One of the commonest problems on any film shoot is poorly recorded sound. Often sound levels are too low meaning a lot of 'gain' has to be added to make the sound louder. Alternatively, faulty equipment or a bad recording environment can ruin the sound. Either way you can end up with very noisy audio which can be very distracting.
Luckily there have been major improvements in sound processing tech which mean (some of) these problems can be fixed. For example, Adobe Audition has powerful noise reduction filters which can rescue badly recorded sound. Here's how you do it:
First, import your noisy sound clip into Audition:
You'll see a standard 'waveform' sound display. Its sometimes easier to see the noise damage by turning on the Spectral Frequency Display by pressing SHIFT D
The example sound file is a ticking clock. The 'Ticks' are the tall spikes in the frequency display. The noise shows up as grainy dots all over the background. Before Audition can remove the noise, you have to tell it what the noise sounds like by selecting a section of the clip where there is only noise and no 'foreground' sounds. Press T to turn on the Time Selection Tool then drag out a box on the sound between two sound peaks.
With just the noise selected, go to Effects > Noise Reduction / Restoration > Capture Noise Print or press SHIFT P and Audition will analyse the noise to identify specific frequencies.
Once you have a noise print, select a bigger portion of the clip, one including the recorded sound and go to Effects > Noise Reduction / Restoration > Noise Reduction (process) and a new window will open up.
Press the Play button in the bottom left of the new window to listen to the processed sound. The filter will only affect the section you have highlighted. By pressing Play a few times, you can listen to the whole sound to get a 'before' and 'after' of the noise reduction. If the sound is really noisy, you can adjust the sliders to remove more or less noise but remember that overdoing it will start to make the sound 'tinny' and synthetic. Once you are happy with the result press the Select Entire File button, then click Apply and the sound is fixed; just save it back out to your Final Cut Pro project folder and import it back into Final Cut and you're done!
P.S. Audition is only installed on the iMacs in DMW 4 (room G123b)
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