How to remove background wind noise ?

mkirtley wrote on 8/26/2009, 2:02 PM
 Hi,
   I've a video clip that has a lot of background wind noise on it.
I've Movie Edit Pro 15 and tried to use the denoiser but it didn't make a difference.
The only way I could reduce it was to use the sound mixer and move all the sliders to the bottom.
Is there some other way to do this or am I stuck with it ?

Regards,
Mike

Comments

ralftaro wrote on 8/27/2009, 5:36 AM
Hello Mike,

If anything, the DeNoiser is definitely the way to go. It may require a little fiddling around with it and may not get the perfect results you were hoping to get, but it is the best tool you will find within the program to do this. You will, however, have to make sure you're using it correctly and a little experimentation will be needed until you achieve the best result possible: Once you're in the audio cleaning dialog and have enabled the DeNoiser, hit the "Advanced..." button in that section. By default, you will only have a bunch of presets (noises produced by various camera models) that you can subsctract from your audio. If you're not using one of those cameras and if you actually want to remove wind noises, this is obviously no good. What you really need to do is using the function to take and save a noise sample from your own footage's audio track under the advanced settings of the DeNoiser. Use the "Next" button to get your first noise sample. Do this a view times and experiment with the "Noise level" and "Reduce noise" sliders until you get the best result. You can always use the playback button in the dialog to pre-listen to the footage and find out how it sounds with the current noise sample substracted from it.

It's a pretty powerful tool and I've gotten pretty good results removing street noise from recordings before, but of course the technical possibilities are limited and you will have to try a little until you get it right.

Good luck!


ralftaro wrote on 8/28/2009, 3:57 AM
Hi again,

The algorithm that masks the noise from the audio track can probably just work with a short sample. I'm not aware of any ways to use a long sample here. I would imagine that it might be somewhat problematic to use a long sample, which in itself could potentially contain a changing pattern of sounds/noise. After all, you need to be able to substract that sample from any given time position of the audio signal, which just wouldn't be possible with a longer and more complex noise pattern. Well, I hope you can work it out and get a decent result through some experimentation.

massi04 wrote on 8/29/2009, 3:58 AM
I like to read ralftaro's explanations which are always very detailed and precise. -
My experience is that the DeNoiser is not the perfect solution for the removal of background wind noise, because the noise pattern is not stable. It is almost perfectly applicable for a noise like the ticking of a clock or similar sounds that have a repeating noise pattern.
As an alternative solution you might try to exchange the sound track with similar sound from another scene. Even small portions of an adequate sound could be repeated and mixed...
Last but not least, a music track or background sound from a noise pool could do this job easily...
After all, a special wind-protected micro might solve this problem from the very beginning.