audio filter?

[unclelar]

is there any way of filtering out background noise from an audio track with VS7. ambient noise such as cars going by or other people talking/
I dont think this is possible but thought i would ask.
thanks

[BrianCee]

You could mute the whole sound track and and a new one complete but no you cannot selectively remove sounds within UVS7 - but you could export the soundtrack complete and then import it into a dedicated sound file manipulation package (Soundforge etc.) - but what you want to do will be quite difficult and certainly time consuming - then when you have finished put the sound track back into UVS - but you could now have difficulty synching sound and picture.

[Trevor Andrew]

Using sound forge you can open Mpegs and view/edit the audio track without the need to split audio in Video Studio.

You need the Main Concept Mpeg plugin.

[DVDDoug]

None of these filters are perfect.

Visual Studio has an audio noise filter which I haven't tried. For audio editing, I've used Goldwave ($45) for many years... much longer than I've been playing around with video. Goldwave has a noise filter too. You can try Goldwave free.

With Goldwave, you have to extract the audio to a wave file first. Of course, you have to be careful not to make any edits that change the length of the audio file, or otherwise upset the A/V sync. I just finished a project where I used Goldwave to create a censored sountrack. Then, I made a DVD (with DVD Workshop) which included both the censored & unsensored soundtracks.

Quoting myself -

There are lots of programs around that "try" to remove noise. It's a very common feature in audio editing programs. Most of them work by taking a noise-only sample, and comparing that to the noise and audio together. If there is a good "signal to noise ratio", you should have good results removing the noise. In this case, you can usually only hear the noise during the quite parts. The program can just turn-off the sound completely when there is no program-sound. If you have a strong audio signal, you should be able to remove the tape-motor noise. You might have to experiment with the filter settings to get the best results.

If the noise is loud, or the good sound is quite, noise reduction can be "difficult". It can be darn near impossible for the computer to extract the "good sound" from the sound & noise mixed together. Lets say you've got an interview where someone rides-by on a loud motorcycle... you can't remove that noise! If you've got a recording of a symphony with lots of quiet-delicate parts, you might not be able to remove the noise without removing or distorting those quiet parts. If you record a rock concert, you'll never hear the tape-motor noise (very high signal to noise), but you'll never be able to remove the crowd noise (low signal to noise).

Noise reduction can turn good audio onto very-good audio. It can't help if the noise is very bad... the cure can be worse than the disease.

"Real" movies are either shot in a sound-controlled environment (i.e a "soundstage") or the dialog is re-recorded in a recording studio while the actor lip-syncs to the video clip... maybe with the original sound playing thru headphones. Probably 99% of the sound you hear in a movie theator is created after the "film" is shot!

With live TV, the microphone is always close to the speaker's mouth... to keep that high signal-to-noise ratio.