Professional Noise Reduction for Everyone

hey guys it's Alex in the last video we talked a little bit about how to get better sounding dialogue using some basic tools that everybody's got EQ de-essing compression today I want to open up a little bit of Pandora's box and talk about noise reduction the first thing to know about noise reduction is that it is dangerous the tools have gotten really good and really accessible and it's easy to let them become crutches for getting bad sound in the first place and then thinking I can just fix this after the fact no big deal I think of this stuff is sort of a necessary evil there will always be situations that arise while I'm recording that I can't really do anything about so I'm gonna have to fix after the fact but if there's any way that I can rely less on noise reduction and more on actually fixing whatever issues come up that's gonna sound better and it's gonna be better later on that being said repair and restorations software can be amazing when they're used right and they can save audio that you otherwise wouldn't be able to use depending on your budget there are a lot of different options out there but when you're working at the pro level you're really only going to find a specific set of tools and the most common one that's used in pretty much every editorial suite on a planet is iZotope RX RX comes in three flavors there's the advanced version that's tailored towards the pro market they have a huge array of tools that can handle anything from dialogue cleanup for film to forensic audio for police or the FBI there's the standard pack which is more tailored towards people who are doing this kind of work regularly but maybe don't need the full range of stuff that the advanced section has to offer and then there's elements which even though it's the most basic offering from the RX family is actually a fantastic introduction to the iZotope ecosystem and all of the tools that they've included are in use on major TV and feature film dub stages and dialog edit Suites around the world so if you're not already familiar with iZotope i'd highly recommend checking out their website picking up at least their elements suite it's one of those things that even if you only use it seldomly when you need it you really need it so let's get into this thing operation is pretty simple it comes with a standalone that you can drag and drop files into or it works as a plugin that integrates with anything like premiere or pro tools or logic or Ableton or whatever and you're going to find for major repair tools within the elements bundle that's going to be D click D clip D hum and denotes the order of operations that I'm gonna use these modules in or if I'm going to use them at all will vary depending on what my problem's and my sound are but generally speaking I want each to be doing the least amount of work possible to maintain the actual quality of the original audio one of the most common problems to run into is over modulated oversaturated or clipped audio when someone's recorded something too hot into a microphone preamp it's overloaded the circuitry it sounds all distorted and weird the D clip module is tailored to fix that and it's pretty straightforward to operate once you've got your audio loaded up in the region you want to fix selected I open up the D clip module and I use the suggest feature to kind of ballpark where I want to start fixing stuff this threshold slider tells the module what you consider to be clipping and what you consider to be totally normal that you want to leave alone so anything outside the boundaries of where you set that threshold will be treated as over modulated you can use the linking feature to adjust those thresholds against each other at the same time or you can leave them unlinked to get a little bit more finite control over them next I always set quality to high this processing takes a little bit longer but it ends up being a little bit more accurate whereas if you're in a time crunch or you're working with a huge file setting it to low or medium is gonna be a little bit faster maybe not quite as accurate but it'll still sound much better than it did before and then there's the make up gain slider which make up gain allows you to bring back the original energy of the audio and of course the post limiter checkbox keeps your new lead Eclipse audio from wreak lipping itself once you've rendered it next is the D hum module I don't personally use this module as much because I prefer other tools but this is great if you have power issues like 60 cycle hum in your recordings this will be able to target just that frequency and it's harmonics and remove it while keeping the rest of your recording intact and the interface is pretty self-explanatory if you know what you're looking at you select the fundamental frequency that you want to remove and the module has a number of harmonics that it will automatically take out if you choose to use them if you have a section of your audio that just has hum in it you can use the learn function to tailor this module specifically to target it or you can turn on adaptive mode which will try and automatically find what you want to remove otherwise you can settle these settings manually by selecting which frequency you want to affect choosing the number of harmonics that you want to target and then using the slope slider as well in case your harmonics taper off and level the higher they go and again this is a great module to target specific issues like hum I use other tools to do this kind of stuff because of the necessities of my workflow but it's a fantastic way to isolate again just those frequencies that you want to get out so let's move on to something that I use all the time and that's the D click module D click is fantastic for moving harsh consonants or weird mouth noises like I can sit here and go and it's gonna sound terrible but if I do the same thing after the D click module has been run that's gonna sound a lot less weird and you can use it to fix those kinds of issues when people are normally talking opening up this module it's pretty straightforward to use I usually find myself working with the random clicks algorithm the frequency skew allows you to kind of tailor what frequencies those clicks occur in so this is gonna leave the rest of your audio you want touched