How to remove background talking but keep natural background sounds.

[patrickh27764550]

I made a video out the window of a plane at takeoff.  The video footage is great, however for the first 3 minutes of the video, the airline has the safety video and comercial's playing, ruining the ambience and feel tht I'm trying to provide for my viewers..  I'm trying to remove the talking but preserve the noise of the plane and the engines.

I extracted the audio into an MP3 since I figured this might be a task for Adobe Audition rather than Premiere Pro.  

I attached a screenshot from Audition.  Prior to the playhead, I can see where all of the chatter is in the red marks in the purple area and even the yellow lines in the red area.  If there's a way to isolate those and remove them, awesome.

Please note that I've use Audition only a few times and probably only the most basic tasks, but I'd like to learn how to do this.  See attached MP3 file.  Any help is appreciated.  Thanks

[SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted solution]

Couple of things: Firstly, Audition's native format is wav, not MP3. In fact it has to convert your MP3 back to wav in order to open it at all. And MP3 is a lossy format (it employs masking to cut the size down) so that doesn't generally help with assessing a file at all.

Secondly, I think you'll have a lot of difficulty with removing the speech and not the noise, because it's in the same frequency band and at a very similar level - so there's very little to discriminate against. I have an alternative you can try which will work a lot better, though. Search a few sound effect libraries and find a similar in-flight effect - there will be plenty. This will work fine; none of your viewers will be able to tell the difference, because they weren't there anyway!

[patrickh27764550]

Steve – thanks for the feedback. I don’t have much experience with working with audio and audition. Fortunately, I have a good collection of takeoff-landing videos that I can try and dub the sound in. That was actually my next idea if you didn’t have anything better.

I’ll keep in mind to work with wav files going forward if necessary.