A COLLABORATIVE POST BY SAM BUSEKRUS
ASSISTANT EDITOR, BOOM BOX POST
Happy Tuesday y’all! This week I sat down with our dialogue editor, Kirsty, to take a look at some cool things you can do in Izotope. She uses these plug-ins daily so she has a pretty good handle on it! We took three different clips from our library and used various tools from Izotope. Check it out below!
Removal of a specific element
For the first example, we used a BG that had some birds continually throughout. I had Kirsty take out that bird element only. To do this, she used Spectral De-noise. In the image below, the bird sounds throughout are the “Christmas tree” looking parts where she put the rectangular box next to. All she did to remove these areas, was cutting and pasting the area highlighted and placing it in the area where the bird sound was happening. Simple right?!
Below in the PT session you can see the waveform with the bird sounds in the top audio file versus the file below with the rendered out file without the bird sounds!
De-hum
For the next example, we tested a different BG. There was a hum throughout which you can visually see in the image below. It is the horizontal line happening in the middle throughout. The hum is happening at around 2k. To remove this you will want take the De-hum tool in the box on the right of the image and move the circular target spot to around 2 Hz (we put it at 1902). You will want to play around with it to see what sounds the best. Also make sure that the “number of harmonics” is set to the correct number. We set the number to one because there is only one hum. Another thing to note is that we have the “Filter Q” set pretty low because the hum is pretty wide. The higher it’s set, it takes off thinner hum.
Here is another image showing the waveforms of the original audio file versus the rendered version below it.
De-noise
Kirsty used Spectral De-noise to remove noise for this example. First, because this audio clip has a constant noise floor which we want to reduce, click on learn to let it 'learn' the noise in this audio clip. Then it will give a suggestion number on Threshold and Reduction. You’ll then adjust the reduction higher or lower while listening to the clip to achieve the result you want for the scene.
Check out the noise reduction comparison in the waveforms below.
Helpful Tips
Avoid over-processing. Izotope can be very powerful. You don’t want it to sound too artifact.
Don’t try to take everything out. Keep life in the file. Make it sound smooth. Only take out unwanted sound.
Do small processing at a time. It’s better to go in small doses several times if needed instead of doing one strong process.