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Next week, I'll be getting a copy of Isotope Rx to clean up some audio on the film. Today, I came across the Raw CNN video of the Wikileaks founder walking out of an interview. Although they are in a confined space, there is clearly noticeable traffic noise and buzzes and hums heard throughout. If you're the engineer tasked with making this audio more presentable, how long would it take you to clean up on Isotope Rx. CAN this be cleaned up in time for broadcast say... 2 hours from when you got it? (probably an hour or less given the urgency of breaking news).

I'm so looking forward to tinkering with Isotope Rx. Are there any other programs that do a great job at cleaning up audio like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_0-KUaQl7k&

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  • Please post what happens after you get izotope and slap it on. I am going to be purchasing that soon as well and I would like to hear what happened in a real life experience before i do. Thank you so much for your time!!
    – Ongaku
    Apr 2, 2012 at 8:50
  • i've yet to speak with anyone who purchased the software and regretted it. i own a copy and love it. keep in mind that it's not simply an automated process. you have to go in and define what you want it to do and where to do it. just like anything else in audio, some are better at it than others. if you have to deal with noise reduction on any kind of regular basis, then it's well worth the investment (of both money and time to learn).
    – Shaun Farley
    Apr 2, 2012 at 15:06
  • There are a couple of great youtube videos on published recently showing how awesome this is. Here's one with Bob Bronow cleaning up audio for the show, Deadliest Catch.
    – Hubert Campbell
    Apr 2, 2012 at 22:29
  • youtube.com/…
    – Hubert Campbell
    Apr 2, 2012 at 23:39

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I think Izotope RX is definitely the more powerful audio cleaner in its price range. Although i'd like to hear the software/hardware of choice for forensic audio guys; does anyone here do that?

As for times, here's an example. I recently had to clean up some horrible audio on a deposition tape. What they delivered to me had loud LOUD hums, a high noise floor, only a few of the people in the room had lapels, and it was all in a horribly compressed mpeg codec with no information above 6k. In about an hour, using RX, i found the hums and removed them; took a sample of the hiss/noise floor and ran that through the denoiser, as well as some eq and multiband expansion with Waves C4. A few volume rides, and i recorded it out. I could have taken a lot longer to finesse my settings, but it was never going to sound anywhere near "good", so i made it intelligible and went no further.

The main problem i heard in the interview you posted seemed to be some hum towards the end; izotope RX has a hum removal module that i think would nail that. Apparently in RX2, the hum removal module actually identifies the frequency of the hum for you, and even recommends if the denoiser module would be more effective! As for the traffic bg, the denoiser could take a fair bite out of that. I don't know if the guy says anything after he's demiked himself, and that would be very hard to bring out of the noise floor. But hey, they could just use what they can from the interviewer's mic. There are definitely quick and dirty ways of cleaning things, if time is an issue.

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Have you seen these posts?

Sound off on Noise Reduction!

What are your favorite spectral tools?

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