There's a lot of background noise with a high pitched whine in this interview I'm trying to work on but I cannot seem to get rid of it with Waves C4 or EQ. They recorded the interview with the Zoom H4n on-board mics..Do you guys or gals have any advice?
Here's a sample: http://soundcloud.com/mitchell-scott/interview
I agree with Bruce's post. Izotope is the plug-in I'd reach for first...but yeah, the signal:noise ratio is pretty low, so there'll be a fine line between improvement and turning the audio into aquatic swimmyness. The fan noise is also pretty high-pitched, so I'd worry about EQing into the women's voices. If the audio was otherwise pristine I'd also suggest trying DeVerb to get that room 'verb outta there, but I think the background noise is the right battle to choose.
If you don't have Izotope, it's a bit spendy. Is this audio that will sync to video? If not, it might be worth a reshoot, cost/time-wise. You might also want to do an EQ pass to bulk up the voices as well, which feel a little thin in the low-mids. But I can also nearly guarantee that anyone who's purchased Izotope has never regretted it. :-)
You are going to have a hard time with that audio.
As the interviewee's are quite off mic and lots of room noise, a lot of what you do will impact on their vocals. You can use a notch eq filter to try minimise the fan noise in the background.
The other option is to use a noise reduction plugin where you set the noise sample and then apply it to the clip. If used correctly, you will get a bit of noise reduction (you cannot push it with that audio you have) and hopefully bring out the vocals more.
Other guys on here might have some more effective ways at cleaning this up, but the old saying is "You cannot polish a turd", but you can sure try.
Good luck.
If this is what you have to work with, I personally think it's better to not try to drastically reduce the noise and leave it somewhat untouched and smooth out the transitions and edits to make it sound natural in and out of words and sentences. Even with top CEDAR gear, I don't think you'll end up much better off. The key to something like this is SLIGHT and GENTLE noise reduction - otherwise like NoiseJockey mentioned, you'll be swimming with the sea monkeys in no time.
I see this a lot in work my peers do - they take a very noisy recording and try to suck all of the noise out of it and they invariably cut right into the voice and make it sound worse than without the noise reduction. "But the hiss is gone!!" Yeah, so is the audience's understanding.
Just my .02.
P.S. Don't forget to give the recordist who did this a hard time and help him do a better job next time. And if it was you, learn from it and make sure you get a better recording next time. If I were to receive this quality of recording for mixing I'd instantly reject it as unmixable and I'm sure a lot of other studios would do the same.
I would go for the Izotope denoiser, it should be able to bring down the background noise by about 12 dB with just a few artifacts, if you use C or D mode.
Render the audio with audiosuite and then put it on a track with a C4 to see if you can expand it a little bit afterwards.
Use a bit of EQ, you can perhaps tone down the noise with a broad dip with a low Q.
Just be careful not to do too much harm to the the dialogue while removing the noise.
Hi Mitchell Does it need to be pristine or just for the dialogue to be clearly audible? The noise signature is well defined and easy to separate, so you should be able to remove most of it using any decent NR plug-in. The dialogue will definitely be more audible, but the process may introduce a pumping effect and some artifacting. You can always add a bit of white noise or a soundbed afterwards to mask this.
I hope you don't mind, but I ran your sample through a basic iZotope Rx Nr algorithm and posted the result here: http://snd.sc/llUiI2
This was pretty quick and dirty, but you should be able to achieve better results doing multiple passes in small increments.
Hi Mitchell
Here is the quick walk-through I promised:
Repeat the above process until you are happy with the results.
This is pretty much the standard NR process for broadband noise, although I have biased it a bit to suit your source material. The Advanced tab gives you a lot more control over your noise profile in terms of the type of noise you are targeting and the manner in which artifacts are handled. You can usually obtain better results, but it takes substantially longer.
The noise in your recording is mainly broadband, but there appears to be a tonal element to it as well, so you would probably link them in the Advanced tab anyway. The real secret to successful NR is multiple incremental passes using smaller (8-10dB) values. Yes, higher values will mean more noise reduction, but will also introduce noticeable artifacts. Also, just in case it is not clear, you must either overwrite your existing preset or add a new one for EVERY subsequent pass.
Your source material will also benefit from higher Global and Fine Smoothing in order to minimise any possible pumping effect from the noise reduction, so once again the benefits of dealing with them separately will be negligible.
Finally, there is often a tendency to want to remove too much noise. Only remove what you have to and no more, otherwise your recording will start to sound artificial. Sometimes I even add in a bit of white noise afterwards to make it sound more natural.
Hope this helps!
Maybe this programm wil do the trick: http://www.algorithmix.com/en/renovator.htm You can also find a movie about it on soundworkscollection.
