Help needed - slight ghosting on finished product

[kozikowski]

I love that it's an In n Out burger

That's not trick photography and the only Photoshop involved is brightness adjustment and fuzzing people's faces.

It is basic photography. Tell a story, provide context, put the viewer in the scene. Tourists normally wander into the public park and take pictures from there. My joke is about watching them elbow each other out of the way. Because the jet motion confuses smartphone auto focus, you usually get this.

http://kozco.com/pix/TouristJetPicture.jpg

You might well think this would be the perfect place to get jet sounds (dragging this back to Audacity). It's not. There is little or nothing between this park and the Docweiler Beach breeze, and microphone wind socks or shields screw up the jet roar. Trust me on this. After I protect against wind noise, there's nothing dramatic about the sound at all.

This sound recording thing isn't as easy as it looks.

Koz

[kozikowski]

I do have a beach/wave clip here somewhere. I caught Zuma beach with almost no wind once and whipped out my portable recorder.

http://kozco.com/pix/ZumaBeach-3K.jpg

What? You don't keep a portable recorder with you?

This isn't the first time I suspected the recorder was doing processing to "help me." In an earlier part of the clip I think I can detect that weird, wine-glass cellphone sound of it trying to suppress all that water "noise."

No, dear. The water is the show.

Koz

[cyrano]

"Hey Siri, can you record that girl in the red dress by the door?"

Fortunately, we're still very far from that kind of AI...

[kozikowski]

Hey, Siri. Go take a nap. I got this.

Koz

[ClaireJ]

My joke is about watching them elbow each other out of the way.

Harsh!

This sound recording thing isn't as easy as it looks.

No sh$t, Sherlock (do you have that saying in America?)

What? You don't keep a portable recorder with you?

Errrr....(whistles awkwardly and looks at the ceiling...)

No, dear. The water is the show.

Lol. And...Lol.

"Hey Siri, can you record that girl in the red dress by the door?"

Modern life has disappointed me. Where are the jet-packs we were promised? Sure, we stole tablets from Star Trek, but where are the amazing food-prep machines? "Computer, makes me an ice-cream sundae. Stat".

Okay, back to audacity....

Soooooo (sigh) I took this to a larger file and my question is quite simple: if a file to begin with has a Nyqvist ACX check reading of Peaks 0.0 and RMS -29.1, does that basically mean delete it and record because the differential is too great to account for the reverse correlation that takes place when you normalise and compress? It's just on the 20 minute file with those peak/RMS readings it took a lot of repeating processes to get a pass and I was thinking - this must be an example of a recording just not being good enough to master in the first place?

Thanks

Claire.

[kozikowski]

My joke is about watching them elbow each other out of the way.
Harsh!

It's not far off. I've seen a number of shooters lined up on the sidewalk jockeying to keep their neighbors out of their sight lines.

Peaks 0.0 and RMS -29.1

That's a gunshot.

Murmur murmur murmur murmur BANG! murmur murmur murmur murmur murmur.

You should be able to see that. View > Show Clipping. Red band in the blue waves or more than one? That correction may be a little extreme for Effect > Compression. You may be wanting Effect > Limiter. Limiter is the one that attacks high peaks and leaves everything else alone.

I'm assuming there is minimal damage and each high peak is not whacked off (so to speak). If you exhibit flat tops on these waves that's more like permanent damage. If you play through that segment and hear a crack or click, then that portion is permanently damaged.

You can try Clip Fix, but that doesn't actually put the sound back the way it was. It makes a good faith guess what the original must have been had it been there (to dip into the subjunctive) based on character of surrounding work, analyzing wave slopes, eye of newt....

If it's really brief (one of the spangles from your tiara accidentally touched the microphone), then you might get away with just magnifying the blue wave and surgically removing it. Not all errors need advanced programming.

If an entire segment of the work turns up red bands. You're dead. Time to reread.

Koz

[ClaireJ]

You're dead. Time to reread.

Yup...that'll be the one!

Thanks

[kozikowski]

And that brings us to the reason the Audacity sound meters are much larger in later versions. So you can see them out the corner of your eye and not produce works that are a forest of bright red overload lines or barely visible blue waves.

You don't even have to make out the position or value. They change colour. Some greenish-yellow when you're about right transitioning through the warm colours and flashing bright red when it's almost certain you've produced some damage.

It's an attractive idea to set Audacity recording and then come back in a half-hour to press Stop on a perfect product, but it rarely works like that.

Koz

[kozikowski]

does that essentially mean erase it and record

Not always. It is unfortunate if your natural presentation includes high, needle-like peaks in the blue waves, but that's not deadly. That can respond to Effect > Limiter whose job it is to squash those peaks in preference to the overall volume. I don't remember if Limiter is included in the stock Audacity.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/limiter.html

RMS - 29.1,

That's loudness.

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 23#p297423

If those relationships are too far off, you'll never get there. Fixing one can kill the others. That's why it's important to get close in the original recording. Too much processing is actually an ACX AudioBook failure. So no you can't beat your show with a stick and submit it because it passes our analysis tools.

The goal is listening to someone across the kitchen table from you, not a cellphone call.

I have a very quiet third bedroom and I have created several voice pieces that needed minimal processing to make ACX Compliance. One of them with the built-in microphone on my laptop.

Koz