Getting rid of BIRDS-in-the-background of my SOUND files?

Hello.

I know it works, I just don´t know what software to use and which button to push.

I need a software that can do away with those damn "bright" sound levels in a sound file. The file I recorded is a dog that is making really dark and low sounds. But there are still those bright birds in the background. So what can I do now? How do I get rid of the birds in post?

Thanks for advice.

 

Uh..since the birds aren't a specifically constant-or-repeating sound that you can isolate, I don't know if you can, without killing a lot of the quality of the sound you want to keep.

 

Ehem, I expected at least more than one to not help me...

Doesn´t mean I don´t appriciate your advice, Funk-E.

 

/edit (double post)

 

you could just kill the birds (-;

...or get a simple wave editor and manually dub the birds out frame by frame

or even lower the pitch of the recording, so the birds just blend in with the growl

 

You still have MSP, yes?
One option would be to use the audio editor and pull out the bird chirps manually there. You could also use an Equalizer audio effect to pull out high frequency sound, but that could change the rest of the audio too (not just the birds) and the low frequency bird sounds would still be there.

 

I still use MSP for this. I already pitched around and tried to cut the VERY obvious and annoying birds out, but I cut out the growl at the same time, then. Where´s the equalizer in MSP?

 

SEnd me the file, I have soundtrack Pro, I can take out the birds and leave everything else.
cfritsche@mac.com

 

I wasn´t that much asking for help, rather for advice or hints. Is this program you have for free`?

 

We had something of this problem: using two cameras and two shotgun mikes but we didn't realize until too late that one camera's input jack wasn't working, so it was picking up motor sound in addition to everything else. So one set of footage is great sound and other is great, plus the camcorder whir.

Turns out we weren't far from an installation of Sony Sound Forge with the Noise Reduction plugin. It took some trial/error and a lot of work, but we were able to clean it up a *lot*. Including one segment of footage that we didn't learn 'til later had my Dad's voice talking in the background (we filmed most of "Forcery" at my parents' house ) Bit of tweaking in Sound Forge and it's completely gone now.

The trick is, don't try to remove the sound/noise in one fell swoop. Get a *tiny* noiseprint of the offending audio and play with that, then when you're satisfied with it process that one and get another small sample and do likewise. Keep doing it until you've achieved satisfactory results. It's painstaking work but well worth the effort.

 

For 'constant' or looping sounds like motor whir, you can actually get pretty good results by grabbing a segment of the audio where the noise is as 'clean'(isolated) as you can, inverting its waveform, and inserting it back into your main soundfile as many times as needed.

 

This is why I prefer to create the soundtrack from scratch rather than relying on audio from the shoot.

 

As Jedi2016 mentioned you could just redo the soundtrack
if you have software(for instance Pro Tools FREE - http://www.digidesign.com/ptfree/ ), a soundcard with microphone input(most do), and a microphone. I've never used Pro Tools--as I have Sonar instead--so your on your
own getting the software to record properly. But having
multiple audio tracks--8 in this case--is very useful.

I don't know if pro tools free has video support though
which will complicate things if it doesn't. Still you can
load the camera audio into a pro tools track to be used as a reference when doing the dialogue over.

Even if you don't want to go to all that trouble you can
use EQ to pull out the frequencies of the birds. Or at least use a Gate. Basically a Gate only allows sounds
through when they are loud enough otherwise the volume is
off. How loud the allowable sounds must be to open the
gate depends on the "Threshold". A mild use of gate and eq might do the trick.

 

That PROTOOLS thing is just for Windows 98. I have XP... Is that a problem?

Funk-E, do you mean I can invert the soundfile, layer it over the original and I won´t hear a thing?

If I can get rid of bird sounds- can I get rid of annoying leaves the people step over?

 

When I was watching "Three in the Afternoon", I kept hearing this.. chirping whenever they spoke.

Since they filmed during what looked to be a summer night, I'm wondering if they weren't cancelling out the cricket noises merely by removing the audio between spoken lines.

It did sound a little weird, but overall it didn't really detract from how cool that film was. If you can't do ADR, then I would recommend trying out something like that.


EDIT: Funk, what exactly does inverting the waveform do? I never quite understood that.


-Vaportrail

 

Funk-E, do you mean I can invert the soundfile, layer it over the original and I won´t hear a thing?


Yeah, if you do that you won't hear anything.

 

>>That PROTOOLS thing is just for Windows 98. I have XP... Is that a problem?

Oops didn't notice that, I thought for sure I saw one for win 2000 systems. Well there's always Audacity, it's free but it
might be a little buggy. There's also a VST plugin adapter for Audacity to download separately. There's quite a few free VST plugins if you need them--many are pretty good. Just do a google search.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Hope this will help you.