Cleaning up the audio with MEP MX Plus

Periplex wrote on 1/21/2012, 3:07 AM

Hi guys.

I'm wondering how useful Movie Edit Pro MX Plus is for processing the audio track of a movie. By "processing" I guess I really mean "cleaning up".

I'm quite pleased with the project I have just finished, especially for a first attempt. The end result is a long video of an Aikido seminar spread over two DVDs.

The one aspect I'm not happy with is some of the soundtrack. There is a squash court right next door to the dojo where the seminar was held, and in places there is the repeated tock-tock-tock of the squash ball in action. From what I've been reading, if I understand it correctly, and if it's at all possible with MEP, I guess I would need to sample that sound in order to filter it out. But I have no idea how to go about that.

There are also other background noises of the type that are generated by any audience. Ideally I'd like to be able to isolate the presenter's voice and scrap everything else.

Is this sort of thing asking too much of MEP MX Plus, or is it a job for a special audio processing program??? I'm retired and I do these jobs for free for a non-profit club, so I couldn't afford anything too expensive.

 

Comments

emmrecs wrote on 1/21/2012, 4:20 AM

Hi Periplex.

I think the short answer to your question is "perhaps"!  Certainly the more "noticeable" unwanted sounds that occur when no needed sound is present you might be able to remove by simply using a volume curve to reduce the audio level of that section.

"Noises" that are present at the same time as "wanted sound" are more problematic.  You could try the various Noise Reduction tools in MX, but I think the process would be very long and tedious with no guarantee of success.

You are right to suggest that only a specialist audio program is likely to do anything like a "good" job on your footage but MAGIX do make "Video Sound Cleaning lab" which is not free, but fairly reasonably priced, and would make this task considerably easier (you can "see" on-screen the waveform of the audio and work on reducing the unwanted short sections of noise.  There is downloadable trial version so you could at least "try it out".)  I have used this program to "clean up" the audio of various video files; it is NOT a universal panacea (for really "poor" audio I would use Adobe Audition, a wholly different program and MUCH more expensive.)

HTH.

Jeff

Last changed by emmrecs on 1/21/2012, 4:20 AM, changed a total of 1 times.

Win 11 Pro 64 bit, Intel i7 14700, 32 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 4060 and Intel UHD770 Graphics, MOTU 8-Pre f/w audio interface, VPX, MEP, Music Maker, Vegas Pro, PhotoStory Deluxe, Photo Manager Deluxe, Xara 3D Maker 7, Samplitude Pro X7 Suite, Reaper, Adobe Audition 3, CS6 and CC, 2 x Canon HG10 cameras, 1 x Canon EOS 600D, Akaso EK7000 Pro Action Cam

terrypin wrote on 1/22/2012, 5:36 AM

While it's ultimately going to depend on whether the unwanted sound is sufficiently different to the wanted material, you could try isolating a section of the 'tock-tock-tock' and adding it to your set of options under Denoiser > Advanced.

The challenge is to find a section (just a second might be enough) in which that's virtually the only audio present.

Well, that and the challenge of using the rather complex interface/dialog, which took me quite a while!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/MEPAudioCleaning.jpg

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Last changed by terrypin on 1/22/2012, 5:36 AM, changed a total of 1 times.

Terry, East Grinstead, UK. PC: i7 6700K, 4.0 GHz, 32GB with Win 10 pro. Used many earlier versions of MEPP, currently mainly MEPP 2016 & 2017 (Using scores of macro scripts to add functionality, tailored to these versions.)