Stro

[Greg]

Once again my life has swung from sorrow to joy. And it all has to do with audio. I had some bad audio from interviews of Michael D'Asaro. And who made the audio so bad? Me. But who fixed it? Me.

An Audio journey

I was getting ready to send  some more audio to a friend to fix that was even worse than the audio I already sent him. I couldn’t take the background hiss and static in the files anymore. Especially since one of them was the first bit of audio I heard as the movie opened. It wasn’t going to be a good first impression.



As I ran through the film again this morning, I heard a particularly bad spike in one of the D’Asaro bits of audio. It was full on static. I didn’t know where it came from. I was going to go back to the original files and see maybe I could find a clean track that I could swap in. I had some watermarked video but I was thinking I could use the audio because it was underneath a picture.



As I was going through the original audio, I noticed it was all really really clean. How could this be? How could I get the tracks back to the really clean audio.



Well, because I am an audio engineering genius, I realized that the good audio was on one track and there was nothing but static on the other track. When I switched from stereo to Dual Mono, it just doubled up the static track and mixed it with the vocal, making it a noisy mess. But when I doubled up just the good track, all the noise went away and I was left with a clean track. Pristine clean. 



Now, I had two interviews I’m cutting up of D’Asaro. The other was later in his life. It was equally horrible. I had done the same Double Mono and amplified the noise. But I was thinking it was a stereo track to begin with which I couldn’t fix. But, no. Whoever recorded it, recorded straight from the mic on one channel and the room from the other channel. Once again, I turned off the room and only doubled the good track. More good audio.



I am so dumb sometimes.