room noise audio

E

enrico

Well-known member
Can anyone tell me how to best clean up room noise in FCP audio? I've used a Rode NTG-2 mike for interviews in a documentary and found the room noise obscures the clarity of the voice. Is their any setting(s) in the audio filters that can significantly reduce the room noise that was recorded, to bring out a clearer, cleaner sound, focusing more on the person's voice, than on the duller room ambience sound that the mike has also picked up?
Your help would be most appreciated.

enrico
 
Soundtrack pro lets you select a part of the overall ambience and then fill the entire clip. Thus reducing the overall noise it even lets you do a reverse preview of whats being removed so you can preserve the voice as much as possible...Sorry to tell you to use another app.
 
No, I really appreaciate the feedback! (no pun intended).... just want to get rid of that dull room ambience and highlight the vital sound of the voice. On the first response, I'll try playing around with the EQ...On the 2nd, I've got Soundtrack Pro; where/how do I find the reverse preview?
I find that audio quality is as important as visual to bring people into the reality.
I'm trying to learn as much as possible on this front and any further points on this discussion is very helpful.

enrico
 
Enrico I only got FC Studio this week.... Ive been reading manuals for a week :S Plus I did the original tutorials as a warm up. On the Tutorial they use this method as one of the first points in using soundtrack ... DO you have studio?
 
SoundTrack Pro is the way to go on this. I do interviews on boats, planes, airports, hospitals, and it is for sure amazingly fast and easy. Here's a link to the tutorial on-line.

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/quicktours/

It's under Audio > Noise Reduction

Forget the EQ, waste of time, just use STP, less time, and if you use the Send To option in FCP, it's non-destructive.
 
Thanks so much for the help! In fact, I do have FCP Studio, but have never really integrated the applications as such...I'm looking forward to exploring possibilities...it could answer a ton of challenges.
Many thanks,

enrico
 
I've used Soundtrack to clean up audio (narration, specifically) and it worked great. I used Noise Reduction and found that using it at 50% worked best. 100% will clip your audio and it will sound very weird. Of course, you want some room tone in your audio, so 50%-ish should help bring your vocals to the front, but still leave an environment for those vocals to live in.
 
Apple Pro Training Series, it rocks...

And I cut all room tone, period. Before the interview, get 5-10 minutes of just room tone. Mix it in post later. That always worked really well for me. I get more control over the sound that way. I can bend it to my liking more.

In my documentaries, there's either very light music connecting it with several other shots. Or, there's some ambient sound from some other shot continuing through a few cuts and back to the original clip. Or, we just don't want to hear anything but his or her voice, period. Nothing wrong with that. It all depends on the feeling you're trying to convey as a story teller. No single rule fits every situation. Watch lots of interviews, try to find ones that you want yours to look like. Watch them, over and over. Break it down.

Oh, STP cleans up sound really nice, too. Just play with the controls while you preview the sound. You'll quickly start to find a good balance.

To help learn it, take the controls to extremes, listen, then a little less extreme either way, listen. Work your way down to where it starts to sound awesome. That way, after doing that a couple of times, you'll get a really good feel for that process. It'll start to make sense.

And non-destructive, not only that, when you round trip it from inside FCP properly, when you're done and save and come back to FCP, the cleaned up sound clip is ALREADY there in your Timeline, AND a copy in your Browser window. It's awesome. I could have chosen any NLE in the universe to become a trainer for, but I chose this. It really is awesome.
 
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Yes I admit FCP has a much higher end feel to what I am used to.. it seems with the extra effort required you can acheive much more just IMO. I have always used premiere and still have it on PC, but I wanted to go FCP to change a few things in my workflow, and whilst this week has been hard its going to be well worth it in time.
 
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