Help - there's gotta be a way to...

[Jenny_]

New to Audacity, so sorry if I'm missing something here.

My son has a video clip (interview) he needs for a school project, but the clip has been ruined by background noise that echoed down the hallway from some volleyball games. We've tried the whole thing where you sample a part where you try to collect a sample without talking and then analyze it and remove those sounds from the whole video. It didn't really help, as it changed his voice, too and still left a lot of other sounds going on, like the whistle blowing, and some loud cheers.

BUT, there's gotta be a way to analyze the speaker's voice only, then to take that and use it backwards - instead of removing that sound, have it remove all the other sounds and just leave the analyzed sounds of the speaker. Then the remaining sound will only be the speaker's. That makes so much more sense to me, and we get rid of everything else.

Is there a way to do this? We have a clip of just the speaker talking with no background sounds that we can use. But I can't find any options for that in Audacity. There's so much to this program that I haven't a clue what it does.

Any help?

Thanks!!!

[DVDdoug]

The best solution is going to be subtitles.

Noise removal works best with constant low-level background noise... It works best when you don't really need it. When the noise is bad, "The cure can be worse than the disease", as you have already found out.

There's a reason why pros still record in soundproof studio s with good equipment and good microphone placement, and there's a good reason on-location movie dialog is re-recorded in the studio. The human brain is really good at determining what's signal and what's noise... Software is not that good yet.

[kozikowski]

That makes so much more sense to me, and we get rid of everything else.

Doesn't it? People all over earth would kill to have a tool like that. Unfortunately, Audacity and many other software products have no intelligence. They don't "know" what a voice is, they just know piles of data.

You have one of the worst-case conditions. The interference is similar to the performer. You know Noise Removal has both Removal and Isolation buttons, right? You an use it upside down.

Noise Removal works by sampling some of the interference by itself and then later, trying to remove those tones from the show. The assumption is that the tones are different from the performance and never change like fans, air conditioning or hum.

You can try Noise Gate assuming the noise is lower volume than the performance. Noise Gate tries to suppress tones lower than a set value. I don't remember if Noise Gate comes with Audacity 2.0.6, which is the one you should be using. I may need to search for it.

You violated number 4.

The Four Horsemen of Audio Recording (reliable, time-tested ways to kill your show)
-- 1. Echoes and room reverberation (Don't record the show in your mum's kitchen.)
-- 2. Overload and Clipping (Sound that's recorded too loud is permanently trashed.)
-- 3. Compression Damage (Never do production in MP3.)
-- 4. Background Sound (Don't leave the TV on in the next room.)


Sorry. Is there time for a reshoot now that you know how?
Sound kills more shows than video.

Koz

[kozikowski]

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyqui ... Noise_Gate

Koz

[chris319]

The Four Horsemen of Audio Recording (reliable, time-tested ways to kill your show)
-- 1. Echoes and room reverberation (Don't record the show in your mum's kitchen.)
-- 2. Overload and Clipping (Sound that's recorded too loud is permanently trashed.)
-- 3. Compression Damage (Never do production in MP3.)
-- 4. Background Sound (Don't leave the TV on in the next room.)

-- 5. Garbage in, garbage out.

[kozikowski]

Everybody's so used to the seemingly effortless way that cellphones handle voices. It's a nasty shock the first time somebody tries to do a straight theatrical recording.

I wondered for a while now what would happen if a bunch of people tried to do a multi-point podcast by just talking into their Personal Sound Recorders. Export and send the files to a central point. Mix. Export.

That's a cousin to how this was done. This was not a recorded Skype conference call.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU8hXDim-1s

Koz