Ever wanting to learn from a pro using iZotope RX on a real project? Well now you can. In this video produced by iZotope, watch as The Walking Dead's dialogue editor Doug Mountain shows how he used RX to clean the production sound of The Walking Dead to clean up ambient sounds like crickets, and make space for foley in the mix.
First he uses RX Connect to ship out 2 clips of production sound from the Pro Tools dialog edit session into the standalone version of iZotope RX to give him access to the full power of all the RX modules in the standalone version, rather than be restricted to the iZotope RX plug-ins in his DAW.
Once in RX you can see on the spectrogram that the crickets and cicadas have different noise profiles. Doug uses the Attenuate mode in the spectral editing module to first take out the cicadas and then on a second pass take out the crickets.
Next Doug turns his attention some rustling and use the De-rustle tool to quickly take that out before turning his attention to some mic bumps. For this Doug shows 2 ways of dealing with these, one is to use the Attenuate mode on the Spectral Editing module to successfully remove the bumps. As an alternative , Doug shows how you can use the Ambience Match module to take a sample of clean ambience form elsewhere in the clip and then selecting a section round the bump and rendering in the appropriate section of clean ambience.
Now Doug moves on to deal with a mouth click in the dialog and takes that out with the Mouth De-click module. Finally he uses Ambience Match to deal with a little bump tight up to some dialog.
Now he is happy with this clip Doug uses RX Connect to bring back the 2 clips into his Pro Tools session . Doug also shows that he had uses Ambience Match to create a fill track of the Cicadas and Crickets to give the re-recording mixer more options.
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Doug is an Editor, Re-Recording Mixer and Post Production Supervisor based in North Hollywood, California. He is currently a dialog editor with Warner Bros, working on TV Series like Fear the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead, The Mick and APB.
He has been recording and mixing audio for film, television, and music for over 25 years and in his Linked In profile he says “I am currently one of the leading authorities on digital recording and digital mixing technologies. I am a highly accomplished engineer specializing in system design for large studio operations. Along with my audio experience I am also experienced in most all digital media technologies. I have extensive experience with large Digital Asset Management systems and many file based media platforms. I am currently the Consulting Engineer for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.”