shirt since the beginning. Of course the recording operator denies everthing, even when you are hearing pops and clothes rasping all over the audio when you check it.

 

Sometimes you have to do the trailer of a tv show, but you have to work with the mixed track.

 

Anyway, the audio engineer has to work with that awful audio and if it still listens awful at the end, he is the one to blame.

 

This week I had to work with that kind of recordings. On some cases I could fix the problem. Here I chose a few examples (before and after).

This time I will not describe the process, instead I'll only do an observation that any producer/director should have in mind if he really wants a professional product: audio has a lot more restrictions that an image when it comes to fixing problems.

 

A static image can be cloned, not a voice. You can matte an image, but you cannot extract something from a mixed audio track. You can record video aspects again; a passionate and interesting interview is hard to repeat. You can fix details like my examples, but it isn't always possible, it depends on the kind of sound interrupting, the intensity, the frequency, the voice volume, its tone and a long list of variables and its combinations. What's the problem with doing everything right since the beginning? Why don't you keep a backup of the voice track? When have you seen an HBO documentary or making of that sounds bad?

 

I was attonished the first minutes I saw Doin' it in the park, a documentary about street ball in New York produced by Bobbito García and Kevin Couliau. All of it was recorded guerrilla style and check out the audio, all of it (if you are lazy, you can see the movie trailer down here). The interviews are placed on parks and street courts with basketball games behind them: people yelling, aluminum boards, cars passing by, balls bouncing everywhere and none of them, ever, are over the voice. Pff.