Ways to work with less-than-ideal audio in your video edit.

Compensating for a Bad Mic

Camilo Castañeda applies the standard tools for basic good audio (multiband compressor, DeEsser, Parametric EQ and DeNoise), but in emergency surgery mode (the demo begins at 1:12):

A particularly helpful tip: Camilo suggests you “loop the audio” – by this, he means looping the section of the timeline which contains the audio you’re working on (to avoid having to constantly stop-and-start). In Premiere Pro:

• in the Timeline, add In & Out points (using “I” and “O”)
• go to the Program window > “+” > drag “Loop Playback” into the menu of the Program window

Room Tone

Deity offers 5 Audio Clean-Up Hacks For Perfect Sound, including specific plugins for removing clicks and pops, and perhaps the most useful “hack” of all – creating a bed of room tone:

Shutterstock demonstrates that Adobe Audition even has a dedicated device for generating room sound from any audio clip:

Also in Audition, Curtis Judd demonstrates how to fix audio clipping:

The Modern Filmmaker demonstrates How To Remove Background Noise In DaVinci Resolve 17:

Interference

DOD Media deals with a very specific, but very common, problem – RF (radio frequency) interference:

Processing checklist

And finally, Gerald Undone walks us through his audio processing workflow (for YouTube, but the principles apply to many other types of video projects):

Javier Mercedes‘ idea of fun, it seems, is to create a bad audio situation and challenge himself to repair it in post, using only the stock effects found in Premiere Pro:

Further Viewing

Of course, the best way to avoid many of these problems at the post-production stage is to get them right at the production stage, by capturing audio properly:

Audio School: Capturing Cleaner Audio

Get creative – a bed of “silence”, room tone, and ambient sound can work all kinds of magic, from creating the “illusion of continuity” to “adding to the story”:

Film School: Silence, Room Tone, and Ambient Sound

ADR – one of the most common “fix it in post” techniques is Automated Dialogue Replacement:

Film School: ADR