alone and then the click widening slider determines how far around each click instance it's gonna try and repair which can result in kind of a smoother sound if you want to take out a lot of harshness from consonants and of course the sensitivity slider is gonna be the main focus here if you dial it all the way back it's barely gonna pick up anything and it's only gonna work on the most clicky of clicks and if you dial it all the way up if you blink wrong it'll probably register that as a click and try and remove it now this is one of those modules that you can definitely go too far with your sensitivity and your click widening sliders so definitely while you're working on it preview the audio that you're going to process before you actually render the other thing that I'd recommend and I know it's super time consuming a lot of people will just select their whole piece of audio and hit render with one setting I will always go through and individually D click only what's necessary because again I don't want to be processing everything I want to keep the natural integrity of my sound and by selecting each individual click which is again very very time intensive I'm going to only process the stuff that really needs it and I'm gonna leave the good sounding things alone and last but not least voice D noise voice d noise is the most powerful and also the most dangerous module of the bunch because it can do really really great stuff to save your audio and if you take it too far it will immediately fall apart now this module is deceptively simple it's only got a few controls but it's doing a lot of really interesting work in the background you can think of the threshold slider is telling the algorithm how loud or how quiet your noise floor is so if you lower the threshold it will look for quieter noise in your incoming audio and if you raise it it will look for louder noise setting the filter type to gentle will result in lighter processing whereas surgical will try and really dig out noise but can compromise audio and leave artifacts if you're not careful optimizing for dialogue is great for pretty much any spoken word while optimizing for music is specifically for singing and vocals and allows the algorithm to treat longer held out notes a little bit more accurately you can have it automatically trying to Tek noise which it's actually really good at or if you want to be specific about it you can set the control to manual find a place in your audio that is only the noise that you want to remove hit learn and then adjust your parameters to render your denoise audio again reducing that noise too much is gonna make your audio sound like it's underwater which can get really bad also you don't necessarily want to have completely immaculate D noise dialog or whatever sound some of the best dialog editors out there are the ones that do not rely on these tools unless they absolutely have to and they keep a lot of the production audio from set in tact with all of the noise in all of the atmosphere in there because it sounds more natural so yes this tool can do a lot of really cool stuff to save you in a pinch but you may not necessarily want to use it if it's gonna distract from the overall quality so that covers the four basic modules that are gonna do a lot of the heavy lifting for you now rx-7 included kind of a cool feature called the repair assistant that allows you to select whatever audio you want to work on and analyze it and Rx will figure out what it thinks you need to do to make it better by understanding these four modules you can then take that suggestion and you can tailor exactly what you need or don't need to your liking the other important thing is the module chain let's say you're working on a set of recordings that came from one location like a pod cast or an interview and you know that all of those audio files are gonna have the same problems you can use one of them as kind of a guide and determine which modules you want to use and how much and then you can include them in this module chain and it'll just run as a batch process immediately when you load something in now the rest of the tools that elements has to offer under the utility panel I don't tend to find myself using very much because all of these things are destructive and I don't want to do anything in our ex that I can't undo later or go back to an original somehow so the fades that gain the mixing side of it I really don't have a use for it but you may find a place for them in your own workflows if you're only working in rx or if you have a specific need to process those things into your sounds now the last thing that I probably should have mentioned is the first thing that I love about Rx from elements through advanced is the spectrum analysis that it provides you you open it up and it has the waveform view overlaid on the spectrum being able to see frequencies in relation to each other instead of relying on the standard spectrum analyzer from an EQ like equality or just a waveform overview like is displayed in most da w's this allows you to get really specific into problem solving and sometimes if I'm having a lot of problems ich ewing something out or fixing a piece of audio that i can't quite get right i'll just open it in RX to look at it and that visual will help me troubleshoot to get where I need to be and again as far as workflow goes the order in which I'd use these modules is kind of kind of vary depending on what audio problems I'm running into but generally I'd say it's safest to do D clip D hum then D click and then D noise because that's gonna make each of those modules do the least amount of work and maintain the integrity of your original recordings so if you hadn't heard of iZotope before I'd highly recommend checking them out at least pick up the RX elements bundle it's gonna save you a huge amount of hassle in post-production again only when you need to use it also iZotope is having a sale on this stuff all the way through the month of April so now's a better time to pick it up than any especially if you have I be using something like a zoom h4 h5 or h6 since they've ruined a bunch of my recordings but even if you're not using a zoom recorder this is a great set of tools to be able to clean up that you wouldn't ordinarily be able to use or it's on the threshold of actually being useful it