Clean Up Podcasts in iZotope RX 9

[Music] hey guys sam here at na studios today i'm going to take a look at isotope rx9 and how i can process podcast audio using this now i have some great features for getting rid of what we don't want plosives mouth clicks and the like and also recovering what we don't have typically in a podcast scenario where someone's sending me some files to edit they're going to be sending them as an mp3 because in an hour-long podcast it's going to be a very large file for wav and just for voice it's kind of deemed as okay to be mp3 but it doesn't mean that we should sacrifice the audio quality and rx has a great set of features that can really bring back some of that quality that we would expect from a wow file and just get it from an mp3 which is kind of magic let's jump right in and take a look at how we can do this so first up here i've got a piece of audio that goes over the middle break of this particular podcast and it's kind of an advert to check out their patreon page let's take a listen to it and identify a few issues if you're enjoying the podcast please come and join our supporters on patreon go to patreon.com forward slash lubbers hole okay so there are uh two things really that i can hear there the first of them is that we're hearing some of that mp3 nest to it we're hearing some of that kind of weird stuff in the high end that i don't like so i'd like to bring back some of that high end and we can do that really easily i'd also like to get rid of some of the plosives i'm going to combat the high frequency issues first and then go to the plosives afterwards so first off i'm going to go to this spectral recovery tool which is fantastic at just bringing back some of that high end that is missing and with the handy compare tool we can compare the original audio with some settings that we can just test out so first off then we've got the amount slider valve sibilant balance cut off and smoothing the top two are the ones that i'm really worried about here the cutoff is telling rx at which point you want it to start affecting that high end it's set to 6k by default i can see on the spectrogram that i do have a fair amount of detail up to maybe 10k it starts to roll off so i'm going to leave that at 6k for the moment and see how it manages that high end it may be that we need to alter afterwards we'll take a look and the amount i've got set to 80. by default that's set to 50 but i'd like to be quite aggressive with this as i think it's quite a um it's something that that needs quite a lot of help so let's bring that up to 79.80 same difference and let's just go to compare and let's take a listen to the original audio and then we'll click over to the process audio and hear how it has affected the high end if you're enjoying the podcast please come and join our supporters on patreon go to patreon.com forward slash lubbers whole that is super easy to hear we could see it on the spectrogram as it changed as we went to the settings and back to the original audio but more importantly we can hear it was as if a blanket had just been lifted off that voice and we got so much more of that high frequency detail in there that's a winner in my book i'm going to click render and it's already applied the processing as it loads it into the buffer so it's super quick in this instance i don't even need to alter any of these controls i think it sounds fantastic as it is if you're missing a little bit of that high frequency detail still you can bring up that amount you can make it so that it's affecting a lower frequency and then it's going to affect a larger range of frequencies in this scenario that is absolutely perfect that's just taken a few seconds i'd like to take a look at these plosives next and there's a couple of ways that we can do this i'd like to take a look at both of them and just see which is most beneficial in this scenario so let's take a listen from the beginning and just identify where those plosives are to my ear there are three areas if you're enjoying the podcast please come and join our supporters on patreon go to patreon.com forward slash lubbers whole so to my ear there are three issues there one where he says please and two where he says patreon the second isn't as bad as the first um but let's take a listen to that please first of all please come and join us support so please where the air has obviously gone into the vocal microphone and has just created a bit of a plosive let's use the built in deplosive module and just see if right off the bat we can get rid of that super easy so i'm going to go to my deplosive module and these are the default settings it's got it set to 200 hertz sensitivity halfway and strength halfway for a male voice or for a deep voice i like to bring this 200 down to maybe 180 possibly sometimes a little bit lower just because it kind of tends to retain a little bit of that that deep voice vibe there let's just select the area and i'm going to bring up the strength to around nine as this is just one element that i want to get rid of if i were to run this deplosive just on the entire track then i'd maybe be a little gentler with it i'd maybe bring that strength down to the default of five um but because i'm just only in on this one area i can be a bit more aggressive so sensitivity at default five strength 8.6 frequency limit down a touch to 180 let's see what it does click render and let's take a listen to it cast please come and join our supporters on patreon it's completely got rid of that plosive let's take a listen to it before please come and join us and then after we apply that plosive please come and join our supporters on patreon cool so for the second one i'm not going to use this deplosive i'm going to do it the manual way and just see which one kind of works better so i think it's just around here and we can see on the spectrogram anything that's brighter that means it's louder and as it's down the bottom that is the low frequency area so we know just by looking at it that is the area that we need to affect patreon go to so where it says patreon on patreon go to p okay so i'm going to press z and zoom in on just that area and as we said we can see just here where it is now a great feature in rx is the instant process tool and i like to use this as often as possible if we click instant process i've got gain selected and i like to have this at around minus 10 db you can be a bit more aggressive you can go to -20 or you can do less just means that relative to what you've got set you need to do it more times or fewer times so for this as it's set to -10 i'm going to be taking down the area that i draw out by 10 db so i'm going to go to my brush tool which is super handy it's kind of like photoshop and audio you can just brush over the element that you want to get rid of and it will get rid of it so for this we can see exactly where we're getting rid of it and by how much so i'm going to use my brush tool and just brush over this area and release and it's got rid of it let's go back and just take a listen to