Mastering audio from live video recordings

[cryophonik]

Here's my task at hand/challenge for the weekend. A friend of mine plays in several bands and was looking to have some live video recordings turned into one 5-minute promo video featuring clips of the songs and members for one the bands. This is a band of seasoned players who are very tight, but the videos were made by friends or wives of the band members and are not pro quality.

I volunteered to take it on and just downloaded the videos. In total, there are about 60 individual songs/videos from two separate shows (about 30 each, with many of their songs duplicated/played at both shows). One show was performed outdoors in a park and was recorded with a DSLR with decent/acceptable audio quality for the purpose of the video, the other show was performed inside and I believe recorded with an iPhone and has much lower quality, quieter, lacking low end, etc. So, my challenge is to "master" the audio from these video clips and get them to match up as much as possible.

I'm a professional photographer as a side gig and I dabble in videography, so I know my way around the tools, but this is a new challenge for me and I'm hoping some experienced people can point me down the right road before I jump in. I typically use Wavelab with other plugins for my own audio mastering and have several DAWs that support video, and I typically use Final Cut Pro X or Davinci Resolve for video editing, but have never needed to do any major audio editing for videos (I usually make music or wedding videos and just delete the recorded audio anyway). I want to keep this is simple as possible, so I'm hoping someone who has dealt with this can offer some advice. Should I tackle the audio separately in Wavelab or a DAW? Or, should I just do it all in FCPX or Resolve, maybe using Ozone? Any other suggestions before I start down the wrong path tomorrow?!

[lfm]

To make promo video
- do video stuff first in FCPX, split clips into interesting parts
- maybe do same song with clips from different concerts, but have the best audio running over all those
- repeat for a couple of songs
- when you have full covered video render that and take into a daw that can extract audio for you to work with fix up level and some eq and stuff
- then just take that daw audio track back to FCPX and sync to that video

It's a bit like I do my time lapses, only video work in video editor and audio in daw running the preview video, that I just sync audio export as last step in video editor last.

Maybe use clips with best audio, as audio through the same song, pics can always differ and not disturb so much if quality is not the best all the way.

I have a range of live concerts with artist and some jump between venues they played the same song, but also bring the audio for each place over, can even be broken speaker quality
- this is disturbing to me, it takes you out of the feel of the main venue with best audio
- I don't think different video snippets matter so much if going audio is really nice
- it's fun to see how different venues they had on that tour

It would show versatility where band has played as well as show off just 4-5 song snippets they really like the most, or something...

[Benedict]

This is old so probably you got done but this is a common issue people face.

In theory you can do this in Resolve as the Fairlight tools are fine. I far prefer to do work like this in Reason as I know the tools really well, I am comfortable there which helps me focus on the program and not technical stress.

The issue you have is that doing Audio restoration without experience is often a recipe for making it sound weird. There is only so much you can change before things become broken. You may think it is better because you are focusing on one part like noise or thinness, BUT the reality is that the results are less listenable than the natural sound - makes less sense to the audience. Think of it like photo color adjusting, you can add a few kg of blue dye, and it looks dramatic, but it also feels wrong.

I discuss the background/mindset and show some examples here: https://benedictroffmarsh.com/2022/01/1 ... s-to-work/