- In this video, we'll look at the moving speech delivered
by Lou Gehrig at the Yankee Stadium in July of 1939.
(upbeat music)
So this audio cleanup challenge was set for me
by a longtime viewer and subscriber, Gary.
Gary, really appreciate your comment and suggestion.
And I'm doing this video for you and many others,
who I'm sure will find it interesting.
In previous videos I've cleaned up,
Sir Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth II,
even Martin Luther King Jr. using a variety of tools,
but how will this one work out for me?
Well, watch to the end as I go through many different tools
including a free and easy tool Descripts Studio Sound,
then we'll hop into Adobe Audition,
use some world class tools there,
and we'll end up in a premium product that you pay for,
but if you've done any kind of podcast production
or noise removal from anything
you've likely come across iZotope RX.
And we'll use that tool last.
So, I've just taken a little clip of the audio right here
and I've put it into Descript,
which is free and easy to download.
You can actually get it from mrc.fm/ai.
It uses artificial intelligence to clean up your audio.
Here's a little clip from Lou Gehrig.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today,
I consider myself, consider myself,
the luckiest man, luckiest man,
on the face of the earth, face of the earth.
- Okay now, I've specifically chosen that part of his speech
because it's well, a very famous part of his speech,
but also it really (laughs)
exemplifies exactly what is going on there.
He's speaking, and about half a second later,
we're hearing some kind of splashback coming
from the stadium, obviously.
Like as the audio travels across,
we're getting like a little reflection of his audio.
So what does AI do?
Well here, I would just select
the audio clip inside Descript.
I'd add an effect, which if I haven't already done so,
it would be studio sound,
but it's already here as I edited it earlier,
so that the processing time wouldn't take too long.
Switch it on and immediately artificial intelligence
is applied to this clip,
and let's listen without anything else
to what it does to Lou Gehrig's speech.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, day,
I consider myself, consider myself,
the luckiest man, luckiest man
on the face of the earth, face of the earth.
- Now you see what it's done
is it's taken the reflection and it's enhanced
that as well using studio sound.
So unfortunately, AI is not smart enough to notice
that exactly what is being said is being repeated
half a second later.
And so it's trying to clean up and improve both versions.
So, you're getting today, today.
I'm the luckiest man, man,
on the face of this earth, earth, like that.
It cannot do it.
So Descript, I'm afraid in this instance, is a thumbs down.
It doesn't work or not at least efficiently.
Maybe we can clean it up and throw something else in.
Let's go back to the full speech.
Let's listen from the stuff.
- [Lou Gehrig] For the past weeks, weeks,
you've been reading about bad break, bad break.
- Okay. So there's lots going on here.
Now, we can see once we get into Adobe Audition,
which is pay monthly software,
we can actually see what's happening here.
Now, we can see as he's speaking and going quiet
there's a little bit of microphone feedback
going on on here, in the mid range, around 2.5k.
(mic screeching)
There's that mic feedback.
So we could easily clean something like that up.
The way I'd do that is I'd use the Spot Healing Tool.
I'd make sure my brush is big enough to get it,
so I can use the curly brackets
to make it smaller or bigger.
And then I'd just go over that mic feedback,
and sort of paint it out like that.
So I can very easily just do a couple of passes here,
two or three passes just to really try
and remove that mic feedback and lower it down.
And as you can see, it's kind of fading away as I do that.
Let's just.
(mic echoing)
Okay, so the mic feedback is less there,
but that hasn't helped with the repetition.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today.
I consider myself, consider myself.
- Now, what I can do is I can go ahead and grab this audio.
Actually, I've already made a copy of that specific section.
I'm gonna go into Multitrack.
I'm gonna call this Lou
and I'll save into my downloads folder.
No worries there.
And what I'll try and do
is manually add some volume key frames.
So I'm gonna hit Shift + E
to get rid of the tracks I'm not using
and Control or Command and back slash to really zoom in.
So now, here what I can do
is I can like paint in some
of volume sort of key frames if you like.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today.
- And, I can actually start to fade out
where he's kind of repeating on himself.
But this, of course, is very rough.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today.
- Okay. So we're gonna have to cut that further.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today.
- Today. - [Lou Gehrig] Today.
I consider myself, consider myself.
- And this is where it gets complex,
cause he's reflecting over his original words.
- [Lou Gehrig] Consider myself, myself.
Consider myself.
