Audacity Forum

I can post a sample recording if it would help, but I have a Canon Legria HF G30 and due to a bad internal preamp and no XLR like the Canon XA versions, there is a hiss on recorded audio. I use a VideoMic Pro for now, until I can afford an external XLR Preamp to bypass the cameras internal one.

I first tried recording 10 seconds of silence with the mic on the camera with the same settings as I used when I record with the camera normally and then exported the 10 second silence audio into audacity and selected a part of the audio which has consistent hiss and then clicked "get noise profile". I'd exported the audio of the video I want to fix the hiss on into a new audacity, then go to get noise profile and click "remove" to remove the hiss on it. However, it doesn't quite work that way. Although it does remove much of the hiss, testing it by isolating the noise I wanted to remove, I noticed it was removing some of the audio I didn't want to remove such as voice audio and other background audio not bad preamp noise.

I wondered if it was it removing all audio the same frequency as the hiss/noise and this would be why it was removing some of the audio I didn't want removed?

Is there any other way of removing or reducing the hiss without removing the other audio I didn't want removed or am I stuck with the hiss?

You're probably stuck.

Noise Removal works by "tasting" a little of the noise in the profile step and then generating sharp, precision filters to remove those profile audio tones from the show. It works OK when you have fan noise, computer whine or other real world device noise like that. The problem with white (electronic) noise is it contains all frequencies, so Noise Removal obediently filters out the whole show.

There is one trick. The Smoothing control forces removal to only work during the quiet periods in the show when hiss is most noticeable. If you have bad enough noise, you may get hissy words over a dead quiet background. Applying the tool is one skill, knowing when to stop is another.

I'm in the camp that says Noise Removal should be rename Noise Reduction. I don't think there is any condition where the show noise goes to zero.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/noise_removal.html

Koz

Thanks and your right, I know you can't remove unwanted noise entirely and it probably would be better if Noise Removal were renamed noise reduction instead. Anyway, I have uploaded some test audio that I recorded with my Canon Legria HF G30 which has hiss. It was just ambient outside noise I recorded. I haven't edited the audio at all so it might need to be normalized before you can really hear anything.

I uploaded the test audio here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/9doic2 as the file size was too big to add as an attachment.