just has some problems in it so hopefully that gets you guys started in the realm of noise reduction just remember don't rely on this stuff too much it may not be as necessary as you think that's it for now let's answer some questions with a field recorder like the tascam dr-40 I res audio on the recorder and feed the lower quality audio to the camera at the same time yes most recorders have a line out function and whether it's a TRS jack or something similar even the tascam has a little 3.5 millimeter jack that you can feed audio out on one of those cables that's exactly what that's for my sound booth sounds very tinny or for lack of a better way of saying it like I'm in a box I only have the Adobe suite how can I fix the boxy sound from the sound booth that is an EQ thing what you want to do is load up whatever stock EQ you have in the Adobe collection and boxiness typically resonates somewhere in the neighborhood of about 300 to about 900 Hertz so if you use the video that I did on EQ and dialogue treatment EQ sweep across that spectrum you'll probably find some really resonant frequencies and you can take those down using that technique also once you've done that if you're finding that your audio isn't really full-bodied boosting some of the general low mids around about 200 to maybe 400 might fix a little bit of that but you want to make sure that you're removing any weird or unwanted frequencies like that boxiness first before you go boosting stuff around it any reason why you don't use the pro cue since you're fond of the fabfilter suite that's actually a great question Pro Q is a fantastic equalizer that kind of is the next iteration that a lot of people are using from equality equality was actually kind of a standard for a little while until pro q came out and pro q - now I guess Pro Q 3 is on the market everybody's kind of moved to that I personally like equality because it's a little bit simpler to manage pro q is sort of this infinite sandbox kind of EQ where you can get 24 bands of Equalization if you have to use all 24 of those bands something is very wrong so I tend to limit myself purposely to only 7 bands and that's what works but the other part of that is when you're running an EQ on every channel of let's say a 3 or 400 track session fabfilter pro-q actually has something like 70 or 80 different parameters that are fully automated also you can change them as the session goes on across every single sound and every track in your session so when you're working with that level of information it actually bogs sessions down a lot and it can be really hard for a single system to keep up with all of those eq's so again it's it's sort of a personal preference thing it's also pro q is a little overkill for what i need but it's a great equalizer there's nothing wrong with it but for that resource-intensive Nisour preferred XLR cable from shotgun mic to recorder that's actually an interesting question because that's one of the most overlooked things in the audio world people think cables or cables in that set I personally prefer kennair or Megami you get really really well made cables they're terminations take a lot of abuse so they're not gonna fall apart on you and they're really well shielded so you don't get a lot of interference from things like cell phones or RF or whatever radio frequencies might be in your area however you can get away with using cheaper cables as long as they are shielded so if you go onto monoprice comm or something similar and you look up shielded XLR cables you're gonna be able to find something that works I have two questions I was hoping you could answer see if I can get them both what's your choice of format when using an audio recorder like a zoom handy 24-bit or 16-bit 96 4841 kilohertz mostly recording voices industry standard for recording is 24-bit 48 kilohertz and the only reason to record under that is if you can't I usually will record most of my material at 96 kilohertz just because I want to get the best quality and the best accuracy for the source material but any deliverables that I'm gonna be handing off to say a picture editor or somebody who's just gonna be cutting these sounds into a picture editing program it's gonna be 24 48 you can record 96 and you can record 192 what those allow you to do is process things a lot more accurately but at the end of the day all of that gets bounced down to 24-bit 48 kilohertz and the second big question how much does the quality of a wireless transmitter or receiver affect the quality of sound when combined with a great love mic so that is a hard question to answer because it kind of varies but generally when you have an analog transmitter it's a lot more susceptible to RF interference and that can degrade your quality Digital transmitters and receivers because they're translating everything into a digital bit stream don't color the sound in the same way but the preamps still determines a little bit of how a microphone is gonna sound when you're working on lavalieres and so yes it can degrade quality or it can enhance quality it kind of depends on what you're working with some of the best wireless gear out there is made by electro Sonics or audio limited and you can get amazing results out of those but you'll pay a price it's like $3,000 per channel of Wireless for that otherwise Sennheiser is coming out with some kind of cool stuff diety is another one of those that I'd love to get my hands on and try out but in order to get something good you're probably looking at about 400 to 500 dollars per channel at the very least that's it for now hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you did don't forget to hit like hit subscribe come follow me over on Instagram at axk thanks for watching

Channel: Alex Knickerbocker

Views: 37,402

Keywords: hiss, hum, noise, how to clean up recordings, clean up noise, edison, mixing, tips, tricks, hacks, noisy vocals, denoise, audio, how to, remove, removal, clean up audio, premiere, izotope, rx, elements, advanced, beginner, editing, video, youtube, background, audacity, adobe, davinci, cheap, spectral, click, clipping, fix, distorted, distortion, declip, dehum, ground noise, noise floor, cable, questions, troubleshooting, problems, issue, software, reduction, tools

Id: bRpx6Ag6d2c

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019