Climbing & Audio
I love audio AND I am an avid climbing enthusiast.
So when Top Tree Herbs approached me to edit their short documentary about climbing in the Ohio valley, I was only too happy to lend a hand.
The Top Tree guys, the Ohio climbers and the focus of the documentary all have a real and genuine community spirit and connection with nature.
I hope this was captured in the serene and gentle flow of my audio mix.
A large proportion of the dialogue was recorded with a rather harsh and scratchy lavalier microphone. This, combined with the rock face being close to a busy freeway meant the audio needed a lot noise reduction and clean-up treatment using iZotope RX 10 – the industry standard software for such jobs.
Most of the time the focus isn’t to remove background noise entirely, but to make sure the dialogue can be heard clearly – and that was the case here too.
Editing Tasks Included:
- Audio Clean-Up: Utilizing iZotope for removal of clothes rustling and overbearing traffic noise.
- Dialogue Matching: Some phrases were ‘franken-bites’, sentences stitched together from other sentences. Where possible it’s the audio editors job to fine tune these so they’re not apparent to the listener.
- Compression, EQ, and Loudness Balancing (LUFS): Fine-tuning the audio for a polished and professional result.
- Automation: The music in this documentary calmly flows in and out, ducking under the dialogue when needed before rising back up when the visuals take over.
- Mastering: Preparing the final mix to meet YouTube specifications.