Using a Compressor in Pro Tools

Video Transcript

Okay, let's talk about a hot tip for dialog processing. Now, as we remember we sent all of our dialog tracks to a single bus, right. We took all of our dialogs into the bus one, all of our effects into bus three, four, and music to five and six. Let's go down to that auxiliary bus, okay. I'm going to be setting up what's called the dialog chain. Now this is one things that some mixers like to keep private or secretive, but this is one of the things I've learned when I started working with sound mixes in an analog studio, working with film magnetics stock back and forth and so forth in the mixing studio. I do the same filtering essentially, and I've just converted to Pro Tools. I take all my dialog, send it to a group of plug-ins all chained together. But in this case, I'm going to put all the plug-ins on one dialog auxiliary. So the first thing I like to do with all of my dialog is I like to go through and run it through a equalizer. I'm going to pick an equalizer, and this case we'll use a seven band e.q. That'll work fine, but I'm only going to use the top and bottom. All dialog needs a little bit of processing and band passing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a band pass and take out all the low frequencies that do not belong with dialog. Human speech only goes from around one-hundred hertz up to ten, fifteen K, so anything below that is occupied by rumble and wind, all the stuff we don't want on our dialog tracks. So we take care of that, we put that filter in. And then we, I put a filter on the very, very, very top. This is to get rid of mike noise, hiss, and those sorts of things, Back when I was working with sixteen millimeter meg, it used to be just a tape noise. So in this case, I'm going to be a little more forgiving, I'm going to actually put tha band pass up way high, I'm going to put it around fifteen K. So, as you can see here, I have a nice little curve, top and bottom gets rolled off. Okay, after that, I gp ahead and I put in an equalizer, I'm sorry, after the equalizer, I go ahead and put in a compressor. Now the compressor is something that, generally when you start with these, they have a built in band pass. Look at that, this one has a built in band pass in it. A lot of these compressor come in with nice presets. That's something you'll have to find out for yourself. But, basically the way they work is, they will limit the dynamics of the audio. So if somebody gets too loud it keeps it down and that's a good way of containing your dialog. I like to make sure that the dialog just kisses the compressor, and sometimes you don't need to put any compression on it at all, and the way we affect that is by the threshold. We want to play our track and we want to adjust the threshold so that it's not actually hitting at all. And that's an optimal setting right there. So, I've set it so it's just touching, and that gives us a good setting for our compressor.

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