How to remove Waterfall noise from background

[FrugalDougal]

Hi Everyone

I am brand new to DC Live Forensics 7.5 and also very inexperienced in restoration of sound files, so please bear with me if I am slow to understand.

I have a copy of the audio from my nephew's wedding ceremony video and unfortunately it is virtually inaudible due to excessive background noise from either a water fountain or a waterfall.

I have tried using EZ clean and continuous noise filters, but these had little or no improvement.
Can anyone guide me into the process of trying to clean up this audio file so that at least I can hear the voices of the wedding couple and the minister.

Many thanks

Dougal

[Craig Maier]

Hi,

While I have never tried to attenuate waterfall or fountain noises from a recording, the general approach would be as follows:

1. First, apply a bandpass filter to the signal to eliminate out of band noise from the audio.

2. Next, apply one of the following dynamic filters:

A. Continious Noise Filter in normal CNF Mode

B. Continious Noise Filter in Spectral Subtraction Mode

C. Continious Noise Filter in AFDF mode

D. The Time Domain Adaptive Filter (found under the Forensics menu)

Other than that, it is really hard to say without hearing and seeing the actual audio. If you want, send me a 10 second snippet of the audio in .wav format and I will report back to you on my findings. My email is:

dctools@aol.com

Craig

[Craig Maier]

Hi Dougal,

I took a shot at that file that you sent; you should have it for review. Let me know if you think that it is an improvement and then I will send you the filters and settings that I used.

Craig

[Dan McDonald]

Hey Craig -
Can you post the presets? I'm wondering if they could be adapted to crowd noise.

Dan

[Craig Maier]

Hi Dan,

I did not create a preset, but did it step by step and just wrote down the results. Dougal reported that he liked the results and is re-creating my settings for the job. The noise was somewhat particular to his file since it had a 187 Hz pure tone which required a Notch Filter. Anyway, here were the settings, but I would not use the Notch filter as a general practice:

1. Notch - 187 Hz, 0.10 Oct

2. Brick Wall Filter - Freq = 100 Hz, Upper Freq = 6500 Hz, Length = 300

3. CNF - FFT = 4096, Attack = 100, Release = 200, Attenuation = 10, Threshold = 6 clicks upwards

4. 20 Band EQ - - - adjust for the best sound with everthing below 63 Hz all the way down and everything above 8 kHz all the way down too.

Craig

btw - it did sound like they had a waterfall in the venue (a wedding ceremony)

[Dan McDonald]

Thanks Craig. Sometimes I run into things where there's a constant crowd noise, which I thought might behave sort of like a waterfall, but at different frequencies.

Dan

[Craig Maier]

Yeah, I would agree with that. The waterfall noise on that file is sort of a frequency weighted random sound. So, that process that I used is about right as a starting point.