Here is the short version, I forgot to set the audio from manual back to auto and now the entire reception is overmodulated and distorted. As i head in for a sleepness night, I figured if there may be any miracle cure I am not familiar with.

Audacity has a unclip filter. You could try that.

DO NOT GET AUDACITY FROM FOSSHUB. Get it from everywhere other than Fosshub.

It will depend on how the audio has been over modulated. If the analogue preamp has 'clipped' there's probably not too much you can do. If it's the A/D converter input, then you might be luckier....

Can you post a short sample?... (without any re-encoding)

You can try iZotope RX. It's not cheap but as long as it's not too blown out it can bet acceptable results. If that can't do it I don' think anything out there will. It is truly an amazing program. But, like I mentioned, it comes at a cost. They do have a really good sale going on now though.

http://offers.izotope.com/rx-save-the-take-sale.html?gclid=CjwKEAjw652_BRDfkebVrdOGkDISJAD0Q2Ru8n5HT6kzgN6ElMBbwncGLYH4dlsgRKLlP2wPJgQuhxoC9m3w _wcB

IF the audio is over modulating and peaking too high. ITS PEAKING TOO HIGH AND OVER-MODULATED

You can bring the levels down and much as you like. Distorted audio will always be distorted audio.

iZotope and other such programs don't just bring the levels down. It analyzes the audio signal and predictively recreates the signal. I was working on a video for a production of Rent a few years ago and on one part in Seasons Of Love the soloist was a bit excited and caught the sound guy off guard. The post sound team was able to get a very usable final soundtrack using iZotope. The only people who can tell where the problem parts were are the ones who worked on the post production team.

It won't be able to save everything but it is as close to a miracle worker as I've ever used. I believe that they have a trial period so you can download it and try it out to see if it can salvage what you have.

IF the audio is over modulating and peaking too high. ITS PEAKING TOO HIGH AND OVER-MODULATED

You can bring the levels down and much as you like. Distorted audio will always be distorted audio.

Not strictly true. If the audio preamp is over driven, then any resultant 'clipping' will introduce odd harmonic distortion into the audio signal path. This kind of over modulation can be very difficult to improve.
However, if the over modulation is in the digital path, and over drives the A/D input, then the introduced clipping will probably be 'clean', and most audio editors (Audacity, Audition etc) can untilise algorithims to help replace the clipped peaks. This can work reasonably well.
I'm assuming the Izotope software mentioned will rely on a sophisticated variation of this technique?.

If the OP can post a short sample, maybe some of our more expert members can try out some of the suggested options, to see if they can be effective in this case...

I always use headphones during ceremonies, and used to also wear them at receptions, but in later years got lazy and stopped using them at the reception. My cameras did not have XLR or external audio controls and AGC simply worked great for me for many years! Well, same thing happened to me, forgot audio level was set to manual (from earlier interview) and entire reception was overblown. Not bad during toasts, except for the applause parts, but dancing was screwed!!! Too far gone to fix, I ended up dubbing in the same songs and dirtying up the tracks in audio software to give it a more "live" sound, then also mixed in crowd noise to give some ambience so the music didn't sound canned. Came out pretty well, but was a lot of work! Never again.

If the sound is not totally distorted, then by all means try the suggested fixes, but depends on the source material. Mine was too far gone to fix.

Good luck

Jeff

I ended up dubbing in the same songs and dirtying up the tracks in audio software to give it a more "live" sound, then also mixed in crowd noise to give some ambience so the music didn't sound canned. Came out pretty well, but was a lot of work! Never again.

Jeff, I salute you! Very well done. Did the client "hear the joins"? - I suspect not.

Grazie

Looking forward to seeing how this one comes out. I've had a go with Izotope's RX5 Advanced.

Andrew

HUGE shout to Andrew Smith in this thread, he had me send the audio file and ran it through Izotope with very good results. The speeches are normal and I will dub the songs and add some fluff. Thank you again Andrew!!

This was an interesting case in that the waveform wasn't quite slammed against the ceiling in terms of having the digital clipping that you would expect. It's entirely possible that the distortion was from prior to the analogue-to-digital converter stage.

I performed a de-clip pass with Izotope RX5 and this certainly fixed the distortion in the speeches, but the party music (which would have been much louder at the event) was still unacceptable.

A second de-clip pass made the music component a lot better, but there is still some degradation that simply can't be recovered from. I'd suggested to Darryn that he could identify, sync and mix in the songs until he had the clarity and ambience required without the distortion of the original recording being noticeable by the 'mere mortal' end consumers.

Here thinks this is going to work.

So there you go. It looks like his predicament is going to be saved. We'll have to wait for the final word from him once the edit is completed.

Isn't the internet (and DVinfo) wonderful? :-P

Andrew

Yes, this forum is awesome but that is because of members like Andrew. This thread is very important to me because you dispelled the hard and fast rule that zero is zero, period end of sentence in digital audio. I hope I will never have to attempt a post repair like this but it is nice to know there may be some hope if I ever clip something. Nobody is perfect all of the time.....

Steve

Even I have had times where I've been concentrating on something else whilst filming and then realise that my audio levels had been recording too high. (It doesn't happen very often.) I'm just grateful that we have a fix for this sort of thing these days.

Andrew

This was a timely thread, and vote up for RX5 de-clip.

I had just read this thread a few days before I covered a corporate event. We did a sound check once I connected my drop from the board and everything seemed ok, camera levels were dialed in, clear sound.

However, once the podium presentation started the podium mic would create a lot of over modulated hard to listen to sound. The problem wasn't the camera, the problem as far as I can tell was that the wireless mic was setup wrong and clipping the pre-amp on the way into the board. But once the speakers were on a roll, there's nothing that could be done.

I had to play with RX5 de-clip a few times before I found a setting that resulted in a workable sound, but it definitely got there.

iZotope RX = VooDoo!