need a challenge? help me fix this audio?

[Keebler]

Hi folks,

Wondering if anyone has any audio repair tips for the following clip? I have about 20 minutes of footage and it would be great to clean it up.

But I'm aware I'm probably SOL on it.

Details:
filmed with a head cam (Drift Innovation), but the problem was a busted external microphone (regular 2 channel mic..nothing fancy). No foam around the outside and another piece was busted off (although I believe it was more cosmetic than anything). It broke when I caught it on a branch

There is a bad hiss. The challenge is that I have guys talking to me on a radio and you can barely make it out, but it would be fantastic if I could somehow clean it.

Tools I have Soundtrack, FCP7 and FCX. X's built in audio tools do nothing for it. I can use the AUGraphicEQ filter in 7, but since it's only 2 channel, the sounds are linked so it's hard to kill that hiss without killing the radio chats.

The radio calls aren't frequent so I could kill most of the hiss before those spots.

Here is the file (just a 6 seconds worth):

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/46156504/keebler audio issue2.mov

Original is HD, but I made this 16:9 so it's smaller to dload.

Any help would be absolutely fantastic. It's for personal use, but important to a group of guys.

Cheers,
Keebler

 

[daybreak]

Tried to play your clip but it would not.
Could you not redo the sound in a controlled environment?

 

[Keebler]

Tried to play your clip but it would not.
Could you not redo the sound in a controlled environment?

very weird. it's a quicktime file output from FCP7.

As for the sound, nope. It was from a headcam field in the forest. No way to redo it unfortunately.

 

[floh]

The file works fine for me. I quickly threw the noise removal of the free tool Audacity on it, and it worked quite nicely, so I think it should be doable.

Luckily, you have a lot of real "silence" with just the noise in this shot. I know that Audacity (and probably many other audio editors, but right now I don't have the time to try them out) has a noise removal option where you can just select a part that is "just noise" and it will analyze this noise. Then you can have it removed from the whole file.

To verify if this really works, you would have to send a small part with a little more sound in it that you actually want to keep. This way, I'm not really able to judge how much the noise removal is affecting the spoken words.

 

[floh]

I just tried the same thing in Soundtrack Pro, which you seem to have.

I can tell you the rough steps, but the exact Menu items might be named differently since my version of Soundtrack Pro is German and I'm merely translating...

Load the file (actually I just loaded the demuxed Audio part, but Soundtrack should probably be able to deal with the video, too). Mark a part (as long as possible) that is noise only and then from the "Process" menu, choose the submenu "hissing supression" click on "set fingerprint for hiss noise". Then you can select the whole file and again from "Process"->"hissing supression" you can click on "reduce hiss".

Fiddle around with the parameters using the preview. It will not be perfect, but definitely improve the sound quality. Maybe try to hide it with a nicely recorded room tone to lay over the whole scene.

Good luck!

 

[daybreak]

Sorry misread your post. My apology.