Bringing up levels on old tapes?

[Jim H]

I have some old footage on tape. To give you an idea of its age, it's Beta tape (regular Beta, not Betacam, etc). Late era, but hey. Probably 1992? Anyway, the tape had poorly recorded, quiet sound to begin with, but the 17+ years of degradation have made it just barely audible.

Anyone have any advice on what specifically to do to try to restore it?

 

[Noiz2]

Well you can't really restore it, what's lost is lost. But if you crank it up and use some noise reduction you may be able to get it back in the audible range. I would recommend having a sound person do it because they will have better tools but your probably not going to want to pay much for this so... If you have FCP you can give the noise reduction filter in STP, it's pretty decent. Dedicated NR apps/ plugins start in the $100 range or so and rapidly zoom to the stratosphere $30K-$60K. You might take a look at a entry level app from iZotope, can't remember the name. They make a quite good app in the $400 range called Rx but I have seen a much more limited app of theirs for I think around $40 that was really aimed at the consumer clean up your audio market that might be decent. I think you get 30 days or so to demo.

 

[Jim H]

Well you can't really restore it, what's lost is lost. But if you crank it up and use some noise reduction you may be able to get it back in the audible range. I would recommend having a sound person do it because they will have better tools but your probably not going to want to pay much for this so... If you have FCP you can give the noise reduction filter in STP, it's pretty decent. Dedicated NR apps/ plugins start in the $100 range or so and rapidly zoom to the stratosphere $30K-$60K. You might take a look at a entry level app from iZotope, can't remember the name. They make a quite good app in the $400 range called Rx but I have seen a much more limited app of theirs for I think around $40 that was really aimed at the consumer clean up your audio market that might be decent. I think you get 30 days or so to demo.

Thanks!