Hello Everyone! I just registered today because I have a question and cannot find the answer.
There is an Air Conditioner probably about 3 feet from where my camera stands. This is the best angle I can get for filming and moving it will probably result in bad lighting, outside traffic noise, etc. I already tried recording silently for about 15 seconds to try and reduce the noise but the AC is still running, loudly, in the background. Is there any way to remove this constant noise? I know there are ways to remove dog barks, baby crying, etc. But what about air conditioning? I am completely new to audio editing. I only use the basics…record, cut, paste, and save. Please help. Thanks!
Have you tried noise removal?
Yes, I record the room sound first for about 15 secs, Get the noise profile, and select all to do noise removal. I am no pro, maybe I am not using the right levels of noise removal?
First I’d like to suggest strongly that baby crying and dogs barking are a good way to kill your show. We can’t take those out. Air conditioner noise is possible, but only if it’s in the background.
There is a three to one rule. The performance has to be three times closer to the microphone or three times louder for us to be able to help. If they’re the same or the interference is louder, then you may have no show then, either.
Try Effect > Noise Reduction. It works in two steps. Run it first by selecting a bit of video with air conditioner only – no performance. Use that as the Profile. Then select some parts of the show and apply the reduction.
See what it sounds like.
I don’t know that anybody ever wrote a thing on noise reduction. I’m looking.
This is the best angle I can get for filming and moving it will probably result in bad lighting
In Hollywood, there is a step between “Roll Film,” and “Action!” In the real world, the sound supervisor yells “Speed!” when they’re happy with the sound. Nobody moves until that happens. There are processes for repairing damaged sound in post production, but they’re all insanely expensive.
Koz
Hey, Thank you so much! I was messing around with noise removal, but as I said, I am no Pro. I am usually directly in front of the camera(no more than a foot away) and The ac is behind(probably 2-3 ft away). I used to just put music over to try and mask it out. I thought that there was a layers option where you could separate the different sounds and just delete…I wish it were that easy.
I am going to apply the noise removal to sections and see if there is a difference. Thanks again. This helps. Any recommendations on what noise level to use (left of right).
I wish it were that easy.
So do we.
Click on Layers and scroll down to Noise and deselect it. [OK]
I can give you fuzzy concepts. The two that have the most reaction are Reduction and Smoothing. 6dB, 12dB, and 24dB are natural graceful values of reduction. If you get much beyond that, the show is going to sound like trash no matter what else you do. 6dB is a very gentle reduction. Listen on good quality speakers. Work up from little numbers.
Smoothing affects how much correction doesn’t happen. This is the one that lets you miss individual spoken words to keep people from sounding like space aliens but still catch the noise in the gutters between words.
Attack and Decay are the wrappers around words. How much before and after gets noise reduced.
I don’t exactly know what Sensitivity does. As far as I can tell from quick experiments, it has a lot of the same characteristics as Reduction.
Unless you have very tiny noises, the show always suffers from these rescue tools.
Koz
That’s our standing joke. By the time you realize you need to rescue the show, it’s too late.
Koz