line level recorded as mic

T

treynolds

Well-known member
Hey guys I tried to do a search for this but i just kept getting errors when i used the sites search feature.

I got a job to capture and edit a presentation recorded on DVcam and export for the web. The problem is the tape i got has terrible audio. It sounds like 2 things happened

For the first half of the tape channel one was recording either way too hot or a line level input into a mic level.
Then secondly about half way through the tape channel two starts recording but its a good clean signal. Then after another 10 minutes that cuts out again.

I told this to the client and they offered a separate recording that i could use that was strictly the audio track. I got very excited and had them email it to me right away. The audio track i got was a recording off of an iPhone that was somewhere in the audience. Needless to say this is garbage as well.

Now i know my audio editing tools a little bit (i mostly use Soundbooth but i also have ProTools im just not the best with it). and they are willing to pay for the audio editing time to try and recover this track a little bit but i assured them that i cannot work miracles.

Do you guys have any suggestions of how you would go about cleaning this audio up a little bit. I know its a tall order to get this audio to sound any good but all i need is for it to be more bearable.

Thanks for all of the help guys. I value your experience.
 
Some audio editing applications will recover moderately clipped signals by artificially "re"-creating the rounded tops to the waveform. If you want to post 30 seconds of the worse example, some of us can try some recovery techniques and applications. Post it as an umcompressed file (WAV, etc.) and NOT as a compressed file (MP3, etc.) You cannot post files directly to this form, just put them out there somewhere on the interweb, and post the link here.
 
Hard to say without hearing what you have.

You might try Izotope RX (google it) - there's likely an evaluation license to give it a try - pretty powerful audio repair tool, and Izotope is known for covering a lot of bases in their software.
 
Thanks for the help guys. Im not longer at the office for the day but i will upload it to my web server tomorrow and post a link for you guys.

I started by adding a compressor and trying to mostly cut out the lows and the really distorted highs. I will upload the original audio for you guys to hear.
 
I would second the Rx sugestion. It is the only tool I have found that has any real sucsess with bad distortion. They just came out with a new version and it may still be at the "intro" price (about a third off).
 
This is probably not what you want to hear but the audio was clipped well before it got to the camera - I wonder how it was fed. There is no hard clipping in the file. It's all heavily soft clipped well into the realm of constant distortion as you noted, but without actual hard-clipped artifacts, even RX won't be able to do much.

(I tried with RX)

Even opening the file and simply looking at it, it was clear the audio was clipped before the A/D conversion (it's playing back at -20dBFS) and the waveform doesn't have that saw-ed off look of digital/hard clipping. There's also a low-pass filter on somewhere in the chain, with no audio content above 12kHz.
 
dialing_wand said:
On the other hand, at least you didn't record it.
Click to expand...


That is in fact my saving grace.

I cant thank you guys enough for all of your help. I cleaned up the audio a bit more and sent them a sample. its acceptable now (granted if it was my shoot i would have never called it acceptable in any way) and im exporting the video.

Im still going to try to get my hands on RX to see what i can do with it for future projects.

Thanks guys!
 
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