I took some video of the frop bog today and did some narration. Unfortunately the wind noise gets annoying at times and drowns out my voice, but mostly - it ruins the vid. Does anyone here have experience with a program that can automatically reduces this? I’ve found links for several programs but instead of blindly stabbing at some random program off the net I’m hoping someone here has done this before and can recommend something they liked.
Thanks! :)
Noise reduction is tricky, because the noise probably shares a lot of frequency content with the audio you want to keep, so it can be tough to cut out what you don’t want and leave what you do.
You might try re-recording the material, if that is an option. You might be able to put up some barriers around the mic that might obstruct the wind without obstructing the light. It’s always easier to get it right the first time than it is to tweak it with restoration software.
Secondly, if it’s narration and you don’t want to keep the location/ambient sound, there is a lot of software that will let you import a video, kill the original audio track, and replace it with newly recorded material. That way, you could sit down at your computer in a more controlled acoustic environment with a decent mic and do the narration until you’re happy with it. (If you need more pointers, I hope you might find this thread a helpful primer.)
If redoing or redubbing isn’t an option, you might see if you can find a free/trial version of an audio editor with video support (or a video editor with audio support) and see if it has some noise reduction software. Wave Arts makes a great bundle of restoration plugins, and they have a generous 30 day demo. That should be long enough to see if it can tame the mighty frop wind.
Hope that helps!
Even bog-standard Windows Movie Maker will let you do narration easily. Note that Movie Maker Live, however, is garbage.
I was afraid there’d be no easy answer. I guess I’ll have to come up with some option to block wind-gusts and re-record it all. Like was pointed out, I could just narrate over it, but part of the beauty of the video is hearing the birds, frops, and waterfalls fade in and out as I move around. without that ambiance it totally changes the dynamic of the video.
I’d try fiddling around with GoldWave for a bit. It’s pretty powerful and easy to use, and you might manage acceptable results. Or, discover exactly how difficult what you want to do is.
If you’re going to re-shoot and have access to some video editing software (sounds like Windows Movie Maker should be up to the task), you might consider shooting the footage with no narration, so you can just worry about the best conditions to capture the ambience, and then record narration separately and combine the two in the editor.