How do I extract video from an old home video?

Question

Hello all!

I'm new here, but I was hoping some of you might be able to help me out. In short, I'm trying to pick apart a piece of audio from an old home movie of my dad and I singing and playing guitar when I was very young. My dad is gone now, and it's a very special video to me, and I would like to have the audio file of just him and me singing/playing guitar. In the video, my mom is recording, and my little brother is running around screeching, and basically there's just a lot of background noise I don't want. I have Adobe creative cloud and all the programs that come with that, so I was wondering if anyone on here could teach me how to pick a part this file (once converted to an audio file, of course), so I could accomplish this task. Any recommendations?

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted Answer

I downloaded it and had a listen. As I expected, it's going to be difficult to do very much with this, and Audition doesn't really have the right tools to do a specialist job on it. You can improve it somewhat with iZotope's RX7, but even with that there's no way you are going to get anything like a clean performance out of it, especially in the middle. It's not really the noise that's an issue, it's the interruptions that are somewhat louder than the part you want to hear that cause the most difficulty. RX7 does have a significant trick up its sleeve that helps, but paying out for the software seems a bit excessive for a single track, I would have thought. Also, there's quite a learning curve on it - takes a while to get the best out of it, definitely.

To give you some sort of an idea (although I think it could be improved upon slightly) here is a link to the RX7 cleaned up version: Country Road_RX7

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Answer

We can probably give you some advice - but not without hearing the resultant audio file first. That's the only way we can find out what it's actually possible to do with it, as they are all different - some respond better to treatment than others do. One thing that's important though is that if you are going to attempt to remove some of the inevitable noise from the file, you need to capture some 'silence' (where nothing is happening), otherwise there won't be anything to capture a noise print from. The other important thing to do is to make sure you capture the audio as a wav file, not an MP3 or anything compressed; that also makes a considerable difference to the noise reduction that can be achieved.

I should warn you now though that general uncorrelated running around and screaming will be very difficult to remove, as is any sound that isn't continuous. It's a bit like trying to unbake a cake - you can't really do it, although you might get the sultanas out, I suppose. Most of the problem is that the unwanted sounds and their harmonics fall in the same frequency range as the wanted ones, and there is no way to differentiate between them.

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