How to Remove Plosives in FCP X Voiceover?

Hi there guys,
I have recorded a voiceover for a documentary, and the voiceover is contained in numerous small audio clips which I have loaded into Final Cut Pro X.

The sound quality is fine apart from one major issue: there are plosives galore, mostly when the letter 'p' is pronounced. For example, in the phrase 'this is a dangerous passion', at the start of the word 'passion' there is a popping sound.

I have searched the Internet for hours trying to find a solution to this riddle, but almost all of the tutorials deal with removing isolated pops - not pops which are occurring as part of the voiceover, and where a simple blade/trim correction will not work.

Any suggestions on how to solve this problem would be sincerely appreciated. I am enclosing a snapshot of a typical waveform formation in case this is of any use.

I am a near-total newbie, so please forgive my ignorance in advance.

Many thanks!

OOooooo... An audio engineer's worst nightmare! No quick, easy trick. Something like Sound Soap maybe. When recording VO work, you should always use a professional grade pop-filter, and test for proximity effect. Not sure there's any really easy fix for this. I'm not sure a compressor or EQ would help, but maybe. Compress it a bit, use an EQ to roll off the lowest frequencies.

AlexMaxim wrote: ...there are plosives galore, mostly when the letter 'p' is pronounced...

These can often be removed using Izotope RX3/RX4, but that is an expensive complex tool. You might be able to find a technician to do the repair; I don't know what the going rate is for this. Here is an example of removing plosive 'p' sound:

BenB wrote: OOooooo... An audio engineer's worst nightmare! No quick, easy trick. Something like Sound Soap maybe. When recording VO work, you should always use a professional grade pop-filter, and test for proximity effect. Not sure there's any really easy fix for this. I'm not sure a compressor or EQ would help, but maybe. Compress it a bit, use an EQ to roll off the lowest frequencies.

Yes, I was considering Sound Soap...I have no idea exactly how effective it is, so I am loath to spend the £60.00 without a better idea of how it works, but if it can solve this problem then it could be perfect.

I did use a pop-filter with an H4n handy recorder, but the proximity effect looks to be the problem.

Is there any way that the tall bit of the waveform can be somehow clipped?

Many thanks for this! Sadly the budget for this tool is probably beyond the project.

I have read that tall waveforms can be clipped ( discussions.apple.com/thread/2198102 ) but I don't know how to do this. Can anyone help me out?

Find the AUDynamics Processor in the effects. Apply to clip, then open up the GUI from the little icon in the inspector.
Then drag the 'knee' down so it catches the peak and reduces the gain.
Have a good tweak to get exactly what you want.

Peter

Many thanks for this kind tip!

Unfortunately, for some reason it was not possible to edit the sound levels dynamically (i.e. one frame at a time, so that I could isolate the peak).

Does anyone have any experience of SoundSoap? Does it remove plosives effortlessly?

If you used a proper pop filter, how did you get plosives? That shouldn't happen. Anyway, if I could get a copy of the sound file, I'll play around, see what I can do.

My mistake - today I realised that I used a standard microphone filter (the one issued with the Zoom H4n) rather than a pop filter. I didn't know the difference.

Thank you very much for your kind offer of looking at the file! A typical sound file is attached. Any guidance on how to resolve this problem would be sincerely appreciated.

Got it, let me fool around with it a bit, I'll post back.

Many thanks!

Try this...I did a quick processing in Soundtrack Pro. I also reduced the level to a more suitable gain for film, but you can boost it easily if you like. The plosive is still there slightly but the track is much more useable. There was actually a lot of noise prior to the speaking and then again afterwards which I removed. Spending a bit more time in STP would probably yield better results still.





EDIT: sorry, the attachment is now there !

Thank you so much for your kind efforts! Yes, there is a significant improvement in the quality of the clip.

I have tried Larry Jordan's tutorial on the limiter effect, and this is very effective in reducing the plosive, though not eliminating it. I am going to download a free trial of SoundSoap and see where I go from there.

Many thanks once again!

Free trial is your best bet. I can't touch this for a few days. Just had an Apogee Quartet blow up, kids have bowling championship out of town, and other fires that just burst into flame around me. When it rains is pours.

I think Sound Soap will do about all anything will do for this. You won't make it go away totally, just make it more easy to live with.

Hey Alex,

Plosives are a burst of air, usually from hard Bs and Ps, hitting the microphone capsule. The little foam cover for the Zoom won't do much unfortunately. A proper pop filter is a mesh that will diffract the air burst, minimising it's energy.

Compressing and limiting will not remove a plosive, as the 'pop' sound you hear is the air hitting the capsule.

A good trick is to cut just the plosive pop, and use a hi-pass filter on it to remove the bass, leaving the rest of the word unaffected.

YMMV though, and if you have a lot of them your results would be much better using a proper tool such as RX.

I used RX on it and you can hear the results.

Just FYI, for the future. This is the one we've used for years and love it.
www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PopFilter6DS

As Brendan said, it's just not that the "Ps" are louder, it's the sound of the air. So you need both level control and EQing. Even so, it's not gonna sound right. But you might get it to the point where it's usable.

If it's something really critical, and you have words with Ps and Bs that not cause plosives, you could take those and copy and replace (or blend) the ones that are plosive. This is a time consuming and tedious process though and has to be done manually. And also takes some audio editing experience to get right.

Pop filters, but also mic placement and technique are crucial to good vocal recordings.
I can usually sing without a pop filter into a large diaphragm condenser mic without cause more than an occasional pop. A good friend of mine, who in most other regards is a better singer and musician than me, cause very frequent pops even using a Shure SM58. He come from a live/punk background, I started my music career by recording myself.

That leads us to the sensibilities of different types of microphones, but that is a topic for some other day

@Ben B: Cool cookies. I agree that even SoundSoap isn't going to make this issue disappear, just ameliorate it somewhat.

Best of luck with the bowling championship! And many thanks for the superb pop filter recommendation!

@BrendanJTR: Thank you so much for this brilliant work! You have done an amazing job.

RX is indeed a wonderful solution. I will definitely consider it if I can't solve it another way.

Cheers once again!

@DmitriZigany, thanks so much for the kind explication! I agree that the manual approach could be very time-consuming, especially given that this is a large project with a lot of voice files. I will probably end up rerecording the offending clips with a better setup as having done some research on this topic I realise that there is a lot of other aspects to the soundtrack that could be improved.