Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1279181
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 51 I'm not even a big football fan and I was very aware when this stuff was going on. Even for the NFL, which has had some of its well-known players on the wrong side of the law, domestic violence incidents, this was beyond the pale. A wanted murderer was playing for the New England Patriots for a period of time. EM: What would you say was the biggest challenge you faced on this project? JG: A couple of the interviews were recorded in very reverberant rooms and we were mainly working with camera mics. I had lavs for some scenes, but the recordings were so challenging to deal with due to the room reverberation. I knew we had a problem from the get-go, so when we first got materials I asked, "are there any other alternative mics for this? Do we have anything else?" We had a note from Netflix post- production coordinator Bill Gabler about this, so Lucien Palmer (my dialogue mixer on Episodes 2 and 3) and I ended up spending many hours going through two particular interviews, which reoccur in all three episodes. We would run multiple passes through iZotope's De-Reverb plug-in. It's one of these things where you have to be gentle. If you try to do too much in one pass, you hear artifacts, so we would do multiple passes to try to clean it up and get it to where the interviewees didn't sound like they were in a cave. In my experience, multiple passes will always yield better results than trying to do one setting and move on. It's time-consuming, but that's part of making it sound as good as it possibly can. We were about 98 percent successful in really cleaning things up, but it was a lot of surgery. The other 2 percent were a few lines where I still hear the reverb, and I just try to sneeze or cough when those moments happen. I hope they don't bother others who are watching. EM: One last question. Was there anything you learned while working on this that you wish you knew before starting on the project? JG: With iZotope RX Advanced software, if you're in Pro Tools and you look in the Audiosuite menu, you'll see De-Reverb, which I've used many times. You can either use it in the Pro Tools Audiosuite menu, or you can use it inside the iZotope software using RX Connect. What I discovered about halfway through doing De-Reverb on Episode 1 is that in RX Connect, I noticed another plug-in called "Dialog De-Reverb." I don't know how many people actually know about this plug-in! If you're just in the Pro Tools Audiosuite window, the plug-in is not an option. It is only available through RX Connect. That is something I sure wish I knew at the very start of editing and mixing this show. I remember talking to Lucien Palmer about it, and he said, "No, come on, there's no such thing." I said, "Look! There it is!" It's this whole other plug-in, a secret gem. This plug-in gave us substantially better results than the basic "De- Reverb." EM: Jeremy, thank you so much for your time. JG: You are very welcome. Football is huge in this country. This is a horrific story about a football star who had millions, fame, fortune, was seemingly living the dream life, and then he threw it all away. Jeremy Grody, supervising sound editor of Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez.