Hmm.....

Most of the sounds you are talking about are basically noise, which is why you won't find charts related to them. And noise invariably has a pretty wide bandwidth, which is why you generally can't EQ it out, and why Audition has a Noise Reduction (NR) plugin. But Audition's NR only works effectively on continuous noise, which can be profiled and effectively decorrelated. You'll almost certainly notice the effect of it though, and you probably won't like it over a long period of time.

But things like car horns can quite often be removed or reduced quite effectively - you just locate them in Audition's Spectral View (they are all different, but are still easy to spot), lasso them, and heal them out.

But none of this really addesses the real issue here. You say you are doing low budget production - well that's fine, but that doesn't mean your techniques have to be low budget, does it? What you'd be far better off Googling for would be sensible information about how to record location sound effectively - which has nothing at all to do with your budget (apart from you'll need a mic on a boom pole) and everything to do with technique. To do this effectively requires your sound guy and camera operator working as a team - that way one gets good pictures, and the other gets the boom mic as close as possible to the action. Because absolutely the best way around most of the problems you are almost certainly experiencing is to fix them at source.

I spent a long time working on low-budget sound back whenever, and I know first-hand what happens. And I also know that it's pretty much curable... especially now, as even low budget equipment is way better than some of the pro stuff back then, certainly in sound terms.

I think he has to walk before he can run! And it remains resolutely true that you should fix these things at source if you can, and you learn to do that first. Fixing it in post should only be for when you're desperate.

Glitchdog wrote:

 

Took a location sound workshop at NAB this year. I was suprised the audio guy did not recommend using a shotgun (even on a boom pole) indoors. Apparently they use lavs almost exclusively indoors. Had never heard that before. Said it has something to do with reflective sound challenges, if I understood correctly.

If you can get away with it, lavs are generally better, simply because you can get closer to the sound source - and it makes it easier for the camera operator, who isn't dodging a boom pole all the time. I suppose the idea is that if you're shooting indoors, you've planned it and therefore you can get the lav on whoever it is you're shooting.