How to increase the actors' dialogue volume but not the background ac

Question

How to increase the actors' dialogue volume but not the background air conditioner in the car which was way blowing air way too loud and I had a hard time lowering the blowing noise of the car's air conditioner with Dehummer and Noise Reduction and after that is somewhat accomplished now, I would need to raise the volume of the actors' dialogue without pumping up the volume of the background ac noise in the car again ? How to ? Thanks in advance.

Bob Howes · Answer

When you did the Noise Reduction, did you use the "Process" in Waveform view or the real time one in Multitrack? Also, if the Process, did you follow the FAQ about using 4 or so light passes rather than trying to do it all at once.

What I'm leading round to is that I've had good luck removing large amounts of A/C noise using the Waveform version but by taking four light passes (say about 10-15% on the NR slider and around 10dB on the amount of reduction). If you can, go back to your original track without the Dehummer and NR. Do you first pass with the FFT size set to 2048 then increase by one setting (FFT size is on the advanced menu), getting a new noise sample at each setting.

Working this way may get enough reduction for you. If you still want more (and if you've got a reasonable level difference between the voice and the A/C) an application of Compression (probably Effects/Amplitude and Compression/Dynamic Processing) might help a bit. You'll have to very carefully set the threshold to be between the A/C sound level and the voice level.

Note though that all of this depends on there being a noticeable difference in level between the background noise and the voice. If the A/C is totally trampling the voice, it would get very hard to separate them.

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