Creative Communities of the World Forums

The peer to peer support community for media production professionals.

Activity Forums Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy Removing cicada noise.

  • Removing cicada noise.

    Posted by Charles House on August 31, 2010 at 11:02 pm

    I have two cut scenes that are outdoors. The drone of cicadas is in more or less every shot, the sound is consistent for the most part, but the tone varies as per where the camera/mic is placed, so it doesn’t sound consistent between shots. How can I remove this sound? I tried soundsoap, but the vocals become very digital sounding and awkward.

    John Fishback replied 15 years, 11 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Michael Sacci

    September 1, 2010 at 1:40 am

    Have you tried SoundTrack Pro, you have to find the balance between the noise reduction and the quality of the vocals. (which you should be able to vary in Soundsoap also)

  • Mark Raudonis

    September 1, 2010 at 3:22 am

    Agree with Michael.

    The trick is to EQ before you start noise reduction. Try to find the frequency band that MOSTLY eliminates the unwanted sound, THEN apply the noise reduction. SOUND TRK PRO’s stuff works pretty well, but go easy on it. In this case, less is more. You’re never going to get rid of the bugs completely, but at least you can minimize their impact.

    Applying the compressor limiter can help too since it will drop most of the Non dialogue sound.

    If you have the budget, take the tracks to an audio post house and let them do their magic. Successful noise reduction comes from approaching the problem many different ways in the proper order. Rough EQ. Compressing/noise gate. And never underestimate plain old manual track editing to cut OUT the worst of it.

    Good luck.

    mark

  • John Fishback

    September 1, 2010 at 6:52 pm

    One noise print won’t work throughout the scene. Every time the character of the bkg noise changes, you need to take a new noise print, apply noise reduction to that section and move on. Playing with the noise threshold and reduction controls, work to achieve the balance you want.

    John

    MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
    FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.2, Motion 4.0.2, Comp 3.5.2, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.2)

    Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

We use anonymous cookies to give you the best experience we can.
Our Privacy policy | GDPR Policy