Interview room ambient challenges, doing things differently?

Question

I’m looking at some interviews to clean up the ambient audio challenges in either Audition or Premiere Pro, BUT it begs a question.

I was originally trained to eliminate ambient audio issues BEFORE post. That is, fix the problems on location like, turn off fans, AC/furnace blowers, unplug a fridge with it’s compressor going off and on, etc, etc.

I’m finding it increasing difficult to eliminate all these sounds. Recently I was filming in the only room available at a particular office complex. Visually everything was great, but we discovered there were at least 6 different sounds coming from some known sources (the office maintenance tech helped us with that), others we never could quite figure out how to eliminate the challenging ambience.

So in this ripened age of digital non-linear editing with a plethora of audio plugins, do most people just fix it in post now?

If yes, any tips or tutorials you would recommend to eliminate the ambient sounds? Thanks!

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted Answer

No good answers to this other than to close-mic as much as you can, which will have the added advantage of not having so much room sound colouring the mic output, which generally makes things easier, regardless of any other considerations.

Izotope in RX have a 'dialogue enhancer' which some people say is quite effective - if you can increase the dialogue level relative to the background, then by definition you've reduced the problem. Other than that, the judicious use of NR is about all you can do, as EQing audible noises out invariably affects the wanted signals too.

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