Removing Audio Pops with Izotope RX

C

ChipG

Carbonite Member
I shot a video interview that has a few audio pops / scratch noise from the LAV and would like to remove them if possible. There is a new program called Izotope RX that was rated very good in the new Studio monthly magazine for this. It is a plug in for Pro Tools, I do not have Pro Tools but am considering buying it and the plug in if anyone here has had good results with it?

Any other recomendations on how to fix this or should I buy Pro Tools with Izotope RX?

Thanks!
Chip
 
There's no need to buy Pro Tools only because of RX.
RX is also available as a standalone application and as plugins of all other common formats.
 
Thanks Alexey. Good to know.

I also contuct interviews in the car at 60 mph for a doc I'm shooting right now and thought it would also be good for removing road noise.

Do you think RX is my best choice for this?
 
Sure thing. I think you'll have some good success removing road noise. I've seen RX used before to help clean up some vinyl recordings (with scratches, hisses, etc.) and it worked pretty well. Good luck.
 
Rx is what I use all the time for exactly that type of work. You can use it stand alone and as a plugin it also shows up in FCP and other AU compatible apps. You don't need the more expensive version. It does have a learning curve but the spectral repair is a godsend to doc audio post. I have successfully removed wireless radio hits (that static burst from ??? that steps on the track), car horns, foot taps and a turn signal from dialog tracks. The noise reduction is by far the best you can get for under a few thousand $. And the thing that originally sold me on it, the declipping function. I had a test file that I would run these things on, a couple of very close F-14 bys. They were completely blown out, it's hard to set a level on a plane that's supersonic at a few hundred feet off the ground, you don't hear anything till after it's past and then it just hits you like a slap in the face. None of the passes were really good (in the end the extreme low end caused the NagraV harddrive to shut down) but the early ones were pretty much wall of distortion. The Rx Declipper got the early recordings to sound like overloaded analog tape, ie usable , NOBODY had been able to get those recordings out of digital hash. The later recordings that had much less blow out but still were unusable, I was able to repair to the point that probably nobody would notice any distortion who wasn't an audio pro.

Hope that helps. Road noise is going to be hard to reduce with out causing problems so it's an unfair test, but Rx might be able to reduce it a bit. I also have SoundSoap2 and Digi's BNR. With those two -5 to maybe -7 on a really good day was about the max noise reduction one can get with out having a LOT of artifacting. Rx defaults to -12 and I was shocked that on a lot of stuff you can actually get -12 with out noticeable artifacting.

If you hadn't guessed I would give Rx five stars.

To use the Spectral repair well takes a certain amount of practice. I use the undo red a lot to see if what I removed helped or not. Also for things like pops I found that the "replace" setting worked better than Attenuate (the default).
Cheers
SK
 
Thanks Noiz2!

I downloaded the trial and on the very first run with stock settngs it removed about 65% of the audio pops. I'll be tweakng it more when I have more time but so far I'm really impressed. If I didn't know where the pops were I don't think anyone would notice them too much unless your an audio guy.

The road noise in the car isn't to bad but a -4 db drop would be great, anything more would be really sweet.

I'm going to try the declipper tonight with some loud thunder / lightning shots.
 
The declining etc might work on pops but the real tool for that is spectral repair. It's a lot more time since you are manually erasing what you don't want but it's VERY effective. Any auto anti pop etc isn't going to work on pops that are not very much the same and are also very different from what you want to keep. "Crackle" and record scratches and such are good candidates. But for those mic hit, wireless hits, and general pop/ thump/ etc that one ends up trying to clean up, Spectral Repair is "the man".
 
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