ADR advice

[alanlacey]

I'm in the process of having to repair a few faulty (mainly) voiceover areas in an edit and trying to match up the audio quality of my new recordings (same artist) with the original.

Does anyone know if there is there any software, edius plugin or something else, which will help me setting the EQ to the optimum settings? Currently 'earballing' but hoping for some improvment.

Edius 8 wg but I have Audition or SoundForge also. I've found online a plugin called FabFilter Pro-Q2 (a VST plugin) does anyone have experience of these filters or company?

Thanks

[David Clarke]

I found the dialogue matching features in Audition CC is great for lining up two takes, but had to match the EQ manually.

[alanlacey]

Thanks very much David. Lining up's no problem, I'd like to improve a bit on my manual matching of audio quality. My new recordings are very clean but the mike and ambience are different. Do you think Audition offers any advantages for this over Edius' audio EQ filter?

[David Clarke]

Most of the really good sound in my productions is done by someone else to be honest so I cannot really suggest what to do better in Audition apart from the fact that my sound guy, who also edits in EDIUS, says Audition is better for sound stuff.

[SoundFreak_HD]

If you can make make a few takes to get the sound similar to the previous takes it would help a lot.
Often the distance of the voice over artist and the sitting (or standing) position towards the microphone are the biggest sound changing factor.
Record with same microphone and other equipments in the original recording (if available)

Much can be done in post but your starting point must not vary too much.
If uniformity is very important you have 2 options;
If the total lines of all voice overs are not too much redo them all again.
If it would involve too much work, and you still have the original voice over source recordings you could re-process them all with the same tools and match them up all.

It often comes down to how well the v.o. artist is in speaking, if one speaks naturally like he (she) always does it shouldn't be that hard to match, if the voice was altered during speaking by the artist then it's much harder too do......

If the spoken words are too far off from the previous recordings no amount of processing can mask that, recording the right tone and feel is most important....

A good multiband processor will do wonders, wavearts track plug can do almost wonders, download a trail, they work full without limitations for 30 days.
Be sparingly with EQ, it often does more harm than good....

[alanlacey]

Thanks for taking the time to reply both of you. All good relevant points.

I've managed to get something pretty good using Audition, maybe luck but seemed to do a better job than the EQ in Edius.

Couldn't use the same mic or ambience, as the original was recorded in audio studio -all bells & whistles- tube pre-amp, great mic. My retake had to be on set, quick & dirty, with available rifle mic.

[PLANET TV]

As a sound engineer, Audition is a way better environment for matching audio.
A competent studio will often apply mild compression to voice-overs, making them sound more "punchy". I suggest pasting a short clip of each VO version
and tweaking EQ and compression until they sound similar. Ambience can be added but rarely taken away. Good luck!

[alanlacey]

Thanks for the advice 'Planet'

[rob stowell]

Even when you match mic and room, people can sound quite different on different days. I find with my own voice-overs, I almost always am better off doing the whole thing again.
OTOH working with a pro voice person recently, she re-did a wrong url in an instant, emailed it and the tone and attack matched perfectly.

[johannesj]

If it is the surrounding ambience you can take them from those older recordings but If it is the ambience from the vocal it is best to do the whole recording again or you can try some heavy EQ work on both the old and those new takes with a good multi band EQ to match them.