Bad Audio
 

I'm trying to help a freind edit a project and a lot of the audio is too hot, over modulated, sounds like crap.

I'm not looking for a lesson in correctly recording audio, I am hoping that someone knows of a filter or technique for taking the edge off and hopfully making it sound a bit better.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If you clipped digitally(i.e. on camcorder) on the way in then it will be tough. Audio editing software like ProTools will allow you to re-draw the waveform and if you barely went over then this will work. There are also plug-ins, such as BF Clip Remover, but then again that's if you lightly clipped. As far as filtering...chances are if you clipped then it clipped over a large portion of frequencies so filtering might make the audio sound worse. Sorry for the rambling...I hope something in this might help.

Jon Bufkin
http://www.jonbufkin.com

I have Adobe Audition 2, do you know of any tools in that application that might help?

I also have a similar problem. We used a Senn. G2 and the audio guy wasn't familiar with the fact that the transmitter has sensitivity levels on it. He kept trying to adjust the levels on the reciever and camera to no avail. The signal never showed clipping in the levels and it's just bareley audible but in some key places. My audio editing guy has Apples Logic so I'm hoping it can do what you (Jonathon) were saying about Pro Tools. I wish he had just stopped the interview and said something. I knew about it.

Take a look in the filters section for Clip Restoration and see if that helps.

Step one is to run a "normalize" algorithmn and get the peaks below 0 dB. Next, apply some clipped peak restoration. Doesn't do any good to try to restore peaks when the restoration process exceeds 0 dB. Sony Soundforge also has a clip restoration tool, altho' its effectiveness is somewhat questionable since you really can't create something from nothing and expect a good outcome. Once the peaks have been restored, then try a multi-band compressor. If the peaks were clipped during high volume component like a tophat, apply compression to hi frequency and see if it helps. I've saved distorted audio in this way, altho' the outcome is never as good as a cleanly recorded piece.