if it's got rid of it enough or if it's not got rid of it quite as much as we want porter's on patreon perfect it's got rid of it completely now that one is not quite as quick maybe it's not got a custom built module for it but you can see that if you have um a preset dialed in in the deplosive module you know that you're applying it to the same voice each time you can create your own preset to say right this person's voice uses these settings this strength this sensitivity this frequency range and it's going to be quicker if just as quick as doing it with the brush tool the brush tool is kind of digging in a little bit more but if you've got an hour's worth of audio then it may not be beneficial for you to dig into each individual plosive but two ways both that work fantastically well next up then we've got another audio file loaded in and this is two people that do a podcast together and unfortunately one of them has something in the room that often makes quite an obtrusive noise let's take a listen to it loyalty to bonaparte uh let's take a listen one more time loyalty to bonaparte uh you know yeah he's got a parrot and it's in the same room uh and it makes quite a lot of noise quite often now typically we would be screwed with that because it's too difficult to eq out to gate out you're just not going to get there there's two ways we can go into this we can do this the fast way or we can do this the slower but more in-depth way let's go for the fast way first and this is dialog isolate now if i just select this one area just so we can kind of zone in on this bit and if we go over to dialogue isolate then this algorithm has been updated in rx9 in rx8 it was brilliant but it's even better now and it is just absolutely invisible you just can't tell when it's being used and it just does exactly what it says on the tin just for this one section i'm going to apply this dialogue isolate i'm not touching anything other than putting the sensitivity up to 10 because this is quite an obtrusive noise ambience preservation is down at zero we're on the best quality because we want it to sound great i'm just going to click render and you're going to hear that parrot just completely disappear and the voice is going to be far more upfront far richer and it's just going to be just the voice which is exactly what we want let's take a listen to that france so his boss can show his loyalty to bonaparte uh you know now for all intents and purposes that is gone we can hear a very small amount of it and if we want to go in there now we can get a bit more surgical on it now the thing is with dialogue isolate this is intended to isolate the vocal from a noisy background it's not really made so that you can get rid of the sound of parrots or dogs barking or anything like that but it does a fantastic job at getting you to a really good starting point or really good kind of 90 of the way there and we can use the second way of getting rid of this to really zone in on it so there's a very very small amount still left over like a an amount that no normal human being will be able to hear but because we're really dialing in in this and we're really zoning in on that area and because we've heard it the first time it's kind of difficult not to hear it the second time let's take a listen and we can hear a very small fraction of that parrot still there france so his boss can show his loyalty to bonaparte it's a very small amount it's just in this area here all right it's almost just like a a scratching like nails on the blackboard kind of thing um and let's just get rid of that completely so let's zone in and we can see on the spectrogram that i think it's this area here i think it's this bit let's just take a listen own a part yeah and if i go to my time and frequency selection tool i can just take a listen to this one bit i think this is where we're going to hear it just there okay so what we're going to do i'm going to go back to my time tool and i know that this is the problem area if i go to my magic wand just press w on the keyboard to go to the wand i can select instant process again and with my magic wand tool i can just say right that bit i want to get rid of you i want to get rid of you and i want to get rid of you and i think it's maybe this bit just clinging on at the end as well let's take a listen to see if it's got rid of it completely i have to be killed in france so his boss can show his loyalty to bonaparte uh you know this is completely gone there's two ways we could have approached that we could have gone in first off with the magic wand tool and just really identified that area and got rid of it but the chances are you're going to be using this dialog isolate on a large piece of audio you're going to be doing it on the entire passage potentially like an hour's worth of um of audio so it's a good starting point to say right i want to isolate that entire piece of dialogue the entire hour's worth and then i'm going to listen through and just go in and get rid of any small things what i tend to do is i actually edit the audio in logic as i find that it's kind of easy to chop bits up and move it around and i will take them into rx first of all apply this spectral recovery and the dialogue isolate just to clean them up as a kind of a broad stroke to the whole thing and then as i put them into logic i will take out any small elements any small pieces of audio that i think needs some further work and then bring them into rx and then i can just work on them so much easier i find it much easier to work on a small passage of audio if there is a particular parrot that wants to be noisy than it is to work on the entire one-hour piece of audio because the chances are there's only going to be a few elements that you want to get rid of but for the most part for the entire dialogue you're going to want to add that spectral recovery to the whole thing to bring back the richness in the high end and that dialogue isolate is really going to help zone in on just the vocal for the entire passage thanks a lot for watching i think the rx9 has just upped the game completely rx 8 was fantastic rx7 was even fantastic but with rx9 with some new features and new algorithms in things like dialogue isolate it is just completely up the game and it's the only thing that i would use to get rid of extraneous noises and to clean up my podcast audio hopefully this has been useful for you i use rx is there something else that you use that you think does the job just as well i'd be really interested to hear if there's something else out there that can really combat these issues in the same way as rx can make sure you leave something in the comments if you think there's something else that can do a better job than this thanks a lot for watching take care [Music]

Channel: Sam Loose Audio Engineer

Views: 1,526

Keywords: podcast, edit, editing, how to, izotope, rx, rx 9, dialogue, isolate, clean up, denoise, noise, remove, spectral, recovery, magic wand, brush

Id: Rjvi_rD9uT8

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021