Soundtrack Pro noise reduction

K

kookooframe

Well-known member
I'm having a problem with a greyed out REDUCE NOISE selection after I make a noise print in Soundtrack for FCP7. Has anybody else had this problem? I've looked at several tutorials for noise reduction and I seem to be doing everything right, but the REDUCE NOISE is always greyed out right from the start of the procedure.

Any thoughts appreciated!
 
It's been awhile since I used STP. It's not really used much by sound people. The NR isn't actually that great BTW.

But I think your problem may be that I believe you need to take a "noise print". I can't actually remember but I believe it's a separate menu function.

Anyway the NR needs to know what the "noise" is you want to remove. So you take a noise print and then you can apply NR.

You have it so use it but if you are wanting to do sound in the future you should probably start looking at programs that are better suited to sound for film/video.
 
Thanks, could anybody recommend a good application for noise reduction?

Scott, as I mentioned, I CAN make a noise print in Soundtrack. It's when I try to use the noise print to apply noise reduction, the menu item REDUCE NOISE is greyed out. (In fact, it is greyed out from the get-go, even before I make a noise print.)
 
Did this work before, or is this the first time you have tried it? Did you read the documentation/instructions?

There may be some minimum length of noise sample that is required for proper functionality. Generally, the longer the better, but uniform, avoiding transient noises.

Of course, software "noise reduction" is an inferior kludge at best and is NEVER as good as getting a decent recording in the first place. All "noise reduction" does some degree of damage to the signal that you want to preserve, and it is always a trade-off of how much noise you want removed vs. how badly mangled you can tolerate the remaining signal.
 
It will be grayed out till you have a valid noise print so that it's gray at the start is normal. I would give it a try but I actually deleted STP from the machine so...

STP has always been a DAW that only FCP editors could really like. As such it's OK but it doesn't have a lot of the features sound editors meed and is it even in FCPX now? If so I suspect not for long. It will I'm pretty sure follow Color and LiveType and DVDSP into oblivion as FCPX becomes a unified "super" iMovie.

I kept the FCP suite on my machine mostly so I could help out pict editors with issues in getting me projects. It's really hard to talk someone through a visual interface you can't see. But now that I won't be getting FCP projects much anymore, pretty much everyone who needs post has moved on to Adobe or Avid (since FCPX can't send projects to other apps), it was a waste of disk space.

To your question. RX by iZotope is the only affordable high quality NR on the Mac. Sound Soap is also OK but...

Waves is good but about 4X the price, and arguable if it's "better" (I don't think so but some do).
 
Yes, by all means doing what you can to get the original sound clean is best. Thanks, I will check out iZotope. The person I'm working with on the sound has used Soundtrack for noise reduction in the past, and is as puzzled as I am why the REDUCE NOISE item stays greyed out. The length of the noise print sample is two seconds or so. So it doesn't seem the sample should be insufficient.
 
Did you try double clicking the clip to open in it first in the STP file editor?
You cannot apply noise reduction directly to clips in the timeline for some reason.

Some clips respond very well to STP's NR, others less so. For best results try fiddling with threshold and definitely listen to 'noise only' before you apply it.

Tip:
For dialogue you may find that after you've applied NR, the voice sounds OK but breaths in-between words sound weird.
If that's the case then you can lower the volume of the breaths (if the clip isn't too long!) by using amplitude adjust over the breaths only.
Then reorder the actions in actions tab so that the NR is last.
 
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