Over the past year, I have had several projects with major sound problems. I’m not talking about commercial videos now, I’m talking about a series of interviews or video tutorials that are either recorded with a camera microphone or with the cheapest microphones.
When a client comes to me with such a project, it is obvious that there is no point in re-recording or duplicating the sound and I take the project “as is”.
The fact that I would find myself in the position of such a client was surprising to me.
About the project
Our project – Gosta Media – is almost one year old. And it just so happened that the development team had just finished a huge update that included global changes to the front-end and back-end. Since the project is live and has more than 800 visitors a day, we discussed a smooth update of the whole site. We agreed on a date and prepared all the files for migration. And then I decided to record a video interview for the YouTube channel with our lead developer about all the improvements that will be implemented on the site. We start choosing a convenient time for both of us, and that time is 4 hours before the full site upgrade 🙂
It’s important to say that, despite my experience and my line of work, this is my first interview and the first time I’ve ever recorded a video in this format. We start the meeting, Sasha is wearing headphones – which means the sound will be fine. I switch on the screen recording, check the sound recording, and make a test video.
3, 2, 1, let’s go.
Almost two hours have gone by without a hitch. I save all the video files. And I realized that I was recording the computer sound and Sasha was talking to me from his mobile phone.
The second problem was recording my sound on my laptop microphone, which I had set to maximum sensitivity. Thanks to this, I recorded not only our conversation but also the sound of cars passing by outside my window, the sound of my dog, and even the sound of my mouse. And now I’m going to be doing a noise reduction in Audition.
So I made a compilation of the audio, what we have, and what I need to work with:
How to remove background noise in audition
I prefer to create all simple projects in Premiere Pro. Of course, the benefits are the sync with After Effects and Audition. After painstakingly cutting out all the stutters, stutters, and backgrounds, and reducing the timing, I still had a 12-minute video with terrible audio that needed fixing.
To start with, I split all the audio into 2 tracks: my voice and my interviewee’s voice (at the same time coloring them to make them easier to distinguish visually). Sasha’s voice is recorded much quieter than mine, and mine can be made quieter.
Audition has a cool batch function called Match Loudness. I select all the tracks, drop them into Audition, transfer all the tracks to Match Loudness, and press Run. Audition equalizes the sound by itself, raising or lowering the sound to a normal volume (you choose in the presets). To avoid saving each file separately, I click Close All and Save to All. All done. The basic volume settings between the different voices are equalized.
Next, we need to solve the problem of the loudest sounds. To do this, I find the peaks locally, reopen them in Audition, select a track with a marker, and turn the volume down.
It’s pointless to go any further with Audition because it would take all week to remove that much noise. I started testing different AI noise removal services. I settled on https://audo.ai/.
Here is a piece of the noisiest audio and an example of what this service did:
BEFORE
AFTER
As well as removing all the spot noise (yes, not a perfect result everywhere, but 95% of the time it did the job perfectly), this tool also added fade in and fade out to the transitions between the 2 voices. And that was another time saver for me.
Logo Animation in After Effects
While I was struggling with the sound, my teammate was creating the animation for this project. I’d like to convert it to 3D in the future, but for now, we’ll use this version.
Many clients order 2D logo animation and don’t even think about the fact that 3D logo animation looks much cooler and increases the value of the brand in the eyes of customers. If you are ambitious, I strongly recommend you order 3D animation.
Final video
When editing a video, it’s always important to consider the type of video, the platform it’s being created for, and the audience. It is also very important to use the brand identity of the brand you are making the video for.
So, after a few hours of video editing, here is what we ended up with:
In the end, I wanted to add my thoughts about any AI tool. They are just tools that make your job easier, but they do not do it for you. If you implement piece intelligence in your pipeline (in any field) – you save your time. And as we know, an expert is someone who does his work with quality, but much faster than others!
