In your audio certain letters, like S’s and T’s, have a higher pitched hiss
sound to them and this is called sibilance. It’s incredibly annoying to
hear in your audio and something that I’ve had trouble dealing with for awhile.
If anyone here thinks they have the perfect audio with no sibilance, I invite them to step forward.
Severus Snape. My audio has no sibilance you silly scallywag.
As you can imagine, I was expelled from Howarts after that.
All weirdness aside, there is a free, built in effect in Final Cut Pro
that can help you reduce sibilance.
It’s called DeEsser. So with your audio clip selected, drag the tool ‘DeEsser’ onto your
audio clip. This tool can be found in your effects tab. Compared to the compressor, which I’ve gone
over using in a previous video about voice audio, there’s not too many dials or knobs in this tool.
We have two sides. Detector and suppressor. Detector detects those sharp S and Ts based
on whatever frequency you choose. Those sibilance sounds could lie in different
frequencies depending on the person speaking, so you’ll have to play your audio while you
adjust the frequency. Generally you’ll set this anywhere from 5000 to 10,000 though.
You’ll notice down here we have this ‘monitor tab’. This lets us isolate the detector,
sensitivity, and suppressor so we can dial things in.
So let’s quickly run through the process. The first thing we'll do is start with the Detector.
Side note, your audio will play sound pretty quietly with this one selected.
S and T sounds.
Like I mentioned before, generally they’ll lie in the 5000 to 10,000
range. Then flip your monitor to sensitivity. The more you increase the sensitivity,
the more of that detected sound will come through and be suppressed.
Having this audio monitor up is really useful because you can hear the exact sounds that
will be suppressed.
So if I swing this in a range that definitely won' t have sibilance,
you can tell that that pretty easily.
Let’s find where the S and T sounds are most pronounced.
Right here it’s coming through the strongest I’d say. Also, you can see when any suppression is
happening because this activity LED will light up orange when you play the audio.
Generally a good point to set the sensitivity to is about half way, but once again,
it depends on the persons voice. Smoothing
will allow for a more gradual introduction of the suppression,
if that makes sense. Basically the minimizing of the S’s and T’s in your audio won’t be
so abrupt. So as an example, you can hear that with no smoothing, it’s very harsh. It quickly pops in and out.
Max smoothing you could hear that it was kind of picking up the rest of my words and we don’t really want that.
Lastly, we have the suppressor. This side will allow us to choose what frequencies in your
audio will be suppressed and how much they will be suppressed by. What I’ve been doing is using the
suppressor monitor to adjust slightly by bringing up the strength and finding a general frequency that sounds good,
and then I’ll switch to off to find what sounds the best for the audio overrall.
As far as I know, and correct me if I’m wrong any audio engineers out there,
you’ll want your frequency for your suppressor to be in a similar range as your detector frequency.
Okay so we went from this. To this.
I chopped up a small section so you can hear the before and after better.
Hopefully I was able to pass on some helpful tips today. If you found this useful in any way,
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I come out with new videos every week all about filmmaking and editing. Have a great day!