Eliminating wind noise during an interview

[David Roth weiss]

The old term garbage in, garbage out unfortunately applies where wind noise is concerned. There’s typically no really effective way to fix wind noise or any other “extraneous” additional recorded sounds, unless they are very specific to a small range of frequencies that can be filtered out, however, wind noise typically covers a very broad range of frequencies. You might be able to filter out some of the lower frequencies using Parametric EQ or low-end filters, but these will never eliminate the wind noise, at best they’ll only help to bring down some of the most annoying frequencies if you’re good and if you’re lucky.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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[Victor Perez]

If its under VO I would rather send to SoundTrack. The final seems much cleaner that way. Process, Reduce Noise and adjust as needed. Save and check your FCP sequence. If you like what you did you can save your settings in SoundTrack as a SoundTrack Pro Script. Now when you encounter another section of the VO with the same wind noise, instead of adjusting it all over again you can just send to SoundTrack Pro Script and its done.

hope that helps

Victor

[David Peralta]

you may want to try izotope rx plugin for STP.. i saw a demo of this at AES and they were able to remove screeching brakes from a MOS interview.

good luck

-dave

hmm… I wonder what this button does…

[Matthew Campagna]

The unfortunate truth is if you have wind, there is no way to remove it. I have been doing professional audio for over 15 years and there has never been a good answer to this issue. Wind covers so much of the dynamic range that you will never be able to get rid of it.

[David Bogie]

“Wind” is not just noise. The impact of moving air on the microphone creates huge amplitude waves that effectively blot out everything else the mic was hearing at the same time. The mic simply cannot resolve the amplitude of moving air and subtle sound waves it is designed to hear.

IMagine a few drops of water being swept along in a fire hose. How do you remove the rest of the volume of fluid to recover the original little drops?

I have no experience with the advanced plugin suggested elsewhere in the thread. It is doing something very interesting and super complex besides trying to filter out a spectrum of frequencies.

bogiesan