How can I eliminate the noise of a camera shutter from the audio track?

[drferry]

I was shooting a very interesting video of tool use by Hyacinth Macaws in the Pantanal, Brazil, using my Nikon DSLR and a 600 mm lens, and there were other photographers there who were also shooting stills, so I have the sound of their shutters scattered throughout the video clips.  I know this is a multiple-frequency sound, but it is very short in duration when it occurs and the interval between the sounds is fixed.  Is there a way to eliminate this noise?  Thanks!

[excited_Genie16B8]

I don't think you can.

I often have to shoo away photographers when filming a wedding for the same reason.  Being stills people, they don't have an awareness of sound's importance and often tend to make way too much of it.

[Meg The Dog]

If you were shooting on a 600mm lens, and recording sound from the on camera microphone, I assume there is no natural sound of the image you were taking (the sound of the tool in use, for example) to protect, but rather that the on-camera microphone of the DSLR picked up ambient sound in the immediate area of the camera body location.

There is no easy or automatic way to fix the camera shutter sounds, but what you might try doing is seeing if you do have relatively long portions of appropriate audio, without the shutter noises, either elsewhere on the source clip or on another clip and use that "clean" audio to replace the sound with the shutter noises. You may need to repeat those "clean" audio sources, crossfading them each time you loop the track to get enough material to cover the bad sound.

MtD

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

For this work, I'd go directly to Audition ... and post the query on the Audition forum ...

Audition CS5.5, CS6 & CC

And try to get the attention of say SteveG(AudioMasters) or ryclark or https://forums.adobe.com/people/Bob%20Howes

It's hard to do much, but ... you might be able to do some. It becomes an issue of choosing which "bad" is the better bad. A little frequency modification, how much noise do you have to remove, that sort of thing.

Neil

[drferry]

Thanks for the great advice.  I went to the Audition Forum, and Bob Howes replied and answered the question.  It involved downloading Audition and spending a couple of hours getting used to the interface, but the basic idea is to isolate the noise in Spectral View and then use the Spot Healing Brush to paint over the offending sound.  Audition then attempts to fill in around the sound to make a seamless background.  Since the camera clicks are so short, this works very well. It is impossible to tell in the finished product where the clicks were.

For a more accurate solution, it is apparently possible to isolate the sound by selecting it (basically drawing around its spectrum using various tools as in Photoshop) and then more scientifically reconstructing the background.  I didn't get into any of that.

Again, thanks to everyone who replied!

[R Neil Haugen]

Glad Bob was of use. I find him to be an incredibly valuable help!

Neil

[drferry]

Thanks, everyone.  I was using the built-in microphone in my Nikon.  I could just delete the audio track, but there are a bunch of cool bird sounds in the background, including flycatchers, a jacana in the nearby swamp, and an occasional squawk from other macaws.  I did use a high pass filter to get rid of boat noise on the nearby river.  I'll try posting it in the Audition Forum.

David Ferry

[Mau7rice]

In either Audition or Premiere itself try using a high pass filter in the section(s) of video where you have that problem. But generally speaking yeah if you have to ask someone to step back or step away then do so. Not rudely but as polite as posible, An external mic or separate audio recording device might help also