Background Audio Noise removal

[Brad Hurley]

There’s rudimentary background noise reduction in FCPX:

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/final-cut-pro/verc1fab873/mac

If that doesn’t do the trick there are third-party plugins.

[Joe Marler]

[Greg Ball] “I thought I saw a something about a built-in Audio noise reduction in FCPX. I have FCPX 10.4.5. Does that exist? Or do I need to purchase Crumplepop’s noise reduction?
“
As Brad said the built-in FCPX NR is better than nothing. I have Crumplepop ver 1; it’s a little better than FCPX and easy to use. I haven’t tried ver. 2.

iZotope RX7 Advanced is the best but expensive. RX7 Standard is only $99, the same as Crumplepop. RX7 is not a one-button fix; it requires some experience. However there are many on-line tutorials available. But it’s a time-consuming, iterative process.

I use RX7 Advanced but always export a .wav and process it using the external app, then re-import. I’m not highly skilled so our post-production audio tech does the hard jobs.

If you think a $1,200 software tool is expensive, this is incentive to capture it right in the first place. However when shooting documentary interviews that is sometimes just not possible or would require a location change and loss of opportunity.

You can avoid much of this by using the best possible mics & recorder and an experienced field audio technician. If the material was recorded by someone else, the producer can educated by billing the project 10 hrs of highly skilled time for repair work by a post production audio engineer. If the producer thinks anyone can fix it in 30 min, please let me know when that person is located.

[Brad Hurley]

I also use RX 7 Advanced, it’s awesome. A cheaper but nearly as good alternative is Acon Digital’s Acoustica editor, which has many similar tools to those in Izotope RX, including spectral repair, denoising, remixing, etc. I prefer Acoustica’s interface and end up using it for most things, and then if I’m not satisfied with the result I’ll try RX. I recorded an interview last summer in a room with very audible air conditioning through the HVAC system and RX made it completely disappear without affecting the voices at all. It’s kind of magical.

There are lots of denoise plugins available.

[Brett Sherman]

iZotope RX’s “Dialogue Isolate” is about as close to magic as noise reduction gets. One parameter to set and it does a phenomenal job. But, it doesn’t work as a plug-in and it is only in the RX Advanced Suite. If you find yourself doing a lot of audio denoising it is well worth the steep price. I have CrumplePop’s first version of DeNoiser, and it is nowhere close to the same ballpark as Dialogue Isolate.