The only way to keep breathing off the audio is to not record it in the first place. Now, you can give yourself motion sickness by rocking back and forth every time you need to breathe, which also means you need to focus on WHEN you need to breathe, which is a pain in the ass. You’ve not gonna be able to do it. Not reliably anyway. I briefly tried this cause the mic I have sounds best if you're on top of it. Unfortunately, if you are on top of your mic, it records every sound that comes out of your mouth. Even breathing through your mouth doesn’t stop it, especially if you have 24/7 allergies like I do. Forget it. I breathe like a freight train, and I’m always congested. It’s also time to record Little Bitey, so now I gotta find a way to truly keep that shit off the audio. In other news, AVIA I is done. The metric was - I'm sick of fucking playing with it.
It’s time to play with the mic and input levels again
So, I have to play with the mic again, but I have more knowledge now, and I have sound foam. I spent the other day sound foaming about half my room. The cost of 144 square feet of sound foam was $110, and it brought the decibel level of the room down by 1. Uhhh….. all those articles that say – JUST ONE PIECE OF SOUND FOAM CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE are full of shit. I bought 48 * 3 = 144 pieces of sound foam. I got a 1 decibel room reduction. However, it’s just enough to move the mic to the side and NOT record breathing.
Now, here’s the conundrum:
If I’m on top of the mic, I get no room echo.
If I lean back or sit back, I get room echo, but no breathing.
If I move the mic to the side, I get room echo, but no breathing.
The trade-off is room echo VS breathing. The question you are trying to answer is how much echo can you tolerate for NOT having to debreathe every other sentence. Of course, debreathing and overprocessing also created echo.... So yeah...
What I did was I moved the mic off-center, sorta like how you’d place a headset mic. In fact, maybe I should have bought a headset mic! But I thought a stand-up mic would give better sound. I wrapped the mic in a piece of sound foam. THEN, I put another piece of sound foam behind the mic. Then, I reduced the gain (input on my computer) from 90 to 83. The end result is that I have a little bit of room echo and nearly no breathing.
And the minute you stop recording breathing, you have CLICKS!!!!! And no, I have no idea where the clicks are coming from, so now the audio has to be declicked instead of debreathed, but that’s easier and faster than debreathing. So, I just cut my editing time down by 2/3rds. And here’s the sound difference.
Little Bitey the old way.
Little Bitey the new way.
