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Can Audition Clean this Up?
Hi, I’m a Director and my sound knowledge is sadly lacking. Help me if you can.
I recently shot a interview out in the States for a programme about pornography addiction (nothing seedy, more a examination of how people get caught up in it). Anyway, to cut a long story short the location was changed at the last minute and I didn’t have a sound operator with me. So I made do as best I could.
I shot the interview on two PD170’s. I had a radio mic (Sony UWP C1) going into camera 1 and a rifle mic (Sen ME-66) into camera 2. Everything seemed fine on the day, but I only managed to monitor the audio on the radio mic. I thought it was all clean, but in one place it wasn’t.
Now here’s the problem.
a) The audio from the radio mic incurred some distortion on it every so often in one particular section of the interview. On first impression it sounds like sibilance. But looking back at the rushes it seems to occur whenever the guy’s body moves as he responds to the questions. So I think it is the mic capsule rubbing on his shirt material.
b) There was a background hum at the location (big old church in Memphis) from the overhead fluorescents. It’s not so bad on the radio mic but it has been picked up a bit on the rifle mic.
Below is a URL link to our website where you can download a short (approx 15 seconds) zipped sample wav of both audio tracks. Track 1 is the radio mic, track 2 the rifle mic.
https://www.foolishtv.co.uk/fixaudio/
The file is virus free, but please check it with your own virus software if it makes you uneasy.
You will need good speakers/headphones on your PC to identify the problems I am referring to.
Now we own Audition 1.5, but to be honest neither I nor my partner have a background in audio/music. We know how to get audio clips into Audition, but we wouldn’t know what filters/frequencies to apply or adjust. So we may need the ‘idiots’ explanation if you should decide to answer this post. Incidentally we have tried the De-Esser in Premiere Pro, but it didn’t work too well.
So, that said, please can anyone help us with the following:
1) Is there any way we can use Audition to clean up track 1 (the radio mic) and get rid of the sibilance effect? We could try using track 2 (rifle mic), but the majority of the audio we have already edited is from the radio mic. Also this mic only let us down in a small part of the interview. Unfortunately we do need the audio from the part it let us down in. So the simplest route is to clean up this one section.
2) Now having said we won’t be using track 2, I would still like to know if there is a way to remove the background hum on it and appropriately boost the audio. In the worse case scenario it may be better to remove all the hum from track 2 and re-edit that into the project if we can’t sort out track 1. So that’s why I’m asking.
Finally if you respond to this you have my sincere thanks. If you’ve ever been half way around the world to shoot something and then found that the odds were completely against you, will know how grateful I am!
Nigel.
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4 Replies
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The good news is, I’m pretty sure you can get rid of the hum. The bad news is I’m not the one to tell you how to do it. I have SoundSoap2 (about $100). It’s pretty automatic, or at least easy for a non pro to use, and it does a great job. I’m trying to sort out for myself (my post) if I should get the upgrade to SoundSoap Pro, or if Audition will do the same job with some learning. I’m also looking at a software that might interest you, Diamond something. It’s supposed to be amoung the best at this sort of thing ($200) and does alot automatically.
The sibilance. With Audition you can try to sample a section when you hear just the noise and no voice. Then use that sample to eliminate the sound throughout. It might take some wanted sound with it, but it’s worth a try.
Cow has a few great tutorials. Here’s one for noise:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=168&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/mcmahon_frank/Audition1/index.htmlHope this helps.
NoGable
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Nigel,
Track one cleans up nice, but it’s the other mic in the cleaning process that may add a bit more echo to the voice … Here is what you do … Load the clip onto the EDIT side of the program go to EFFECTS > NOISE REDUCTION > NOISE REDUCTION then highlight JUST THE NOISE you want to remove left click on OK … Open the NOISE REMOVAL back up and highlight the whole clip, (it will still have the settings you want) … I found that you should remove by about 90%, left click on OK and it will remove your noise … You will have to recapture for each offending noise … Remove at about 70% for the rifle mic …… WILLIE
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Thanks Wille I’ll give it a try. Much appreciated.
Nigel.
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Nigel,
Let me know if you have any problems ……. WILLIE
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