On the plains of Spain ... a summer migrant from Africa ... looking for a mate.

I'm looking for a way to eliminate the noise of XM2 (in post with PremierePro?) which seems much louder when I'm shooting from inside a car.
Is it possible to isolate the pitch at which a particular level of sound is recorded?

I'd love to see one of these birds.

I'll have a play with the sound - see what I can come-up with. Can you post a copy of the original sound track?

Hoopoe is most handsome when he opens the crest on his head into a fan that matches the colours on his wings ... rarely does it when calling.

If I can find an unspoilt recording of his voice from any clip I could delete the present track and dub the voice to synchronise with his actions but it would be much neater if there was some way of deleting the sound of the cam motor without wiping the rest of the track ... here's the unedited soundtrack ... I would be delighted if you can find a way of selectively deleting certain pitch levels and leaving others ... and no matter how it turns out thank you Grant for offering to try.

Hi Brendan,

Here's my best effort. I managed to remove most of the camera noise. It's left the song sounding a bit hollow - see what you think.

You should have been a surgeon Grant.

That's a remarkable piece of editing.
I'm trying to practice using the pen tool with keyframes in Premiere pro 1.5 to eliminate the intros & exits but I am amazed at how much extraneous noise you have eliminated. There is a change in the voice quality but that may not be the end of it yet.

What editing tools did you use?

I used Sony Vegas. It helped that the Hoopoe's song is like an oboe - there's just a couple of frequencies.

The main frequency is around 500-600Hz. I used the Equaliser to boost this frequency and cut any higher or lower frequencies. I then rendered this as a .wav file

I opened the new file and used the Equaliser again to boost 500Hz by 15dB and 1000Hz by 7.5dB. These to processes increased the signal to noise ratio of your recording. Then I used a noise gate - adjusting the threshold level to remove most of the noise.

This still left a couple of clicks on the track. These were just cut out.


I've just been searching for Hoopoe sonograms to see what they should sound like. I'll have another go at this later.

Grant

Thank you for the inspiration, Grant. There's nothing like a gentle kick in the arse to get me going!

I eventually found "noise reduction" in Adobe Audition and here's what I should have posted here the first day ...

Good fun this audio editing. I've had another go. I've also included a sonogram made with SeaWave

http://www.nauta-rcs.it/SEA/seawave_index.html

all we need now is a nasal voiceover and a drum synthesizer and we'll be ready to go public, alright? ... is 50/50 okay with you or should we line up a chirpy backing group first ... some applicants have sent in their tapes already. Here are a few samples to keep you editing -

50/50 is fine. We can pay the backing group with peanuts.

What an idea, I thought to myself; only a bird-lover like me would think of peanuts ... and then this arrived ... just in case the message doesn't seem as urgent as it is I'll summarise it here & now ...

firstly, it's himself on the line, Cetti's Warbler; he never shows up unless it's heavy stuff. He says, for a start, it's my fault for lowering the tone of proceedings by referring to the tape sample as "chirpy" but when you offered peanuts the other songsters promptly appointed him to advise both of us that "Songbirds do not eat peanuts, understood!?" Either we line up an endless exotic menu of insects and seeds or we can, more or less, call the crows ... here's the original ...

Brendan/Grant,

First, what a totally cool bird!!! thanks for sharing brenden!!

I have heard that Vegas is outstanding with its Audio tools. Grant shows us how useful these tools can be!!!

I to use adobe 1.5 and Audition they have numerous tools but for the most part I only use a handful. I think most people do not know how to optimize the audio software they have. Probably from not really having the time to do the necessary exploration and expirmentation.

Now here is a challange. today i shot some footage in 70 to 90 km/h winds and gusts. I got down low to the ground, turned my audio down to minimum (using my gl/xm 2) and the wind noise is totally out of hand. obviously I do not think I can use any of the audio even though I could hear birds making all kinds of sounds.

