Improving the sound
The breathing between sentences is too loud
Loud breaths are usually compression doing its job on the wrong thing: it lifts the quiet moments, and breaths live there. Cast lists them with the mouth clicks so you can remove the distracting ones — but removing every single one makes a voice sound synthetic.
A breath is not noise. It is the sound of someone about to speak, and listeners use it to follow the rhythm of a sentence. Take them all out and the result is uncanny before it is clean — the same effect that makes over-processed audio sound robotic.
What is worth removing is the breath that draws attention to itself: a gasp before a long sentence, a sharp inhale right on the microphone, a breath left stranded at the end of a cut. Cast marks breaths alongside lip smacks and clicks, so you can review them as a list rather than hunting the waveform.
The permanent fix is at the microphone: a few more inches of distance, or speaking slightly across it rather than into it, drops breath energy far more than any processing. Compression makes breaths louder by design, so a lighter setting helps too.
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