Audio editing: church

[Poy]

I was filming (DV camcorder) in chuch. Now I want to readjust audio (cancel room echo and and sound is too silent). What kind of method do you know? I am beginner with audio.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Garbage in garbage out.

Audio is really tough to fix :)

You may be able to kill SOME of the echo and certainly boost the overall volume, but the key to good audio is having good recording gear. There's really no way around it. A good shotgun condenser mic with XLR is preferable.

[krypted]

Maybe with a noise gate you can cut the long tail of the echo but the resonance over the original sound is hard to get rid off,some experimentations with equalizer and expander in a good audio editor would help.

[dosdan]

I do lots of church sermon recording. Here are two ways:

1. Take a feed off the tape out from your PA and feed it either into a MiniDisc recorder (small & relatively cheap) or attentuate the signal a a bit (line level is too high of a mic input) and feed it into your camera's external mic input (assuming it has one).

2. Place a small mic up near the pastor and feed that into a Minidisc that has a mic input.

I often use the MiniDisc's soundtrack instead of camera's soundtrack or I use both of them, syncing and mixing them together where appropriate.

I'm just working on a wedding now where I used a Rode Stereo Videomic mounted on the camera situated about about 1/4 of the way up the hall for crowd (the PA came through surprising clear - PA picked up with a mic that's not close to it usually sounds bad) and ambience + 1 MD fed by a Sony ECM-939LT stereo mic on a small tripod, behind the pastor & the couple being married, for the vows + 1 Hi-MD fed off the PA for the pastor and the hymns. I'll mix it down in Adobe Audition (a multi-track editor) but there is freeware around you can use instead.