#1 gets my vote.
IMO it benefits from De-essing, (the ess sounds are a bit too strong),
and cutting the bass increases intelligibility, (as the air-con is bassy), at the expense of fidelity/gravitas.
There is a free Audacity de-esser plugin: desibilator (not real-time).
ToneBoosters have 2 free 64-bit de-esser plugins, (real-time): the simpler-looking one is sufficient.
Depends on what the goal is, but for pure theatrical voice quality, I like #1 even with the background trash. The other two sound pinched and tight…and processed. I know people are used to processed, cell-phone voice, but that doesn’t make it good.
Didn’t you say the most of the damage was to your voice, right? The guest got out relatively clean?
Also, this is a video interview?
I think you should try looping. You can re-record your portion in a clean, quiet room. It’s borderline magic but you listen to your original work in tight, sealed headphones and announce a couple of words behind into the fresh recording. Play the original voice on a phone or music player. It’s not important. Record the new voice on the computer. Don’t try to do them both on the same machine.
It takes some getting used to, but after a while, you can say your words consistently a second or two behind. It helps a lot that they’re your words.
Mount the video along side your repaired track, shift the track to get rid of the time offset and see how close you can get to laying the new words in in place of the damaged track—getting your lips to match up.
“Real” Hollywood looping is the actor sitting in a perfect studio watching a constantly repeating video segment (looping) and repeatedly saying the words until they perfectly match. In your case, that can’t take any more than a month or two, but once you master the simul-announce, you should be able to knock this out pretty quickly without too much trouble.
We are assuming you can find a studio to record in. That snaps us back to the original problem. A noisy room.
Koz
Alright guys, I ended up re-recording my voice, taking advantage of the fact that I am actually off-camera.
Coupled with video editing, all this is A LOT of work, it’s taking me almost a week overall.
Some would say I’m a perfectionist, but really since I’m only beginning I need to do all this just to make it half decent.
It’s going to be far from award-winning… but hopefully people will appreciate the in-depth amazing story being told. My post-production work removes all the horrible anomalies and distractions.
taking advantage of the fact that I am actually off-camera.
It would have been good to know that earlier. You would have been re-recording your voice three forum chapters ago.
Coupled with video editing, all this is A LOT of work, it’s taking me almost a week overall.
I had promised everyone that I would produce beautiful videos
You promised top quality work.
This was the real-time class. Now you have a collection of process and production tricks for the next show.
How are you going to record a two-voice interview next time? I don’t mean how to find a quiet room. You know all about that now. I mean any home performer can make one microphone work. Graduating to two microphones can be a major problem. Most home systems can’t do that. And even if you do record two microphones, they sometimes pick up a little of each other making post production processing difficult.
Koz
Well I’m not 100% content with my re-recorded voice either, it sounds off, because I couldn’t redo it in the same environment.
But I like to look at the bright side, at this point I’ve learned more than I was expecting about post production.
In fact I’ve also masked the background in the video so that the viewer can’t really know where it was shot - for all they know my voice is perfectly in line with the environment.
Coupled with video editing, all this is A LOT of work, it’s taking me almost a week overall.
I had promised everyone that I would produce beautiful videos
You promised top quality work.
This was the real-time class. Now you have a collection of process and production tricks for the next show.
How are you going to record a two-voice interview next time? I don’t mean how to find a quiet room. You know all about that now. I mean any home performer can make one microphone work. Graduating to two microphones can be a major problem. Most home systems can’t do that. And even if you do record two microphones, they sometimes pick up a little of each other making post production processing difficult.
Koz
I’m one step ahead on this one: I bought an extra mic system with two TX and one RX. I do have an interview planned with a couple, I’ll put the new mics on them, then the professional mic that I already have on me.
Also made sure to test them today and learn how to properly record so that their voices will be separated inside the single stereo track that the receivers outputs.
This will allow control over everyone’s voice in post production.
Next step will be to also get a professional video camera. Seems unrelated but at the moment I’m recording with Audacity on my laptop and I’m sure the audio will be even cleaner if I connect the RX to the camera - there won’t be a lot of unrelated electrical noise in the camera.