Fixing poor recorded audio (camcorder built-in)

unclebob6958 said:
You will probably have to ADR.

You can get it cleaned up beautifully. A friend of mine does forensic audio. He charges $375 per hour, and it usually takes 90 minutes to three hours per minute of audio to be cleaned up. So let's see, a five minute scene will take, oh, call it twelve (12) hours; that's only $4,500. A real bargain!

Sorry, I didn't mean to be so sarcastic, but what you are trying to attempt will be extremely difficult and time consuming, especially since you don't have the tools or the experience, and the results will probably be equivocal. Let this be a lesson to your friend; you have to plan out your sound as well as the visuals prior to shooting. This means scouting locations for sound as well as its look.
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The problem with 'forensic' recovery is that the quality of the audio need only be sufficient for a human listener to extract the information... where if one is trying achieve quality for a dramatic presentation... forensic recovery falls quite short... unless of course, the shot is like out of 'The Conversation'(1974)...
 
eL ProduceR said:
Lol, guys, this is six-pack-Joe's-weekend-in-the-park kind of footage recorded with an Canon HF200, just needed some tips to clean up the audio a bit so Joe could hear his cousins saying hello to grandma.

I played around with the High pass filter and Low pass filter and boy, it went from really, really crappy to kind of crappy. You can still hear the freeway noise, but the conversation is more distinguishable. Thanks for your tips guys, really, thanks
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Since your 'playing around', you could try using the noise gate type filter, I think FCP and Sound Trak have it.

The idea is that you attempt to adjust the filter so it 'cuts out' the freeway noise 'a lot'. The result is that the speakers sound like they're on radios that go totally silent when not being keyed.

Then to 'cover' the cut out, add back a bit of the freeway noise, but not so much as to be totally objectionable.

Of course if you have a trucker doing the 'engine brake' during the conversation, there's not much one can do there...
 
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