Rescuing location audio

Vocals first, everything else second

Location audio is chaos. You've got traffic, HVAC, wind, random footsteps—the works. But the voice is why you're there, so we grab that first.

Once you have a clean vocal track, you get to decide what stays. Want some street ambience for texture? Cool, blend it in. Need it dead quiet? Also fine. The point is you're choosing instead of fighting.

Don't kill the room entirely

Total silence sounds weird. People expect to hear something, even if it's subtle. We usually keep a low level of the original behind the cleaned vocal.

It's a small thing, but the transitions between lines feel way more natural. Takes maybe two minutes to dial in and nobody asks why the audio sounds off.

The numbers

We ran 18 interviews from a doc shoot through this. 15 were good to go—no ADR, no reshoots. The other 3 needed quick patches. Compare that to our old workflow where half would've needed studio time.