removing the echo sound of a bad mic

[Andrew Kemler]

I shot an interview and forgot to switch the camera to external mic so the audio I recorded was with the built in camera mic (sony vx 2000). so, in short, it sucks. I removed the hum using soundtrack pro. Is there any way to reduce the echo and generally improve, albeit a little, the audio? any help is much appreciated. i am working on a g5 2.7 with the latest version fcp 5.1.4.

thanks
andy
akemler@yahoo.com

[Bill Davis]

Originally Posted by Andrew Kemler

I shot an interview and forgot to switch the camera to external mic so the audio I recorded was with the built in camera mic (sony vx 2000). so, in short, it sucks. I removed the hum using soundtrack pro. Is there any way to reduce the echo and generally improve, albeit a little, the audio? any help is much appreciated. i am working on a g5 2.7 with the latest version fcp 5.1.4.

thanks
andy
akemler@yahoo.com

Unfortunately, NO. In the same way it's impossible to mix two colors of paint to get a third color and want to remove one color to get back the two original colors - there are no "filters" that will remove natural echo from an ongoing stream of audio and make it sound like it was recorded properly to begin with.

If someone ever develops an algorhythm that CAN take an echoy on-camera micsign and make it sound substantially like a recording that was mic'd properly, expect that person to get very, VERY, VERY rich indeed.

Sorry.

[Jared White]

Well, besides removing noise and hum which you already did, the one other possibility is spending some time using an effects combination of compressor and gate. You'll want to compress the audio a bit to make sure the less audible parts of the speech don't get cut out, then you'll want to use a noise gate to diminish the trailing reverb/ringing.

To some extent however, the previous poster is correct. There's not a whole lot of choice when it comes to fixing bad audio.

Jared