sound speration software

[mollymoo]

Hi i have some footage of a wedding and have recorded the sound seperatley, unforunately it has the wind and also later music in the background that fades out the speeches. Is there anyway to seperate the frequencies so I can delete one and keep the other so you can at least hear what they are saying. I have adobe audition, but not sure how to use it. ANy ideas or other software. thanks

[smorodina]

If all the sound is on one mono track, I fear you will have no luck. You could try playing around with boosting the middle frequencies which may make the speech more audible, but it probably won't be by much. My personal favourite software is 'Soundforge'. 'Cooledit Pro' is good too.

[wideboy]

I have used the FREE program 'Audacity' and used its noise removal facility.

[badams]

Unfortunately "Audacity" or any other software will not clean up this type of recording.  These automatic noise reduction tools are great at removing hiss, and other electronic noises, (especially when the noise level is well below the signal level) but they cannot discriminate between "signal" and "noise", when the "signal" (speech in this case) is at a much lower level than the "noise" (music etc.).  Wind noise will be virtually impossible to remove.  Because it typically has a lot of low bass content (caused by the wind trying to blow the diaphragm out of the mic!), the automatic gain control (used in most domestic video equipment to set the recording level) "ducks" the level to compensate for what it considers to be a very loud noise.  When the ducking occurs, the signal (speech etc.) is severly ducked along with the wind noise, and will be at such a low level that it will be almost irrecoverable.

Even with very expensive studio equipment, and many years of experience using it, cleaning up a recording like this will rarely produce acceptable results.

Unless the speech is critical to the video, replace the entire soundtrack with music!