Saving heavily spiked audio- one option
 

A couple years ago I shot a some footage out in the rain. It was alot of fun, and the footage was good, but the audio was filled with spikes from the raindrops hitting the nylon cover. I finally edited it into something presentable, and had decided to just buckle down and manually wrestle with the spikes, as least getting them out of the red 0dB zone.

The audio was recorded on one side of a stereo track...an AT897 into the right channel on the Sony V1U.

I first changed the setting from right channel to centered. After doing that on all the clips, I reviewed the piece and discovered that by splitting it out to both sides, the 'magnitude' had dropped, so there were no more spikes, and everything was coming in around -6dB.

Problem solved. You can check out the final result here.

Let me know what questions you have, if any.