bad feedback noise obscuring speaker - how to remove?

cleaning noise
Posted by: bunnystyal (IP Logged)
Date: April 22, 2007 04:40PM

i got these audio files but theres an annoying sound in the background!is there a way to clean that up in soudntrack pro?

thanks
Hi there Y'all-

It's been a long while since I wrote to café la, because things have been going smoothly here at TED, and this is my FIRST time writing to soundtrack pro, as I am new to it.

I KNOW this is possible, I saw someone from Apple demonstrate this very thing, but I can't find a menu item for it, and I don't know what it is called to look it up.

I need to take three brief instances of mic feedback, which are at VERY different frequencies from the speaker, out altogether. You can't hear what he's saying, and I am hoping to clean this up. It is not like guitar feedback through an amp, it's a low buzz that's quite loud and very brief.

I was surfing through this forum and came upon the following little thread - does this apply to my situation too??? I don't have a spot that ONLY has the bad sound, just one channel of audio that mixes a voice speaking, a lzy chordal piano in the bg, and then this crazy buzz...


Re: cleaning noise
Posted by: David Slater (IP Logged)
Date: April 22, 2007 07:06PM

if it is a consant sound like an air conditioner or background noise like traffic etc the noise tools in STP should be able to clean it up

in the sample editor window select a section of audio that is just the noise you wanna remove

go to the process menu and select set noise print
select the whole section of audio you want to clean and go to the process menu and select reduce noise and adjust the settings to get the results you want

M A R L A


Current System:

FCP 7.0.3 on an MBP 17" from early 2011, running OS 10.8.3

Processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MB
Software OS X 10.8.3 (12D78)

Hi Marla,

I'd say you are SOL on this one, unless there was a competent sound person on the shoot who did what the job entails. in other words, the sound recordist made detailed notes on the Sound Reports submitted to the editor of each incidence where unacceptable was recorded, got ahold of the speaker afterwards & did several wild takes of the missing lines & supplied the editor with at least 30 sec. of useable room tone (ambience) for each location in which a lip sync recording was made, then you have the needed material with which you can do a repair job in STP.

From your description, not even have a sec pause in the speech where you could sample the general over all ambience of the room. It's like over exposure in an image, no amount of pulling
down the opacity will bring back information that has been totally burned out in the highlight areas.

If you had a short section of Room Tone, David's suggestion would get you a more inteligable recording, but probably not totally get rid of all the background noise. Any filtering on a recording with the described problems will probably end up sounding as though the speaker had been delivering the lines while under water.

As you have no Room Tone, you can try one of the equalization filters & try taking out various
ranges of frequencies & see if that helps. You can easily pull out all sound over 5000 khz and below 250 khz when dealing solely with the human voice. Maybe this will give you amore acceptable recording, but experiment with raising &lowering various frequencies until you achieve the best you can get. The lines underneath the feedback will nee to be re-recorded (ADR or wild lines recorded in an extremely quiet environment).

Sorry I couldn't be more positive about this, but there is only so much you can fix in post. It's a lot easier to solve the problem at the time of the shoot.

All the best.
Dave