How much clothing noise is too much to be fixed in post. I did a test with DX Revive pro, zero efforts were made to make it actually sound good or reduce artifacts, I just loaded the plugin and set it to 100%. DX revive is not your regular noise reduction tool, it uses a trained neural network to reconstruct voice elements and leave everything else out. It is a very good tool, works with multiple adjustable bands and has different restoration algorithms that can further improve the sonic profile. For this test I chose the “retain” algorithm that is supposed to retain the sonic profile rather than try to make it sound like a U87 studio recording. For this test recording I tried Spectrallayers, Supertone Clear, Izotope RX 7 but found Revive to work best in this situation, with Spectrallayers unmix noisy speech on a 2nd place.
My personal conclusion is this:
- It still matters very much that we do our best to eliminate clothing noise on set, as severe and consistent noise like this cannot be removed completely without introducing real HF artifacts that need actual work in post to smooth out.
- If the person doing DX editing isn’t living in the past, an occasional rustle shouldn’t necessarily ruin your day. It won’t take more than a couple of seconds to fix, and if the take was otherwise good, leave it be.
- A clear and open sounding lav placement with a rare occasional wind noise or rustle wins over an “OK/suboptimal” sounding lav placement with no wind noise / rustle
This isn’t a post to discuss AI or anything like that, just sharing my thoughts
