[Kevin Dearing]

Like Vince said, if you have access to Audition then you’re golden – just use the noise reduction tool.

However, (also like Vince said) the sadly stripped down version called Soundbooth can do it for you too.. In fact, I just spent countless hours cleaning up the audio from an hour and a half school play where the audio guy had feedback out the whazoo and left mic’s open when they shouldn’t have been open – major lav rustling throughout the entire hour and a half.

Sorry about that complaining..

Anyway, in soundbooth, I’ve grown to like the Spectral display. For the stuff I was doing it was mostly lower frequency stuff – the mic rustling was roughly 200 Mhz or below and the feedback was about 500 Mhz. You say your’s is high frequency, but the below should work for you no matter what the frequency of the noise.

Option A:
Use the Reduce Noise ‘task’

Select an area (preferably 5 seconds but as long as possible – even if it’s a fraction of a second) that has only the noise you want to remove..

In the Tasks panel, choose Clean Up Audio -> Capture Noise Print.

Then de select (or select the entire file) and click ‘Noise’ from the same panel. It only gives you two settings so play with them (using the preview) until you are happy. Don’t go too aggressive or it’ll distort the audio and it’ll sound heavilly compressed

OR

Option 2:
In the spectral display, use the lasso tool to select an area where you expect to hear the noise (and only the noise). Select ‘Play Selected Frequencies only, select loop and play it. If you hear your sound, then you can go through at very small increments and use the ‘Auto Heal (I set my resolution to 4096 (Slow)). Or, you can select larger sections at a time and reduce the amplitude.

Either way, make sure you listen to it periodically as you go..

HTH
–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Be sure that you have extra frame handles at the end of the first clip and at the beginning of the second clip. If you don’t, PR won’t have anything to cross-dissolve between..

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Not sure why this thread was moved to this forum (the tutorial I referenced wasn’t from Andrew K / Video Copilot) but if someone is able to help me animate a camera down a windy and hilly road in AE that would be great – otherwise i guess I’ll stick with a flat road with hills passing by as Jack suggested..

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

That’s awesome Brian! Thanks for pointing me to it..

I think I can actually make this thing happen. Just bought the DVD today so I’ll be able to rip it later tonight and at least check out the footage from the scene that I don’t really remember!

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

I love it! I’ll play around with the idea – either way, I think your suggestion would help me to learn AE much more which is a major reason for this silly project in the first place!

Thanks Brian!

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Haha.. It’s supposed to be sort of a joke.. He Photoshoped a picture of Hasslehof in K.I.T.T. and put my geeky friend’s face on it and said it was him in High School.. So this is the retaliation!

I’m sure that you are right – no matter how long it is, it’ll still be too long! But as I said to Joey, I’m extreemly stuborn!

I’ll post the results when I’m done (if this board is still around by then! lol)

Here’s kind of my plan of attack – can anyone tell me if I’m just stupid instead of crazy? 🙂

I thought that I’d try to find a segment where the camera doesn’t move too much.. I’d take pieces of the background from different frames and assemble a background devoid of Rocky (and Hulk Hogan). Then I might be able to use a matte to key out Rocky. I do expect it to not be very good – and yes, even cheesy but I have faith and think that this can be done so it’s not too bad.

So, I take it I shouldn’t worry about the copyright infringements – again, I don’t really plan on showing this to anyone other than my friends and I’m certainly not making any money on it..

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Thanks Mike,
I’ll go through them after I get my kids to bed!

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Thanks Joey,
The good thing is that I’ve been using photoshop and illustrator for years and about 15 years ago I was rotoscoping on my Amiga!

But when I do things I do them big – and I’m so stuborn that I don’t give up so I know I’ll come up with something… But again, my real purpose in this thing is to get familiar with AE so when I have a real job I won’t have any ramp up time.

Since my last post I read the manual a bit on AE’s drawing / painting tools.. I see where I could have set it to do a single frame and I also see how I could’ve hit shift to continue the previous path. See, I’m learning already! 🙂

And no, I don’t think you are discouraging – I’m used to my stupid but huge ideas! Just ask my wife (or neighbors – I once spent about two months collecting soda cans to stack between a friends storm door and his screen door! When the wind wouldn’t let me get past the 6th row I came up with this bright idea of creating prefab’d stacks by stringing fishing wire through them – my neighbors saw me drilling holes through cans pretty much all day one Saturday. Anyway, it worked out.) I’m just a big, stuborn kid!

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Thanks guys! I really appreciate it.

Unfortunately, yes, I already have footage of the friend fighting – the ‘gig’ of it is that he’s not supposed to know about this until he see’s it anyway. So I’m not really able to green-screen him with planned shots. Hopefully the footage I have will match enough for just a few seconds of the scene – enough for him to realize what it is – I can’t do the whole fight scene.. That’d be crazy (well, crazier!)

AE’s better than PS for roto huh? Ok (honestly I haven’t really done anything like that in PS – just read about CS3’s new features supporting video files).

I did some roto’ing in AE recently just playing around with yet another learning project (where I punch myself out {anyone see some sort of a theme here?} 🙂 ) I must be missing something.. I was using the rubber stamp tool primarilly to paint out a little washer I had hinging from the ceiling on fishing wire so I knew where to ‘punch’ but found out (after doing quite a bit of painting) that I had to change the duration of each paint “stroke”. I mean, it was great when the washer was stationary – or even mostly stationary but when it was moving was annoying. Plus I had what seemed like hundreds of strokes saved. Is there a better way? I will take your advice and look it up on this forum..

So it seems like I’ll have to roto Rocky.. I’m not too worried about adding the alpha channel to my friend fighting – the mask I did on myself was fairly easy and even quick to do…

Thanks again guys!

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Hey all,
I just wanted to follow up – just so someone coming along later will know for sure how this turned out..

I was indeed able to import the whole project. Doing so alerted me to the fact that one of my batch captures was done wrong – or soemthing – the footage was still letterboxed (well, not exactly, it was simply scaled down with black all around it.) So I was able to make these offline, then recapture and all was well!

Thanks so much for the help! Going from 6.5 to CS3 while going from Hi-8 to DV is quite a lot to deal with all at once – but boy! Too bad I didn’t make the move earlier!

–KTFA