removing fan noise from audio track
 

Hey everyone,
I have some video that was shot with a ceiling fan running on high in the adjacent room by accident. Unfortunately it is VERY present in the audio track. I can find portions of the audio track that contains only the fan noise and would like to do a digital audio subtraction to remove the noise from the whole track. Is this do-able with a vegas plug-in? or some other software? Or are there other options for removing the sound? I've tried using a notch filter without much sucess... thanks Mark

Try using either the EQ filter to remove the fan noise frequency (works well), or if you have access to the noise reduction filter, then select the fan noise and use NR to remove the sample from the entire audio clip.
Be careful though, as your audio may become more tnny and flat if you remove too much of that frequency, as it's in the area of speech.
It's always good to use NR several times in small increments to get the best audio.

You probably won't get all of it out, but enough to make the audio much better than what you started with.

Good luck,
Michael

Your best bet would probably be the Noise Reduction plugin

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/Pro...uct.asp?PID=14

Something similar can be found here:
http://www.voxengo.com/product/redunoise/

Edward,

I'm a little ashamed to ask this, I should know the answer.

Will Sony's Noise Reduction plug-in work in Vegas or do I really need to quit putting off getting Sound Forge to use the NR plug-in.

It will work directly in Vegas. (Works well in Sound Forge too!)

Thanks for the info. The main problem is that it was a ceiling fan (which seems to spill out a very wide frequency range) and so using eq just doesn't really get rid of it, believe me I tried. I guess I'll have to spend some money... yikes! $280, although it should be quite useful so I suppose it's ok.

Patrick,
From what I can tell, it works directly in Vegas! Mark

Dear Mark,

I realize it is expensive, but it is very well worth it.

I have been using it for a few months now and I am amazed at what it can do.

It takes a little experimenting, and a little practice to get it right, but it works wonders. I have had audio that was completely unusable, and it made it very usable. You get four filters when you purchase Sony Noise Reduction 2.0.

On the other hand, road noise is harder to remove and takes an experienced user to make obtain the best audio possible when you have bad road noise present. The instructions tell you, for road noise to invoke the filter multiple times, taking out a little (10 db) or so of road noise each time. This does work.

Fan noise is usually very easy to remove using the Sony Noise Reduction 2.0.

Thanks for the info Dan, I suspected it was probably a pretty good plugin to have, your comments make me less reluctant to make the investment! M

PS thanks for the tip about road noise, I'll be sure to stay away from bad roads when I am shooting! ;)

Download the FREE software program called Audacity. I have been using it for a couple years and it will also do a very good job of noise removal, especially if you have a clean sample of the noise signature which you indicated you do.

The software is part of the open source project and it's a great tool that runs on multiple platforms. Do a Google search for it.

regards,

-gb-