Audio Filters – There’s got to be a way

[Walter Soyka]

For room tone, try Bias’s Sound Soap. It’s really the quickest and easiest way to remove regular noise like room tone from audio.

If you really need to stay in FCP, you can use a stack of Parametric EQ filters, but it’ll take you some time to get them all right.

When trying to remove noise with parametric EQ, you should actually try to make the noise louder first, to help you isolate it so you don’t EQ out any frequencies you actually want. Here’s how:

In a parametric EQ filter, boost the gain, then play around with the center frequency and Q (how much on either side of the frequence you’ve selected to use for the EQ) to try to boost the level of only the noise, and not the interview. Once you’ve found some noise, and only noise, drop the gain. You’ll almost certainly need more than one EQ filter with different settings.

You can also use parametric EQ to adjust frequencies within the vocal range of your interview to make it sound richer.

To basically address your other question, compression squishes the dynamic range of the audio, kind of like a levels filter can squish the latitude in an image. It makes softer parts (above a certain level) louder, and leaves the already loud parts loud. Limitation keeps high levels from getting too high and clipping.

For better information and clearer explanations, check out some of Jay Rose’s columns from DV magazine. Here’s a list from his website, or go to dv.com (registration required) and search.

https://www.dplay.com/tutorial/column.html

Regards,
Walter Soyka

[Ted_kazear]

After you mix sounds good to you (all levels, db, volume are in proportionate volume) Eq it, then try a compressor, then you can use an additive limiter, or just a limiter. You can eq and compress the vocals on a separate audio track. You can eq and compress the over all mix, the limiter should be on your master fader, or in this case use a limiter on you final mix. The limiter will raise the audi to a higher ceiling giving it an overall loudness, without clipping, you can set the threshold so you have headroom just under 0dB.

if confusing i’ll check back later

[Dan Brockett]

Hi:

You might take a look at this https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_audio_filter_tutoria.html

FCP’s audio filters do not have any noise reduction capability although the new Soundtrack Pro does.

Best,

Dan