Removing occasional (yet consistent) audio noise from video?
June 15, 2010 12:30 PM Subscribe
Inspired by this LifeHacker post, is there a way to eliminate uniform, occasional (not constant) noise in a self-shot video without ruining the rest of the audio?
Shot some video a few weeks back. The only tripod I had available was a Dorica I've used for still shots. It's not made for panning and isn't used to moving in such a way. As a result, my video looks pretty good, but is interrupted by low creaking sounds from the tripod.
So far, I've exported the audio as a WAV and attempted noise removal in Audacity, using a sample of the audio with a fair amount of the creaking. But the result is clippy dialogue and that annoying ringing that can happen with too much processing. So now I'm wondering if I could take the EQ route, but don't know where to start.
Shot some video a few weeks back. The only tripod I had available was a Dorica I've used for still shots. It's not made for panning and isn't used to moving in such a way. As a result, my video looks pretty good, but is interrupted by low creaking sounds from the tripod.
So far, I've exported the audio as a WAV and attempted noise removal in Audacity, using a sample of the audio with a fair amount of the creaking. But the result is clippy dialogue and that annoying ringing that can happen with too much processing. So now I'm wondering if I could take the EQ route, but don't know where to start.
Noise removal isn't made for this. The noise isn't uniform because it starts and stops. I can't say for sure without access to your files, but I'd bet that the creaking contains lots of mixed frequencies and shares a lot of them with the speech you want to keep.
The only way to fix this would be to manually edit each occurrence of creaking, knocking out the frequencies from the creak. You don't want to do this to all the audio or you'll hear the difference. If the creaks are short you might get away with this.
Is the right or left channel any better? You can make your audio mono using the good channel if so.
posted by echo target at 2:06 PM on June 15, 2010
The only way to fix this would be to manually edit each occurrence of creaking, knocking out the frequencies from the creak. You don't want to do this to all the audio or you'll hear the difference. If the creaks are short you might get away with this.
Is the right or left channel any better? You can make your audio mono using the good channel if so.
posted by echo target at 2:06 PM on June 15, 2010
If the video is during speech that you want to preserve, it's going to be difficult. I've seen demos where Adobe's Soundbooth removed a ringing phone, but I've never seen this out in the wild.
1) If it's during talking, you're probably going to have issues removing certain frequencies, unless they're really far apart. I haven't seen it done well by a lay person.
2) If isn't done during talking, just use other audio. If you have a one minute shot at the park with park noise, and there is creaking in the first five seconds, look for audio far away and gracefully fade it in where the creeks were.
3) I've certainly seen people take similar words or sounds and cleanly edit them in to mask ones with interruptions.
4) Remember the truism "you can almost always do something about bad video, but bad audio you have to get right the first time" for next time.
posted by history is a weapon at 4:53 PM on June 15, 2010
1) If it's during talking, you're probably going to have issues removing certain frequencies, unless they're really far apart. I haven't seen it done well by a lay person.
2) If isn't done during talking, just use other audio. If you have a one minute shot at the park with park noise, and there is creaking in the first five seconds, look for audio far away and gracefully fade it in where the creeks were.
3) I've certainly seen people take similar words or sounds and cleanly edit them in to mask ones with interruptions.
4) Remember the truism "you can almost always do something about bad video, but bad audio you have to get right the first time" for next time.
posted by history is a weapon at 4:53 PM on June 15, 2010
If it's like mine, the tripod squeaks across the audio spectrum. The noise removal I'm familiar with works on the part of spectrum the noise is in, but that's too broad here.
Something that removes pops might be able to be adjusted into doing this. Personally, I avoid this now by recording audio separately.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:06 PM on June 15, 2010
Something that removes pops might be able to be adjusted into doing this. Personally, I avoid this now by recording audio separately.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:06 PM on June 15, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by thylacine at 12:37 PM on June 15, 2010