I seem to spend as much time editing voiceovers as I do making music in Pro Tools these days and as someone who is coming to a very common task in Pro Tools but from the perspective of someone who doesn't have a background in post or radio production I've used my working knowledge of Pro Tools to find a way to approach this task without a great deal of insight into how the pros do what they do. If you are a dialogue editor, this probably won't be something you don't already know. However, if you are someone who is new to editing this is something I've found speeds up my workflow considerably.
Reducing Breaths In Voiceovers
One task I find I have to do over and over is to pull the level of breaths down. I've tried setting up expanders, with unsatisfactory results. Strip silence is too heavy-handed, the only way I've found which works is to clip gain them down one by one. This is laborious and anything which speeds up a repetitive task like this is going to save a lot of time.
I used to Ctrl+Shift+Mousewheel down to reduce the clip gain, it works well enough but I do find that if I slip sideways with the mouse while mousewheeling (is that even a verb?) you get multiple unwanted breakpoints - not ideal.
Clip Gain Defaults
Using Ctrl+Shift+Down Arrow is better, but as the default clip gain nudge is 0.5dB to reduce the gain by 3dB takes 6 actions.
In Pro Tools Preferences - Editing there is a user definable Clip Gain Nudge value. I set mine to 3dB which is very coarse but really speeds up my breath editing. If I need lower values I still have use of the mouse to change clip gain using the small clip gain fader available.
Do you have any editing tips you'd like to share with the community?