SurroundByUs.com

I’m a location mixer for film and video. I was initially drawn to your forum because of my interest in surround sound remixes, like Dark Side of the Moon, but I joined the forum to investigate a different issue. I’m hoping someone here may be interested in helping me.

An editor friend sent a short and particularly horrific sample of a client’s “video diary.” It’s the worst: stereo camera mic at the beach! I was able to significantly improve the dialogue by abandoning the left channel, which emphasises the surf, and apply a little Sound Soap 2 to the right channel.

This got me to thinking. Can “slicing” be employed to target the dialogue, which sits a bit to the right of the loudest surf sound in the stereo field and draw out a mono track of that dialogue. I thought it might be a useful start before applying more conventional noise reduction techniques.

The sample is only 30 sec. Anyone interested in taking a shot at it?

I would just add that you you should listen to all channels of the ArcTan output. It might be that the surf is more of a common signal (thus routed to center) than the dialog.

Another idea: If the surf is mostly left channel it might be interesting to subtract the left channel from the right ( I would try both time and frequency (spectral) domains.

I have Mac OS 10.6.8. I looked for downloads for ArCTan, Spec 4.6/Zag 2.1, but can't find anything. Only a thing called Plogue.

Spec (which contains ArcTan) for OSX is here:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=216

You'll need Plogue first, from here: www.plogue.com