De-Noising a car dialogue scene
 

I apologize if this has been covered - I'm terrible at searching forums.

We have a dialogue scene in a short film, and I am cleaning the audio in Audition 3 right now. There was a lot more engine/road noise picked up than I originally thought, and not being an expert sound engineer I'm having trouble getting off on the right path to cleaning up the situation.

I have successfully removed my actors' voices altogether, but the process of removing or dropping the level of the noise and keeping the dialogue intact is still a mystery to me. Every time I attempt noise removal the program seems to remove both the voices and the car noise - this is using the Adaptive Noise Removal tool.

I am not a sound guy at all, I just happen to be stuck with the editing equipment for now. Any suggestions would be extremely helpful, even just getting off on the right foot would be great.

Thanks

I don't know what noise removal tool you're using, but, you can try adjusting the THRESHOLD settings. Use the preview tool to adjust to taste.

Does your noise removal tool function by taking a noise print? If so, be sure to take the noise-print in an area of the audio where you have the car noise but no speech.

I've been using the Adaptive Noise Removal tool and the basic Noise Removal tool. I've successfully eliminated a barking dog, wind and traffic in another scene, but I'm not having luck with this car stuff.

I'm not sure about the noise-print you mentioned - I'll check up on it as soon as I get home. Thanks for the heads-up.

What are you using, Media Cleaner Pro?

Adobe Audition 3 - I have Sound Booth too, which may be more on my level, though it's less powerful.

Sounds like a hopeless situation, especially if the engine was loud.
You should probably call back your actors to redub the dialog in your studio.

Just out of curiousity, how was the dialog recorded? I'm mainly curious about your mic placement. Won't help you here but could help in future situations and it would be fun to open that discussion up.