Wind noise suppression......

GoldWave general discussions and community help
Post Reply
hollingw
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Jun 19, 2008 2:33 pm

Wind noise suppression......

Post by hollingw »

Hello:
I have a short audio clip of my kids when they were very young. I recorded it outside and there is a lot of wind noise. Does anyone know a filter and settings to remove at least some of that noise without loosing my children's voices?

Thanks,
William
DougDbug
Posts: 2172
Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2005 3:33 pm
Location: Silicon Valley

Post by DougDbug »

:( Since you said "a lot of noise", there's probably not a lot you can do. As you've probably noticed, news crews use "wind socks" and close-miking to minimize wind noise, and sometimes it still comes through. For most on-location movies, the dialog is re-recorded in the studio. (The pros don't have software that can do it either.) After-the-fact noise reduction can work very well if you have a constant low-level background noise, such as a bit of tape "hiss".

OK... GoldWave does have a noise reduction filter (Effect -> Filter -> Noise Reduction). It generally works best if you can feed it a sample of noise-only. Select a "typical" sample of the noise, and click Copy. This will copy the noise sample to the clipboard. Then select Use Clipboard in the Noise Reduction dialog box.

If the noise level is too high (compared to the voice volume), you'll loose some of the voice sound, and/or you might get artifacts. You'll just have to experiment to see if you can make an improvement.

You can also try a Noisegate. There are a couple of noisegate presets under Effect -> Compressor/Expander. A noisegate works by completely killing the sound when the sound falls below a preset threshold. This will only work if the wind noise is lower than the voices, and won't have any effect while the kids are talking.

Lastly, you can use an equalizer (Effect -> Filter -> Equalizer) to try and filter-out some of the wind-noise frequencies. Some (most?) of the noise & voice frequencies will overlap, but you may be able to filter-out some of the low-frequency noise. (Just use the "preview" button and experiment with the slider settings.)

Good Luck! Hopefully, you can make some improvement without too many side-effects. Make a back-up before you start experimenting!
DewDude420
Posts: 1171
Joined: Fri Mar 11, 2005 11:15 pm
Location: Washington DC Metro Area
Contact:

Post by DewDude420 »

Wind noise cannot be accurately cleaned up. While you can remove the noise, there is permanent damage to the modulation of the wave at just about any volume. Even if you do clean it up, chances are you'll have an offset that's not correctable.

This little bit of knowledge is based on talking to some foley guys that have done movie work. You really need to prevent wind noise to begin with.
hollingw
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Jun 19, 2008 2:33 pm

Thanks to all......

Post by hollingw »

I tried all of your suggestions, and you're right. It clobbered the voices. I'll just live with it...

Yes, I NOW know about and use a home made "dead cat" outside, but I did this back when I first got my Sony PD-170 and didn't know any better.

Thanks again,

RH
Post Reply