Baby Crying in the background on my sons wedding…now what?
I’ve been holding back on the release of this video to my son that I casually shot during his wedding. I was told that I didn’t need to do any photo work since I was in the wedding as his father. But I decided to set up my video camera on a tripod in the back of the room and jus let it run during the wedding. My grandson let out a yelp during the service and now we are trying to figure out how to clip out just the crying baby in the audio. I know that there is software that will get rid of hiss and creckle when cleaning up an lp to cd recording but clipping out audio in the area of the human voice range I’m just not sure where to start.
I would highly recommend Audacity 1.3.12 on all platforms.
1.2.6 is now very old and unmaintained.
Unfortunately even Audacity 1.3.12 will have trouble dealing with the baby crying problem. It is the audio equivalent to putting your finger in front of the camera lens.
You may be able to get some improvement using the third party plug-in “ExtraBoy” (a demo version is available).
I did a google search on “Extra Boy” and saw tons of Download sites that require your name and personal info to download the “Extra Boy” software. Since they all looked like they were coming from Europe I’m a bit gun shy about giving out all of my info to get the download. Do you know of a USA download site for the exact version of “Extra Boy” for the plug in you mentioned? Tks
Use the official web-site: http://www.elevayta.net/product13.htm
Being wary of unofficial download sites is very sensible - unofficial download sites are a really easy way to get viruses and other malware as well as ending up on spam lists.
If the cry coincides with speech/music which you want to preserve, then sorry it can’t be removed, (even with “Extraboy” or “Kn0ck0ut” etc).
It may be possible to overdub the part of video with the cry with ambient sound from elsewhere in the recording, (cut ‘n’ paste job ), depending on the action going on in the video when the cry happened.
If the cry is louder than the speech/music it is possible to reduce its volume to match the speech/music: i.e. not removing the cry but making it less jarring by making it same volume as everything else.
A method of achieving the latter is to use Audacity’s envelope control to manually reduce the amplitude (volume) of each cry, (time-consuming if there are a lot of them).
…And if he’s crying when you say, “I do,” you don’t.
When Hollywood gets stuck with something like this (and we do), the solution is to round everybody up and say the words again in carefully controlled sound rooms. Lay the new dialog into the old show in place of the damaged dialog in an editor.
Separating two human voices running at the same time in the same show is, in effect, impossible. The general rule is you can’t separate the instruments in a performance in post production. “Instruments” in this case includes human voices.