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AlluringImminence
Inspiring
August 5, 2017
Answered

Huge Static Spikes from Mics - Anything I Can Do?

  • August 5, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 2290 views

Hey there Adobe users,

I have some audio that sounds clean for the most part, but there are a couples of places where the mic just goes crazy and there's a huge static spike, sometimes it's when the person isn't talking at all. That's easy to fix, by just bringing up the orange and purple noise graph (don't know what it's called), highlighting the static spike, and then deleting that portion. But other times it's when the person is talking, I am guessing that because the spike in static may land in the same frequencies as speech, it's going to be hard to isolate it and remove it, correct? And the first spike is probably unworkable, but what about the second slight one?

Please listen to the excerpt below, and suggestion some possible fixes.

Vocaroo | Voice message

Thank you!

EDIT: Tried using the healing brush, but that sort of just smudges all the frequencies together.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer ryclark

Unfortunately the noises appear to be drop out splats from wireless mic interference. In the Spectral Frequency display, as you have found, you can identify the 'splats' but removing them is virtually impossible when they are over the speech. The Spot Healing Brush is the best tool. But there isn't any speech signal to recover under the bigger dropouts so you will always be left with a gap. In your example clip the second splat at around 3:21 can be removed fairly successfully with a Spot Healing Brush size of 28px. But the larger one at 2:13 will, I'm afraid, leave a hole in the audio. So it may be better to just delete that one but the speech will be left with a jump unless you can find the same word elsewhere in the recording and copy it into the gap.

When using the Brush tools you can make drawing a vertical line with the Tool easier by holding the Shift key whilst dragging the mouse downwards. This confines the Brush to drawing an absolutely straight line rather than a rather wiggly hand drawn one.

1 reply

ryclark
ryclarkCorrect answer
Participating Frequently
August 5, 2017

Unfortunately the noises appear to be drop out splats from wireless mic interference. In the Spectral Frequency display, as you have found, you can identify the 'splats' but removing them is virtually impossible when they are over the speech. The Spot Healing Brush is the best tool. But there isn't any speech signal to recover under the bigger dropouts so you will always be left with a gap. In your example clip the second splat at around 3:21 can be removed fairly successfully with a Spot Healing Brush size of 28px. But the larger one at 2:13 will, I'm afraid, leave a hole in the audio. So it may be better to just delete that one but the speech will be left with a jump unless you can find the same word elsewhere in the recording and copy it into the gap.

When using the Brush tools you can make drawing a vertical line with the Tool easier by holding the Shift key whilst dragging the mouse downwards. This confines the Brush to drawing an absolutely straight line rather than a rather wiggly hand drawn one.

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