How to remove big room reverb and flanging artifacts from smartphone video?

[XilburQost]

I've got a smartphone video of people taking turns speaking from a lecturn in a large, reverb-rich indoor space. The spoken words are barely intelligible, and I'm hoping to improve the quality. I'm hearing two severe issues throughout:

- Booming reverb/echoes
- A warbly flange/under water effect; I'm thinking is a compression artifact

Per helpful tutorials I've found online, I've played with Audition's DeReverb and tried minimizing echo by tweaking frequencies via Audition's parametric EQ, but the results are only marginally better.

I'm especially wondering if there's a tool that might help remediate the warbly flange effect?

Any suggestions for an amateur? Thanks.

[EuanWilliamson]

Hi,

To start, please reply with a 30 sec or some sample of the audio you are having the problem with. 
Until we hear it,  it will be difficult to offer possible solutions. 

[XilburQost]

Thank you for the reply, Euan. Attached is a sample of the problem audio.

[emmrecs]

Although I am most definitely NOT an expert user of AA, having listened to your sample I think the chances of doing anything even slightly successful to "improve" this audio are virtually nil, sorry!

The "flange" effect very much resembles what is produced when effects like Noise Reduction are excessively applied to any audio.  Unfortunately, once this is "baked into" your file there is no way to reverse its effect.

For the excessive reverb, again, although I have used a number of different "dereverb" tools, I know of none that would have any likelihood of any success with your file.

[EuanWilliamson]

Thank you for the sample.

Can you confirm: was this the audio directly from the phone without any processing?

[XilburQost]

Thank you for the response, emmrecs. I thought it was a bit of a lost cause (all the tutorials I saw addressed far less severe issues).

Euan--the video comes from a smart phone video uploaded to YouTube by a third party, the link forwarded to me by a friend requesting my help, so I'm suspecting that any post-smart phone processing was applied by YouTube itself, and from my experience with YouTube that processing was relatively minor compared to the problems inherent in the video itself.

While I have relatively little experience with this stuff, I suspect that the original video (it's 720p) was recorded on an older smart phone and that the phone's software applied the heavy noise reduction/compression, so it's truly "baked" into the video. 

[EuanWilliamson]

Sadly I fear that @emmrecs is correct.

Unless you can find a copy that is a better starting point, I fear that there will be little to be done to improve upon what you have.

[XilburQost]

Thank you again everyone for your feedback. I don't think there's anything else to be done with the video, unless they can provide me with a less-processed version. I check back in here if that happens with my results.