Isolating a Reporter's Voice from a Competing PA Announcement
Updated: Aug 13
A video production company brought us a short but genuinely difficult job: a few tens of seconds of audio that took several rounds of rework to get right, because of how strict the delivery requirements were.
Two voices, almost equally loud
The footage was a reporter covering the atmosphere at an event venue. While she was talking, a venue announcer's PA announcement — guiding attendees elsewhere in the hall — was bleeding into her mic at nearly the same volume, roughly a 10:8 ratio against the reporter's own voice. Because the announcer's PA speaker was further from the mic, that sound also carried a bit of room echo.
The goal was to keep the hall's live atmosphere while getting the announcer's voice down to nearly nothing — without touching the reporter's own dialogue.
Why it couldn't be re-recorded
The camera operator had been rolling audio but likely wasn't monitoring it closely, and this take had been approved as usable without anyone noticing how much the announcement was competing with the reporter. There was no clean ambience recording to swap in either — every quiet moment of the take was completely filled by the announcer's voice. It also wasn't something that could be reshot: a live event, gone.
Where the real difficulty was
Working primarily in iZotope RX Advanced, the actual noise-identification and separation work — distinguishing the announcer's voice from the reporter's — took the overwhelming majority of the time on this job. Both speakers were women, so their voices sat in a very similar frequency range, which made it easy for any aggressive processing to damage the exact voice we needed to keep.
The first pass we delivered wasn't quite there for the client, but given how much they valued the technical result, they extended the budget and timeline, and a second pass was accepted. It's rare for a job this short to take this much time — but when the budget and schedule allow for it, we can take on jobs like this that most editors would have to turn away.
If you're dealing with something that looks unsalvageable — overlapping dialogue, a background announcement that shouldn't be there, audio nobody can go back and re-record — the initial consultation is free.
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