Old
Record: Very good results in a heartbeat, well actually
two heartbeats. The Noise Reduction plugin, followed
by Click & Crackle Remover did the trick. You could
also just use the Vinyl Restoration plugin, but I opted
for the greater flexibility offered by chaining those
other two together.
Living
Room: Excellent results in about five minutes! I
started with the "default for fast computers"
preset, captured the noiseprint by looping a section
of audio between sentences, tweaked the Attack and Release
settings until the speech sounded as natural as possible
and adjusted the amount of reduction until it was gone.
NR2 did a better job than some others of reducing
the whine from a PC fan in the background along with
the HVAC system. Interestingly, the the voice of interviewee
sounded a bit brighter after NR2 did it's work.
Large
Foyer: Decent results in about 10 minutes. I couldn't
really get NR2 to take out all of the HVAC noise
in this sample without adversely affecting the speaking.
Basically, I just set NR2 to a point where it
would reduce as much noise as possible without the artifacts,
then placed a noise gate with a slow "close"
time of around 1.5 seconds. This allowed the natural
reverberation of the room to decay naturally while keeping
the remaining HVAC noise from being distracting between
sentences.
Outside+Cell:
If you read the first article in this series you know
that this clip is nearly impossible to clean up in post.
We purposely choose one of these because we know that
sometime microfilmmakers are in the unfortunate position
of simply not having anything else to work with for
a given shot. This sample is really in need of an adaptive
solution with several layers of noise reduction for
the many types of noise that are occurring sporadically
throughout. NR2 simply doesn't include anything
that can adapt quite like this, so as one might imagine,
the results were less than stellar. It did do a good
job of getting rid of the noise of a given section,
but as soon as the wind or the cell phone buzz changed,
it became quite obvious that this is not the software
package for these types of problems.
