How to remove background noise in FCP X?

Check out “Audio Enhancements” by “Michael Wohl”:

http://www.nedwebserver.com/ned-web/finalcutprox101-overview-and-quick-start-gui de&nedweb&site=MPV&&sid=7im9g0r1pvl9d8i72npsr9lgj7

Regards

Nolan

Adam,

Nolan gave you a good reference. I came from a sound engineering background, and there are a few other tricks you can use to make it better (not fix entirely). Your biggest problem is that the unboard mics are not as close as the lapel mic to the sound source and therefore they pickup the room ambience (reflections, echos, reverb, etc). The other problem is that they pickup the noise of others or other things in the room in addition to the sound of your subject. You cannot completely fix it, but you can make it better. First, you could use the Background Noise Removal in the Audio Enhancements as Nolan points out. This can be a good first step. Personally I have found that it seems to take out some of the lower volume levels of my subjects speech as well so I need to use something in addition to it or rather than it often. Here's what I do ...

Click on your audio clip, or the video clip that contains the audio. Then look at the Inspector under the Audio tab. Then, in the Audio Enhancements section click on the little sound mixer icon to the right of Equalization. A sound mixer EQ window will come up. Click on the 10 Band and choose 31 band instead. Pull down every slider from 125 HZ and lower to about -5 to -6dB. This will take some of your bass out, but that is where most of the room echos reside, and therefore this is a crucial step to reducting room noise.

Second, boost 3.1K (3,100 HZ) by about 5.5dB. This is an area that sound engineering people know makes the voice cut through the mix of other frequencies and gives the impression the speaker is more energetic or excited about what they are saying. Thirdly, if it is a male speaker, boost the area at 250HZ by about 5 dB. If is is a female, boost the area at 350 HZ by about 5dB instead. Then pull down the 16 HZ area by about 6dB and boost up the 20K to 22K area by about 5dB. This former will help get rid of some of the background noise, while the latter will boost what we call presence and make it seem like the speaker is closer to the microphone.

Finally, you can also reduce 6KHZ and 12KHZ by about 4 to 5dB if they help in your particular situation. Then, one last trick is that, if it is appropriate in your project, put some sort of faint music or sound background there with the voice on another "track" (connected clip). This will draw attention away from the background noise in the speaker's track and the listener will switch back to the speaker when the speaker is saying something. Anyway, like I said ... it really cannot be fixed ... but it can be improved. Best wishes.

stephen

One thing is if the audio you are trying to remove sounds the same as what you are trying to keep (like trying to remove people talking in the background versus someone speaking in the foreground), then it gets more tricky.

I've had good results using SoundSoap. It's not very expensive and It works as a plug-in for FCP X - fixed an interview with it last week and the results were impressive. It will take out background noises, hiss, pops, clicks, etc.

Jeremy

Thank you still_learning!

Thanks to your EQ settings my audio is sounding sweeer.! 🙂

Thank you and have an amazing day!

I had some trouble with white noise on interview footage I had imported into Final Cut Pro X (FCP X); there was an issue with the lav mic I hadn't noted during the production stage. This was loud white noise overlaying the footage on the audio channels. The pitch of my interviewees were also different – one high, one low. I wasn't particularly keen on using an audio programme, just because of the headache of de-linking/linking video/audio in my particular timeframe. However, I am aware that there are programmes that can filter out background noise based on the baseline audio between dialogue (e.g. Audacity) and there are tutorials for these.

After a few hours of tinkering, I found the following useful:

• Audio enhancement – background noise removal. Audio enhancement also carries it with 'Loudness' and 'Hum Removal'; be careful with these. I didn't find Hum Removal useful for my purposes. After a certain level, however, the BG noise removal feature does distort the audio, so I would recommend playing around. You lose volume with this, so you have to make adjustments otherwise.
• EQ adjustment – dialogue, 100% pan.
• EQ adjustment. The white noise may be particularly loud on high or low frequencies.
• Audio filters – pre-gain, and gain, to raise volume.

I would also note – pay attention to the waveforms on the audio channel. Where red and yellow, the audio tends to be particularly harsh-sounding; it's advisable to bring the volume down in such cases. Of course, there are instances where the baseline audio quality will not allow for this.

Different voices/pitches will require different settings, unfortunately. Once you find a good setting, it's easy enough to copy and paste the attributes of the audio over the rest of the footage.

After trying different combinations, I managed to achieve an acceptable and relatively good quality result. And felt a great deal of relief!