Hi everybody. I shot a performance with my digital Sony video Cam and had the camera fairly close to the speakers. It's pretty squashed, too much. Is there any way to repair that or am I just SOL?
Any magic plugin I'm unaware of? Thank you.

WSS

There are several suggestions in this thread:
 
http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=359240 
 
If I remember right (which may be unlikely) the latest version or Izotope RX has some kind of specific tool for doing this as well.  (EDIT: Just checked and there's no specific tool for this, but there may be helpful tools you could use with an expander.  Seems like you would need to do a lot of experimentation.) . If you don't own it maybe someone here who has it will run your audio through it for you.
 
Good Luck!

There are expander plugins, which conceptually do the opposite of compressors, i. e. they reduce the level of sounds below a given threshold to an even lower power. Mostly they seem to find use as noise gates to drop the level of unwanted signal (noise) to an inaudible level and thus remove noise from the recording, but they can function less agressively
 
http://www.practical-music-production.com/noise-gate.html
 
https://ask.audio/articles/4-tips-for-mixing-with-gate-expander-plugins/p2
 
 

Westside Steve Simmons
Hi everybody. I shot a performance with my digital Sony video Cam and had the camera fairly close to the speakers. It's pretty squashed, too much. Is there any way to repair that or am I just SOL?
Any magic plugin I'm unaware of? Thank you.

WSS

Rule #1 never using video cam audio
 
If you have no choice set the cam to manual mode and set the mic level.  Most default to "auto" which compresses everything no matter where you are in proximity to the sound source.
 
As for restoring dynamics to a heavily compressed source, I've never found anything that sounded good to my ears.  

Thank you gentlemen. I certainly understand the problems with video camera microphones and should have asked the sound company to give me a direct line into my hand held digital recorder and then sync them up.

I will experiment with expanding. I own wavelab so there's probably something in their.

WSS

I was going to say most times people use Handy Recorders at video shoots and only use the video cam audio as a guide when editing. Even video people don't trust the Camera's audio. 
But I'm afraid that sort of damage to audio is totally un repairable. 

That's what I was afraid of. I usually bring my tascam DR40 .
I have cleaned it up some wood with a limit or and some extra bottom 1.5 K and little high end.
WSS

Using a multiband equalizer is good way to recover transient information. I use vsl multiband usually although any worthwhile other should do it.

I was once handed a "professionally" shot video that had not turned out well. Two high-end cameras' microphones had failed to work, so all we had to work with was audio picked up by two home-video type handheld camcorders meant to be safety backups. Their video quality was OK because the lighting was good, but the audio was horribly compressed, while noise was amplified by the cameras' AGC circuits.
 
I did not have access to any restoration software such as Rx, but was able to employ two types of processors to help. First was a transient designer. At the time all I had was Waves' TransX. I used the multi-band version and concentrated on the upper-frequency bands. Today I'd try Meldaproductions' MTransientMB first.
 
Second tool was an expander. Back then all I had was the Sonitus Compressor with a negative ratio. Today I'd turn to Meldaproduction's MDynamics plugin, which lets you define your own transfer curve (as well as having just about every other feature a compressor can have).
 
Other plugins to consider (caveat: I don't have experience with all of these):
Fabfilter's Pro-G
Hornet CompExp (free)
BT ExpanderGate (bundled with SONAR)
The Dynamics module in Ozone Advanced
DMG Compassion
Flux Pure Expander (requires dongle)
Flux Solera (requires dongle)