In the evening we had an invading sky, winds still bad I shot footage of the sky and i could hear Partridge calling in the distance. On the camera all you hear is noise. to windy even for a foamy and a muff.

These software tools are useful but no substitute for a good recording. Here's a wren recorded with a Sennheiser ME67 onto a Canon XL2. No audio editing. I'm going to miss my XL2 this month.

Delightful songster, Grant. Were they gulls or kittiwakes in the background?

I wish, like many since 1988 when Richard Ranft of the British Library made this uniquely classical recording of the the Musician Wren in Amacayacu, Colombia, that there was a video clip to go with it ...

mms://audio.bl.uk/media/wren01.wma

I'm half-seriously plotting to go out there and die in my wellies trying to track this little bird in vast Amazonas ...

Grant,

My xl2 is supposed to be back late next week, its been three already and was supposed to be rushed, yea right. supposedly waiting for a part, an easy excuse. I really miss it.

that was terrific audio, nice to see there was no noticable wind!!

Curiously, what kind of mic do you think the xl comes with?? I have a rode shotgun and use it often but i am thinking of going with the Sen. modular mic. any opinions??

Dale,
It turned out to be so easy to selectively eliminate the GL2(XM2) motor noise from the hoopoe clips that I'm going to experiment with noise reduction in Adobe Audition to eliminate wind noise from another clip which also includes birdsong. I have such a clip somewhere and I'll post the results here when I find the clip.

Brendan,

can't wait to hear how you make out!! I must say audition is my least used software and i must get to work with it!!!

First, a jittery handheld clip of bee-eaters burbling while a truck roars by ...
Second, the same clip slightly shortened & without the sound of the truck ...

Another example of noise editing with Adobe Audition ...

First, handheld original video+audio clip of vulture glide
Second, same clip minus the wind

there aren't any hoopoes in colorado, but i shot one in bhutan and saw several on my trip. the one i managed to shoot is included in my UWOL #3 short. fascinating bird, really unique. he wasn't singing at the time, so i didn't get to hear him, so i'm thrilled to get to hear this song clip, to get to know hoopoe better.

and brendan, you're morphing into quite the techno-geek! it's awesome.

Yeah, some techno-geek I am ! I can't even find the link to your green tara Meryem and while I'm figuring out how to see your hoopoe and myriad other delights I could reveal that tara is anglicised (like many English words) from an Irish word for Eminence (usually topographic) like a hilltop ... Tara, 40 miles north-west of Dublin was the hilltop location of the court of High King of Ireland in ancient times ... I could go on, but there's not a frame of video evidence to back-up my story and people do want their stories in pictures. Waiting to see yours ...

Gotcha Meryem. Loved it. Been thereabouts, only 1000 miles away, alpine flower hunting. Marvellous rhododendrons and climbing plants where you were. Your hoopoe responded nicely to manual focus. Chanting and prayer wheels and flags all about focus too.

You recalled for me how shocked I was in 1994 to see women on their knees hammering stones into potholes ... what an awful way to exploit belief in reincarnation. Thank you for reminding me of my capacity to be inhumane while their wilderness seemed to welcome your Bhutanese.

not to hijack your thread, but the women-with-babies road crews were a bit stunning to my senses.

in many ways, i had a very fortunate trip. i was invited to shoot a lot of off-limits-to-Westerners footage, most of which can't be displayed online without disrespecting the culture. and doesn't fit the theme!

now back to our regularly scheduled hoopoe!

Brendan,

You know I never believed in reincarnation, but in my prior life i did.

Joking aside, Until one sees how much of the rest of the world lives, it really can't be truly comprehended. Pictures wont create the emotion and empathy first hand experience will.

I was set back seeing small children(4 years old or so) living in cardboard boxes at the dump just to survive!! Breaks the heart. You can see where they need to believe the next life will be better!!!

certainly a documentary on the Sad and the poor covering the dark corners of our planet could be a 24 hour channel of its own!!