Video Sound edited in Ardour

Hi there,

here’s 2 parts of an extraordinary performance that I filmed recently:


The audio was captured by two AudioTechnica large diaphragm condensers left and right at the stage (one of them visible in the video, top left). It went through a Soundcaft digital stage box into a Impact console, from which I got it recored into a Tascam DR70D. The video was captured using a Panasonic V777 camcorder. The mics did a good job on the sound, but they were too low on output resp. had too much noise. It’s not really disturbing but still it is there, the noise.

In Ardour, I reduced the stereo width, applied some EQ (x42eq), reverb (from the old LinuxDSP Black series) and multiband compressor (Voxengo Elephant Windows VST, the very best in my ears). Then I put the audio together with the video in Kdenlive, which was tricky as recorder and camcorder apparently had some clock drift (consumer devices, no SMPTE, etc.) – thus I needed some minor time stretching of the audio which I did in Audacity. The entire video was 1h15m, the artist picked those two pieces from it for being published.

Thanks to the entire Ardour team! You guys make things possible!

Best
DrNI

Really nice resonances captured and the throat singing goes well too. Thanks for breaking-down the tools used, both digital and analogue. Good to see Ardour deployed effectively and with lovely results.

thanks for sharing , great!

although the noisefloor in the vid doesnt bother me: the lv2 plugin noise-repellent is extremely useful to get rid of some unwanted noise, though you should use it very subtle with music and voice…

@calimerox Can noise repellant be used for cleaning up dialogue?

Mh, so far using noise suppressors wasn’t a great experience but I might try noise-repellent next time. Furthermore, I’d usually use rather expensive outboard reverbs, either Yamaha or TC. But this is part of volunteer work so I didn’t want to spent too many nights on it… I think for a real good recording I’d rent some Neumann mics and get the audio from the digital console via USB, so that no further noise would be added. Still, the two videos show that you can go great stuff with affordable gear. The Audio Technica mics are relatively inexpensive and so are the DR70D recorder and the V777 camcorder (compared to the “real stuff” such als Sony film cameras and the DR701D, both having SMPTE and what-not for a lot more bucks).

I might capture my favorite presets from the outboard reverbs using an impulse convolver, this would speed up things in the production chain. I haven’t found the time for this yet.

@ fathomstory yes I would say so! imo it s the first noise reduction on linux you can actually use and it s really good!

@calimerox I have tried to install ‘noise-repellant’ on my machine but it spits out too many errors. I will wait until it leaves the alpha stage. However, Audacity has the first noise reduction on Linux. ; - b