Separate Audio Track

To begin the audio pass I separate the audio track from the video file.  There are many ways to do this, but I like the ease and speed of doing a drag+drop of the video onto TwistedWave.  The resulting audio-only file is saved out as a 44.1 AIFF into the same location as the source video.

Cleanup Pass

I do the cleanup pass in Logic Studio 9.  I have a Logic file set up that I drag each AIFF into one at a time, deleting the previous one.  The audio is run through a simple channel strip setup:

• Noise Gate / Silence areas in between words and reduces sibilance.
• EQ / Roll off the high and low end to give my voice more clarity.
• Compression / Some gentle compression to even out my voice and give it a touch of punch.  While most any compressor would do for this task, I chose the IK Multimedia T-RackS 3 model 670.

The EQ and compression stay the same for each file, but I will adjust the noise gate to compensate for differences between input levels, which tends to happen on recordings done across several days.

I manually edit the volume automation track to silence the areas where I took a break, made mistakes, said “uh”, etc.  Any plosives that got through are ducked here as well.

When done I bounce out the track, leaving “Normalize” turned on to bring up the overall volume.  The resulting AIFF is saved back into the same location as the video file, and I delete the original unedited audio track to minimize future mistakes