Wind Noise Reduction

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
March 9, 2009
6 replies
26412 views

I'm using PPCS3 for a project and have a video interview piece that was shot outside. The subject was wearing a lav mic with a windscreen on it, but there is still a considerable amount of wind noise coming through. Can anyone suggest a way to at least reduce the wind noise without reducing the vocal quality too badly? I have the entire CS3 suite, so Soundbooth is also available to me.

Thank you in advance for your help.
-Ken

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A

andyskullshoes

Participant

Jim_Simon is right wind noise comes in boomy and muddy, but reducing only the frequencies involved with Equalisation isn't enough. The dynamics (loud and quiet) and boominess of the wind can be the most distracting part. You can use multi-band compression to tame and control the dynamics and then Equalisation to tame the frequencies and it can be very effective. This article was pretty useful in helping with wind noise 5-pro-tips-to-reducing-wind-noise

M

morrisonvpAuthor

Participant

Thanks everyone for your responses. I'll give them a try.
-Ken

B

Bill_Seper

Participant

Also, rather than make one heavy pass with NR, sometimes it works better to make two light passes.

_

_raymond_setzer_

Participant

The noise reduction tool in Soundbooth will do an ok job. Iv'e found
however that if the wind is light, it removes fairly well, but if you
have to remove some heavy whooshing sounds, you can get them out, but
the final output will be just a tad on the metallic side.

B

Bill_Seper

Participant

I haven't used Soundbooth Ken, so I don't know if it has any NR features with it. Audition has some very good noise reduction tools though. There are NR plugins you can buy that may work well too, but I'm not sure of their prices.

If you get stuck, and it's a short file (like ten minutes or so) you're welcome to send it to me, and hit it with some NR for you. I do a lot more audio work than video actually.

If you want to try what Jim said, I would use a narrow band parametric EQ with a sweepable Q, lower it way down to about -20db, and just sweep the EQ across the frequncy spectrum until you hit the sweet spot. Once you find it bring the db back up until you find a place where it still sounds good but has also taken out much of the noise. It's not as good as using NR, but sometimes that works quite well.