While
shooting a low budget film there are many, many things
to occupy one's mind, and often times audio is close to
the bottom of the list for many video-oriented producers
-- if it isn't terribly distorted it's fine, right. Or
perhaps you are one who realizes that the audio has some
issues but you're not sure what you can do about it short
of spending a lot of money you don't have. In the world
of a microfilmmaker, takes from a shoot often include
noise from an air conditioner or computer, noise from
the camcorder itself, hum, or God forbid, crackling caused
by a cable going bad, or something unforeseen that's worse
like the noise induced into the line from an incoming
cell phone call because someone thought it would be okay
to just put theirs on vibrate rather than turning it off.
I'm
here to tell you that you can do something about the unwanted
noise that plague your audio tracks, reducing the credibility
of low budget films and distracting the viewer from the
story you're trying to tell. In this article (and others
that will follow) we will explore some of the noise reduction
(NR) software packages out there, ranging from simple
to tweaked-out, in a wide range of prices. For this purpose,
I pulled together four test files. Three are from a low-budget
documentary on which I'm currently doing audio post, and
the fourth is a clip from an old record. All of the files
were processed using only the NR software being reviewed
unless otherwise noted. To gain some perspective on these
software solutions, all results were benchmarked by processing
the files using the noise reduction algorithms found on
the TC Electronics System 6000 with the Backdrop program
loaded into one of the DSP blocks. This is one of the
best hardware noise reduction platforms available and
will give you an idea of the quality you might expect
if you decided to pay a commercial studio to clean up
your audio for you. Before and After clips will be made
available on microfilmmaker.com so you don't have to depend
on mere words to form your opinion!
With
that said, check out our first three Noise Reduction reviews:
Bias
Sound Soap 2
Diamond
Cut 6
Sony
Noise Reduction 2.0
