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TeeKayCC
Inspiring
June 8, 2017
Question

Generate Matching Room Tone

  • June 8, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 4939 views

I've edited audio from a lot of situations, but sometimes we just aren't lucky enough to get room tone at all. I've had a number of cases where I manually went in and deleted audio that's over a certain amplitude to try to create my own room tone, and it's a very lengthy process.

The benefits of having room tone are endless. Having the ability to generate roomtone that matches your audio clip would be a huge bonus. Especially with the Essential Sound panel having noise reduction. Reducing noise is great, but sometimes you'd want to fill in the silence you've created with some natural room tone. Or perhaps you're shooting ADR and want to mix it in with stuff recorded live. You'll need room tone to put behind the ADR to make it match.

Another company's software suite has the ability to do this and it looks like an absolute life saver:

Ambience / Room Tone Matching with RX 5 Advanced Audio Editor & Pro Tools - YouTube

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    1 reply

    Bob Howes
    Bob Howes
    Inspiring
    June 10, 2017

    IF it really works then this could be a very useful feature.  No matter how much I yell at the rest of the crew to be silent while I try to record a minute or so of room tone, I'm lucky to get 10 seconds.

    However, on the other side of the coin, the age old trick of looping what you have does work--just put in a long enough overlap to cover any changes.

    I wonder if the "match room tone software is just an automatic looper?

    T
    TeeKayCCAuthor
    Inspiring
    June 15, 2017

    The other company's software can generate room tone from a clip where there isn't any notable room tone. You can run it over dialogue and it will come back with something. The more clean room tone there is, the better it is at coming back with a decent result, but it works either way.

    My colleague has been trying it out and is very impressed with how well it works. It might be enough for us to switch software, or use both (which is obviously less than ideal).

    ryclark
    ryclark
    Participating Frequently
    January 13, 2019

    Yes but the other company's software is rather expensive for just that feature if you don't have it already.

    However if there is no suitable room tone I have often generated my own during an audio restoration using Audition's Generate/Noise. Pick a suitable noise type (usually Pink) and generate enough of it a a suitable low level to cover your requirements. Then pick a small sample of original noise/room tone from the original file and do a Frequency Analysis on it. Then you can use Audition's Parametric EQ to colour the noise to match your small sample.

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