Thursday, March 31, 2011

Elimiate breathing sounds in voiceover audio with this handy filter


When you're cutting clean, well-recorded and professional VOs where the breaths are real loud and clear you can usually use the expander filter to pot out low-volume breath sounds instead of cutting them out manually.

Set the threshold at the level perhaps just above where the breaths are (they were at around -30db) you can use the ratio slider to move them down in the dynamic range so they're essentially inaudible. Then you want to set the release time a little long because otherwise you'll start to lob off the ending consonants like S and F and "Sh"

There is a reason why I qualify this as specifically applying to professionally recorded voiceovers and that is that in non-boothed or poor recordings the signal-to-noise ratio is low, or in other words there's a loud noise floor surrounding your lovely voice, and this filter will give you a different result in that case. You'll hear the noise floor coming in and out, depending on your attack/release times: no good for most uses. In professional recordings done from a sound booth, or with the microphone very close to the subject, your noise floor is reduced and this filter will be more effective.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Cascade windows on a mac, especially mail.app

Reposting from: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050519021838783

"In any program that has a 'Window' menu, you'll find "Bring All To Front." However, if you hold down the Option key after opening the menu, this becomes "Arrange In Front." Select it, and you get a (nasty IMO) Windows-esque cascading arrangement feature."

Very helpful in the case that you have a million mail.app windows open and spread across the desktop and variously sized.