Noise Reduction PP#23

     This was such a huge issue within my editing journey that it literally warrants its own blog post.  As I mentioned before, I started editing and filming my project, and a lot of the filming that I've done was taken place outside in the middle of a large field.  Because of this, a lot of wind was collected via the microphone of my phone, making the audio extremely hard to hear.  I don't have any lav mics or anything like that, so it's not like I could've brought some audio equipment on set.  Instead, all I had was my phone.  

    But as I was filming, the wind wasn't that bad.  Or at least so I thought.  The wind was pretty strong, but I really didn't think that it would make some parts totally unhearable.  

    You can hear in this video scene that the wind totally obstructs a lot of the audio and you can't really hear my actors.  This unfortunately was the case for a lot of the footage that was filmed outside.  Wind sucks, and I was left with two options when I sat down and heard the audio for the first time when I was about to start editing. Either:

• Scrap the clips, start again, and film on a new day where the wind didn't suck

OR

• Use my editing expertise in order to reduce the sound, and somehow make it work.  

    With those two options, I obviously went with the ladder and went to google to figure out how to make these clips manageable.  When I researched solutions, one managed to pop up when a YouTube video in which I came across an individual named Ian.  

    Ian suggested that a great way to take away wind sounds from a video clip would be to manage the frequencies that the video created, suggesting that wind sounds create such a low frequency, that being able to take out all the low frequencies within the video would ultimately take out all the wind sounds. 

With this, I took to the previous clip above, and it, unfortunately, didn't work. I think since my footage is more dynamic, meaning more wind is entering the microphone chamber, meaning that the wind variation is a lot more than the variation seen on the video since the camera is simply static.  It didn't really suppress the wind audio, mainly just all the audio in general.  

    

    I looked around some more to find more solutions, and I managed to actually find one by myself within DaVinci Resolve.  

    Noise reduction is typically used in order to remove background noise, and I was a little hesitant to use it because it wasn't really tailored for wind noises and their frequencies.  However, I decided to give it a shot, and was actually surprised to realize that there was a "speech mode" that you can apply to the audio clip and make it a lot more crisp.  With that, and increasing the audio, you get a much better sounding clip!

This is the same clip above, and although there still is some wind, a combination of different shots along with the noise reduction effect should make more clips audible.  

-Noa