I have been successful at removing a heater noise on the background, but now the audio sounds like, wahhh wahhh wahhhh. It’s not clear enough to hear. It’s like it has been altered after I removed the background noise. ANy suggestions? I followed tutorials on line for removing background noise. Thank you.
I have been successful
Success is when you suppress the noise and leave the show clear and undamaged.
Noise Removal is a juggling act between suppressing the trash and not harming the show. If the noise is bad enough, there is no middle ground. Noise Removal fails a lot.
The first step, when you drag-select a little of the trash by itself for use as the profile is super important. If you get a bad sample or worse, get a little of a voice in there by accident, then Noise Removal will try to remove the voice, too.
Once you have the Profile, you run Noise Removal again and apply it to the show. It’s valuable to select a small portion of the show as you experiment to avoid having to wait forever for Noise Removal to process an hour long show, only to not like it and have to start over.
The first value Noise Reduction is pretty simple to understand, the higher the more reduction, but you should start with gentle reductions like 6 or 9 and work up as you experiment and see what it sounds like. If you hit 24 and 30, then you should start thinking about a reshoot and this time don’t shoot the noise.
The third value, Frequency Smoothing is a little magic. That tunes how much of your voice Noise Reduction ignores. In order to improve voice quality, Noise Reduction actually stops working when you talk. If you have nice, low level noise, your voice will cover it up and nobody will ever know. If you end up with “snake voices” or other trashy vocals, then the noise was too severe and you may need a reshoot.
Obviously, if you suppress too much noise, you get the talking into a wine glass effect which is vocal damage. It doesn’t count that you got the noise down to nothing if you destroyed the show.
So those are the tradeoffs.
I saw one of the video shooters clean up an interview he shot. He had very gentle but persistent air conditioner noise in the background. He suppressed the air conditioner noise just enough to make it easy to ignore, finished and went home.
That’s different from rescuing a damaged recording. Noise Removal usually won’t do that.
Koz