Hi there,

I'm new to this forum and to working with picture and I am trying to make some objects sound far away.I am currently trying to place a voice and some objects at about 10M-30M away from the camera position.

I first decreased the volume of the sound then I used an IR outdoor reverb and removed some of the low and high end from the voice .The result was unnatural and unconvincing.I was wondering if you guys have any tips on how you make this distance illusion seem realistic and are there any frequencies in particular which I should remove or add ?

Kind regards,

Shilshoolon

to impart the illusion of distance is a difficult thing- ultimately the clarity of the dialogue is the key issue- If it is supposed to be loud, as if shouted, sometimes a slap delay can sell the illusion- One thing that can be useful is an understanding of the Fletcher/Munson effect- which will basically weight the EQ to the 1k to 5k range- this is where a baby's cry tends to live- those frequencies, at least to human hearing, are very audible- if you favor them you will generally be successful- Otherwise depending on the setting of the shot, some sort of reverb may be useful- in an interior shot you might favor a chamber type reverb for a study or other large room, If it is an exterior- you might mult the track and with your second channel, lower the passband to less than 1k and delay it slightly- you can then blend the non treated sound w/ the treated sound to taste- lower frequencies travel slower, but have a larger amount of spl than high frequencies- the high frequencies will travel faster, but since they are typically at a lower SPL they migh not quite make to your ear-

there are indeed many roads to Mecca on this-


charles maynes

also use compression to create distance. Sounds coming from far away tend to be less dynamic.

wow you guys really know your stuff

Thank you so much :-)

The compression trick with the slap delay made a huge difference. I also distorted the sound added delay and eq which made it sound even farther. The one thing I did notice is when I dip some of the mids I get a very boxy sound which isn't very natural .Should I filter/shelf the extreme highs and lows with the mid freq dipped or just dip them according to the Fletcher/Munson graph ?

The Fletcher Munson Filtering is going to be to taste- as all treatments are-

Another thing that is fun to do is this- If you have a distant sound that still has a lot of dynamics, try setting up another aux with a broader decay reverb and put an expander on the input side- That way only the loudest bit of the sound will make it to the reverb-

It can be a pleasing effect.


charles maynes

I completely forgot about that! I always have expanders on my auxes so I can kick them in when needed. This is helpful for large interiors as well. For example, when someone is whispering in a cathedral, you wouldn't want all that reverb on it. Just on the peaks, maybe. The same goes for exterior shots with IR verb.
If you've got Altiverb try the "Distant building mics far" from the Biz. Park Culemborg set and put an expander on your aux, or insert it before Altiverb. This will give you some really nice, realistic outside slapback ambience.

Brilliant tips :-)

Thank you

If you get someone else to do it, is it "Fletcher Munson Filtering by Proxy"?

ooow, very nice one!

Thanks

I never would have thought of that one

This is a great post. I have used the reverb trick in the past but the compression with EQ was a good tip. I got the chance to use it tonight in a documentary.

You could also play the sounds through speakers and re-record them at the desired distance. They did that on "Cast Away" all over the place to make the ADR sound more natural.

I'd like to see mroe games use a "distant" voice pack for dialog - It would be nice to hear your enemies actually sound somewhat distant when they spoke rather than it sounding like the huge radio voice many people do.

i wanted to resurect this old thread to see if any others had suggestions to give some distance to to a sound. i have tried some of these, and though ive had some sucess, i would love to try some other methods... any ides?

Also, in this vein, i thought why not use a convolution reverb? one that is only the sound of distance, no room, no other effect. sort of world-izing in the box. then you could dial in wet versus dry to dictate the distance. (i guess you would have to create the effect in a large anechoic chamber, or outside in a very open space.) then, you could use a second verb or other effect, if you needed to further put it in a space. anybody have one?

bump

voice looses intelligibility with distance, because the further you are, the less details you hear. so, try decreasing any mouth clicks, esses, letters t, k, etc. try with plugins for transient manipulation, de-clicker and de-esser.

