Can I auto-duck 2 Dialogues?

[tylerm42061752]

Curious if there's a solution for this, whether it be the auto-ducking in audio essentials, or even a third party software solution.

I shoot a LOT of 2 person interviews with 2 wireless lav mics. Then I spend a fair amount of my editing time ducking/cutting the audio while each person talks so that there isn't bleed/echo from the other person's lav mic while only one of the people is speaking.

Is there a way to automate this process that I don't know about?

[Richard M Knight]

Have you tried using an expander on each channel?

[tylerm42061752]

Thanks Richard- I have not- I'm not super familiar with expanders, I'll do some research and run a test or two. Thanks for the pointer.

[R Neil Haugen]

That's a problem, sometimes made a little less problematic by setting a drop-off below certain dBs in one of several tools.

I know in one vid I watched on working interview audios, the audio guy had something like three different effects combined to work to minimize lower-volume "bleed" between mics. As each one doing a little gave a less irritating overall effect than doing more with any one effect.

And that was the way he put it ... the overall effect was less irritating than any one by itself. It mostly worked, and he could drop that "rack" on a clip and only need a few places to go to manual adjustments.

Neil

[Richard M Knight]

When I was a sound mixer this was all done manually using physical faders. More often than not the main 'presenter' was the loudest speaker so it was their voice that was picked up on the other mics. So the presenters mic was left at full volume and the other mics were pulled back when they were not speaking by about 10 to 15db. With practice you could tell when someone was about to stop or start speaking and move the fader accordingly. The latest new digital consoles have an auto mix feature that does most of this so it would have put me out of work!

If you're interested have a look at:

https://lawo.com/automix/