How to remove ocean from recording?

[Paul2s]

How do I eliminate the surf and bring out some barely audible speech from an old recording? I am editing my nearly 25 year old wedding video. I got the video from the vcr to the hard drive and seperated the audio for editng in CEP. My efforts so far have been less than satisfactory.

[shortedaman]

i would say add a low pass filter and filter out everything above say 2000-4000khz. next maybe mess with a lil eq in the mid range from say 700-2000khx. i would also eliminate any bass frequency's. say 300-500hz remove everything below that. IMHO. but as i have no idea as to how your tape sounds, these are just mere suggestions.

[ErichS]

Originally Posted by Paul2s

How do I eliminate the surf and bring out some barely audible speech from an old recording? I am editing my nearly 25 year old wedding video. I got the video from the vcr to the hard drive and seperated the audio for editng in CEP. My efforts so far have been less than satisfactory.

If this is just a voice recording, I'm assuming that there must be some segments with only ocean sounds (e.g. no talking for a few moments). If CEP has a noise reduction feature like Audition you could try creating a noise profile of only the ocean sound and subtract that from the file. It might not work but it's worth a shot.

[Chili]

I think it would be almost impossible to eliminate the random noises of the ocean.

You could re-say your vowels as a voice-over, or.... You could discard the camera's audio altogether and use a music track, then add captions. Make it a music video. A nice slow jazz instrumental or classical.

I like this approach for my home videos. Most of the time, no one says anything witty when the camera is on anyways, so it's all garbage. I just replace it with music. Of course, I'm not saying that about your wedding vowels, but if the audio track has too much noise, you might consider more creative options. And something unique and unexpected might be better received if it were to be a gift.

Just some ideas....

[Paul2s]

Thanks for the quick suggestions. Shortedaman's suggestion was the path I was headed down. I had tried Erich's approach but instead of speech I got some other weird hollow ringing noise. Maybe I just haven't applied it right yet. I'll keep playing around with it for a bit. If I can't make it work I'll go with Chili's idea. It opens up some interesting possibilities.

[Mortonman]

Try the noise reduction option again, but try doing it at varying levels of intensity. 100% usually does produce annoying artifacts. Try it at 75%, 50%, 33%, 25%. The lower you go, the fewer artifacts you will get. Maybe you'll find just the right balance.

[gecko zzed]

Originally Posted by Chili

Of course, I'm not saying that about your wedding vowels . . .

And nor, presumably, the wedding consonants!


But I'm curious why you (Paul2s, I mean) are doing this?

The wedding video is what it is . . . a record of that time. I could imagine that the ocean noise is intrusive, but how much does that matter?

Like Chili says, it's going to be difficult to get rid of it, and despite using selective EQ and noise reduction, you may end up with a bigger mess than you started with.

[Atom Bomb]

HAving tried this a few times with CEP its going to suck. ou got your work cut out for you.

At best you may remove it but your going to have some very robotic sounding sounds on the enunciation and trail out of words. that weird tin-cannish kinda sound.

Given that the ocean at a wedding is kinda special, id just try and reduce it to mere background atmosphere sound. Which is far less of a chore thne removing it.

Trying to get rid of it is going to make you wish far nails raining from the sky to put you out of your misery. .

[Jim Lad]

Try Acoustica's "Spin it Again".