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Removing car noise from the background of an interview

I recently shot a series of interviews where there is a lot of car sounds in the background. It's not a constant city traffic noise, but rather a single cars and trucks speeding by. Of course when we scouted the location there was no traffic at all but the day of the shoot there was a nearby event and we had no choice but to do the interviews. Is there any way to separate out to remove that kind of noise and leave the interview intact? Thanks in advance for any help.

Gary

macbook pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Dec 5, 2009 9:28 AM

Reply
8 replies

Jan 3, 2010 10:12 AM in response to Studio X

<edited by host>

try this -
For consistent tones interfering with your files, i cant stress enough the magic of editing the frequency spectrum of an audio file. IT IS A FEATURE MANY STP USERS ARE NOT AWARE OF. It is easy to do:

... in the audio file editor window, select the upper right tool in the window to show the frequency spectrum display instead of the wave form.

Right click the left grey area of the window outside the audio file (where the frequency graph is) and select"logarithmic" view - then right click on the file itself and select "show spectrum controls" - use the minimum and maximum frequency controls to highlight your buzz - which will be visibly obvious.

then select the frequency select tool - right next to the arrow in the upper left window of the file editor ( NOT at the top of the session, which contains a different set of similar tools) - once you click on the frequency select tool, you will get a cross hair tool in the audio window. If you use that to narrow in on the visual line of the buzz, highlight it, and then delete those frequencies - you will be amazed at how clean it will sound. Its magic!

http://www.lynda.com/ provides wonderful tutorials - and can be accessed free for a time, in demo mode. Good luck!

Jan 7, 2010 3:17 PM in response to gmatoso

Trust me you cannot do anything to fix it. You have to Go With it. In other words, if there are parts you need to cut together where the car sound abruptly stops you put a car in there to finish the sound and make it "real" sounding again.

In one movie I did there was a cement cutting saw about a block away. I had to inter cut the shots and some had the saw and other didn't. So I took the saw sound and worked into the scenes that didn't have any. Anyway it made the scene "real".

As far as getting the cars out with noise reduction, you are going to have an issue with destroying some of the dialog because the car sounds are very broad band. Noise reduction will "perhaps" reduce them a little and not mess with the voice. BUT don't count on it.

I would try to minimize the car noise and maximize the dialog with a parametric EQ. Take some of the bottom end out of the cars so they don't sound so big. Kick up the intelligibility range of your talkers but don't use too much.

ADR will be a pain and you would have to have to rebuild the ambiance to match anything you didn't loop...

RE-SHOOT IF YOU CAN

Daniel Shattuck CVFT
Forensic Audio Examiner
Certified Forensic Video Technician

Message was edited by: Blearyeyes

Removing car noise from the background of an interview

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