Subject:FIxing ambient mic sound
Posted by: shobbs61
Date:1/6/2010 7:39:25 AM
A client brought us interview video that was shot with a camera mounted mic and has a lot of room ambience. Anyone have any tricks to help this sound better? Any filters/settings to try? Thanks. |
Subject:RE: FIxing ambient mic sound
Reply by: jackn2mpu
Date:1/6/2010 9:35:03 AM
Unless you're dealing with VERY distinctive voices you are out of luck. You can try a plugin like Bias Soundsoap that lets you take a noiseprint of a sound and try and filter out the background noise, but you'll never get it perfectly clear. What usually happens is the stuff you want to actually hear gets cut along with the noise, especially if the noise is broadband in frequency. Been there, tried that, gave up. Of course, if you have a friend that works for one of the alphabet government agencies you might be abel to get done what you want done. Us poor civilians are out of luck. Jack |
Subject:RE: FIxing ambient mic sound
Reply by: rraud
Date:1/6/2010 10:12:16 AM
Us poor civilians are out of luck. I've seen & heard miraculous restorations on TV. Fiction of course. |
Subject:RE: FIxing ambient mic sound
Reply by: plasmavideo
Date:1/7/2010 6:50:17 AM
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=3&MessageID=545526 |
Subject:RE: FIxing ambient mic sound
Reply by: jackn2mpu
Date:1/8/2010 4:31:38 AM
The technique that plasmavideo is referring to is basically a manual version of using a plugin like Bias Soundsoap and doing the noiseprint thing I referred to in my post. You can get some of the ambient noise out but you'll never get it clean enough for general consumption. If the noise is broadband enough in frequency you'll tend to lose a lot of the actual signal you really want. I tried plasmavideos routine and the Bias Soundsoap routine on a couple of videos my wife shot at the Jersey shore to take out some of the wind noise and the resulting effort was like listening with one's ears plugged full of earwax. Muffled and really gives a headache. Jack |
Subject:RE: FIxing ambient mic sound
Reply by: musicvid10
Date:1/8/2010 8:05:36 AM
I tried plasmavideos routine . . . on a couple of videos my wife shot at the Jersey shore to take out some of the wind noise and the resulting effort was like listening with one's ears plugged full of earwax. Muffled and really gives a headache. Just to be clear, the technique I originally posted years ago is designed to provide a little reduction in acoustic echo, and only that. Used judiciously, it might provide a "little" relief for the poster's problem (if what he refers to as "ambience" is really light echo and not noise), but definitely not for your wind noise, which I can say with certainty the OP is not encountering. If you don't understand the difference between negative feedback of an acoustic signal and broadband wind noise, for which this technique is not applicable, then don't use it, but certainly don't trash it. It's been in use for many decades, for everything from live event recording to intelligence gathering, and long before I adapted it for consumer daw use in the '90s. It is not a noise reduction technique and has never been represented as such. If the OP will upload a representative 30 sec clip of the audio, I will take a look at it and see if the echo reduction technique will help. I suspect however, that something like Izotope might have a more positive effect. Message last edited on1/8/2010 9:07:18 AM bymusicvid10. |
Subject:RE: FIxing ambient mic sound
Reply by: plasmavideo
Date:1/8/2010 9:29:55 AM
Yes, that technique is for ambient reverb, excessive compression in the original mix, etc, not for excessive "nat sound". I'm sorry if I misunderstood the nature of the original audio file problem. It can be amazingly effective on the correct type of problem. A posted sample would be fun to play with. Tom |
Subject:RE: FIxing ambient mic sound
Reply by: jackn2mpu
Date:1/8/2010 2:18:41 PM
musicvid said: I tried plasmavideos routine . . . on a couple of videos my wife shot at the Jersey shore to take out some of the wind noise and the resulting effort was like listening with one's ears plugged full of earwax. Muffled and really gives a headache. Just to be clear, the technique I originally posted years ago is designed to provide a little reduction in acoustic echo, and only that. Used judiciously, it might provide a "little" relief for the poster's problem (if what he refers to as "ambience" is really light echo and not noise), but definitely not for your wind noise, which I can say with certainty the OP is not encountering. If you don't understand the difference between negative feedback of an acoustic signal and broadband wind noise, for which this technique is not applicable, then don't use it, but certainly don't trash it. It's been in use for many decades, for everything from live event recording to intelligence gathering, and long before I adapted it for consumer daw use in the '90s. It is not a noise reduction technique and has never been represented as such. If the OP will upload a representative 30 sec clip of the audio, I will take a look at it and see if the echo reduction technique will help. I suspect however, that something like Izotope might have a more positive effect. My reply: Until the op posts a clip of what he has you cannot be certain what type of noise is being encountered. The description of the technique in question said that it was used to get an acceptable demo out of a recording done of bands in a bar, IIRC. That would lead one to think that it could be used for more than just echo reduction. Noise in a bar isn't just echo. And I never trashed the technique. All I said was I tried it on a couple of files I had with surf noise and it didn't work all that well. Never said it wasn't useable for anything, just that it wasn't for what I wanted to do. I'm a firm believer that just because something was done or written for a specific purpose that doesn't mean it can't be used for something different. Jack |
Subject:RE: FIxing ambient mic sound
Reply by: musicvid10
Date:1/9/2010 5:56:17 PM
"The description of the technique in question said that it was used to get an acceptable demo out of a recording done of bands in a bar," Oh, I worked with touring bands forty-six weeks out of the year, and we tried (sometimes successfully) to record demos on stage. That doesn't mean there were patrons in the bar at the time. I can see your confusion if you weren't around the circuit then. I only offered this as a spatial echo reduction technique, and not for noise reduction, since it presents no intrinsic means of differentiating noise from sound. I hope this is clearly understood. Message last edited on1/9/2010 6:48:30 PM bymusicvid10. |
Subject:RE: FIxing ambient mic sound
Reply by: plasmavideo
Date:1/11/2010 7:31:07 AM
I've used it successfully on a voice only recording made in an atrium that was almost unlistenable due to the ambient reverb and echo, and on a soloist at a church performance where the mic was placed too far back in the sanctuary and there was a lot of room "liveliness". I multitracked the processed file back into the original and adjusted the levels to where the blend was such that it sounded more natural than just keeping the processed file by itself. It does help on material that was squashed by to much compression and limiting as well, although I haven't done much playing with that aspect as yet. Message last edited on1/11/2010 7:31:58 AM byplasmavideo. |