Salvaging bad audio

V

vip77

Active member
I'm attempting to salvage some dialogue recorded with a noisy mic preamp and/or bad mic placement. The signal is averaging -25db. The scene was recorded in a mostly quiet room.

I tried a noise gate, but the hiss is still audible during the dialogue.
Noise removal is okay but not much hiss is removed before the dialogue distorts.

Anyone out there got any magic formula to fix this?
 
You might try a de-esser but there's often not much else that can be done. Depending on the frequency of the desired sound a low-pass filter might offer a little improvement. Hiss is very broad spectrum so trying to notch it out with an equalizer doesn't usually help very much. There's just no substitute for getting the original recording right.
 
With noise removal, try going for a few passes and removing only a little each time. One pass that tries to remove everything will often have adverse effects on the audio.

But along the lines of what Steve said, there's only so much you can do if it wasn't recorded right the first time.
 
Thanks for the tips guys.

Do you know if i should I normalize the track before or after noise removal?
 
I'd try it both ways to see which works best (save separate work files). Try using some EQ too.

If you have some room-tone from the same scene (or if you can "make" some by editing a quiet/blank segment of the dialogue track you have now), you could try taking just the noise and reversing phase, lining-up the waveforms, and cancelling the noise.


GJ
 
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