I am making a video for a friend as a farewell and I received many videos from her friends and family around the world. Some have background noise (wind etc.) but there is one in particular that was shot in a moving car, and the engine noise overpowers the speech.
Is there a free program I can use to tune out the noise part of the sound track? If it involves splitting the audio and video please tell me how to do that too, I'm not a pro and I'm doing this in a Windows Movie Maker.
Thank you!
Mujer Alta2011-08-21T16:06:48Z
Favorite Answer
1. The audio can't be split from the video with Windows Live Movie Maker. If you have the Vista or XP versions, it's easy. In Timeline view, click the + sign next to "video" on the left side of the Video track, click and hold on the audio track and drag it straight down into the Music/Audio track below it. Don't panic when the rest of the video disappears. It's OK - no videos are harmed in this operation;-) Now, do what you normally do to publish. Instead of video files, you'll get a selection of Audio file types to choose from. In Vista, on the second page of the publish dialog, click on "More Settings" and pick "High Quality Audio (156 kbps)". This creates a wma file which you can open in Audacity and other sound editors.
2. Now for the really hard part - removing noise. Getting rid of the noise depends on the audio characteristics of the noise. Here's are 2 examples from a project I'm working on (I've only been using Audacity for 6 months! When asked by a friend, it's impossible to say "No"! LOL!). The lower two bands of noise were relatively easy to get rid of with the High Pass filter. That's "relatively" because, since I hardly knew what I was doing, it took a few hours of trying this and that to figure out how the filter worked. Getting some of the noise out of the upper areas with a Low Pass filter without destroying the bird calls was a lot more difficult. Before: (All that pink stuff is sound and somewhere in there is a bird call.) http://www.flickr.com/photos/22020217@N05/6066822639/in/photostream
Final Result (analysis of the "after" clip in another program): the "footprint" of a bird call that can be measured and compared to other bird calls. http://www.flickr.com/photos/22020217@N05/6067353138/in/photostream
2. It's easy to remove noise, if the noise is separate from the voices you want to keep. When the noise and the voices overlap, it takes some finesse and a lot of trial and error to get it right.
3. If you want to try it, I'll help as much as I can. Click my avatar to email me. In the meantime, split the audio from the video and save it, download and install Audacity - the newest 1.3.13 beta version. I'll check and see if the High and Low Pass Filters I used came with the program or if I downloaded them. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/