You can also try Princeton Digital Stereo Room plugin.
What you do is select short room preset, set decay and reverb time to zero.
After that you have the option of front to rear slider switch where you can select how distant you want the sound to be in the mix.
It works great

Once I had a problem with recreating a voice of a person that was on the other part of the room then the camera and was speaking to the side of it. Good thing that the scene was made in a house of some1 i know, so I took a speaker, went to that house, set up the speaker where the person was standing, facing the way he was standing then and recorded the dialogue form the camera place on 2 hyper mics spreaded about 1m poiting about a point that they ware crossing like 1 meter behind the target.

The result was quite natural but I had to blend in some of the original signal also (with a little of manipulation around lows and highmids).

If you have the chance, try it.

Im a bit surprised that no company has made a usable "all-in-one distance plugin" yet. So many great suggestions given here, that would be nice to have in one plug.
It would be nice to have, especially in post wouldnt it?
Maybe a plug where you could choose, both distance and surroundings, to match the picture.

Just a thought

Best wishes,

Mikkel

Ya, i have to completely agree on this. I was just thinking of simply making impulse responses for altiverb or tl space, or other convolution reverb. You could either make it in a really large anechoic chamber, or a place outside far away from any reflections. You could make several for distances. Then mix them with the dry to taste.
Once you put you distance on it, you could then put it into the verb of your choice to put it in the space. Could work!

There is a plugin which can emulate this -to a certain extend-.
E_REFLECT

Reflect is a reverb plugin, but with an independant Early Reflections/Wet balance.
Which makes that you can take advantage of the early reflections to give the sense of a certain room, without having to deal with the annoying reverb tails that mostly comes with it.

There is a setting "Close Mic" in the Post pro setting, and if you turn the rotary buttom to complete "wet", it will give you the impression that the person is at a distance. The beauty is that you can also automate the plugin, just in case he/she closes in.

Best regards
Fredo

right now, i can't recall any reverb plug that doesn't have automatable direct/ER/tail controls....

hmmm here is a suggestion...

take a compressor. compress it with fast attack (even less than 1ms) this is to make the punch go out of your channel and flatten it.

than take an eq and shelve it in the high frequencies. the more distance you want cut it in lower frequencies.
than ofcourse add a reverb to match the distance.

and finally,
if you want the region to be in an accurate place in the stereo image add a short delay of below 30ms and pan it to the sides with a lower volume than the dry region. this is calld haas effect and it helps you get the sound more focused in the mix.
on important thing: these short delays also cause phasing so you sholud be carefull with them.

good luck

Yeah, but there aren't many that allow you to *only* use the Early reflections.
For example, with Altiverb, it takes 3 settings (Direct/Early reflections/Tail) to automate such a sequence. Also, with most reverbs, changing the tail values (for keeping the ER only) will also affect the Early reflections.

Fredo

oh, i see. you mean, there is a knob that balances between ER and tail? if so, it could be usefull. i'm mostly too lazy to play with all three (direct/ER/tail), so i just balance between direct and wet(wet=ER+tail).

That is correct.
At full ER setting (counterclockwise) you only use the ER's without any tail.

It is always a PITA to -for example- balance the reverb when two people are speaking in a church. When they talk quiet, you only want the ER's and no tail at all. But when they shout, you want a lot of tail. I have not found a reverb that manages this easier than Reflect.

Fredo

Maybe this was already mentioned but I read that they played Tom Hank's voice through a loudspeaker out the window of the studio and miced it up from a distance for the movie Cast away. Seems easy enough...

Haven't tried it, but this may suit your needs to some extent:
http://www.wavearts.com/Panorama5.html

Also, one of the fisrt thingsfor distance is rolling off lows up to around 300Hz, and the his sometimes down to 3Khz.

Sonnox reverb has tail / er mix also

Matti