- So what we can do is try and fade this out, like so,
Make it less prominent.
- [Lou Gehrig] I consider myself, consider myself.
- Okay, I've done a little duck there.
It's not the greatest.
- [Lou Gehrig] Consider myself the luckiest man (echoing)
Consider myself the luckiest (echoing)
- And again, that is something that can completely go.
So let's fade that out.
- [Lou Gehrig] I consider myself, consider myself,
the luckiest man, luckiest man.
I consider, the luckiest man, the luckiest man.
The luckiest man, luckiest man.
- And again, we're just gonna try
and fade out a little bit of this,
but keep the man bit in.
- [Lou Gehrig] Luckiest man, luckiest man.
- And get rid of that man bit there.
So again, you can see this is painstaking.
It's taking a lot of time.
- [Lou Gehrig] Luckiest man, man,
on the face of the earth, on the face of the earth.
Man, man, on the face of the earth, face of the earth.
- And then we can get rid of that earth bit at the end.
- [Lou Gehrig] On the face of the earth, face of the earth.
- Oh dear. No, this is.
You see the kind of issues we are coming across here.
- [Lou Gehrig] On the face of the earth, the earth.
- Okay, so we got something there
that we can potentially work with.
Now, I did think through many different tools, by the way,
just to show you that I'm not diving straight
into Multitrack and trying to do it manually.
I did try many of the earlier tools that I've shown you
in different videos like De-noise,
unfortunately, not working so well.
Zero to 100%.
Let's go to the start and play that back.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today,
I consider myself, consider myself.
- It cleans up the background noise,
but unfortunately that's not what we want.
I can also try something like Noise Reduction Restoration.
We'll go for Sound Remover
and we'll try and train it on.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today. (echoing)
- We'll try and train it on a word that he says
that is reflected.
So, we'll learn the sound model of that.
But unfortunately,
(mic sound muffled)
we can enhance for speech, of course.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today.
I consider myself, consider myself,
The luckiest man, luckiest man.
- But of course, we'd have to train on the whole speech.
So that's not working.
Another idea I had is,
well, what about if we cancel the phase?
What if I take the left hand side of this recording
and copy it and then paste it on the right hand side?
Like so.
So I'm gonna delete that, paste that in,
And then as I do that, what if I go to effects
and I invert the wave form.
Now, if you invert a wave form and get it exact
with the other wave form.
When you go to mono, so this is stereo.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today.
- If you're listening in mono,
you might not hear anything there.
And then if I go to edit and convert sample type to mono.
See, both sides cancel each other out.
And I thought, ah,
what if I did that with the echo track
and calculate exactly what's going on there?
So again, we'll get rid of that and we'll listen.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today. (echoing)
Today. (echoing)
- So today starts,
let's see here probably about 0.473 seconds later.
So, nearly half a second.
So if I go and find 0.473,
which is there and then I paste this only
onto the right track,
maybe we can cancel out his echo with a phase in version.
This is complex stuff.
I'm gonna try it.
Click okay to that.
See, I've pasted that virtually.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today.
- We've got that now virtually lined up.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today (echoing)
- You see the original is now matching up with the echo.
Now, what if I go ahead and take the right track.
This is over complicating in a way, isn't it?
Edit and we'll go, sorry to effects.
And we'll invert that wave form.
And now we'll bring it back to stereo.
And now we'll try and do a phase cancellation
by going to edit, convert sample type to mono.
What happens?
- [Lou Gehrig] Today (echoing)
I consider myself. (echoing)
- And unfortunately that phase cancellation
just doesn't work because the wave form
is not exactly the same
and it needs to be exactly the same to cancel out.
So unfortunately, that didn't work.
So I've got this squiggly thing in audition.
We're not doing too well, are we?
Multi-track mixed down entire session.
I've done a bit of a fade out there.
Let's save that as Lou Improved, if you can call it that.
And then I'm going to go back over to Descript right here.
And I'm gonna go ahead and bring in
that Lou improved version.
So, let's go and drag and drop this just about there.
We'll let it come in.
And we'll also add the effect of studio sound to this
to see if the AI handles it better.
So again, it's just gonna take a few seconds
to add studio sound to Lou improved
and we'll see now if by me ducking out the reflections,
mostly, it will actually clean up this audio.
So give it just a moment
and then we'll play it back from the start here
with the play button.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today.
- Yeah, it's not. - I consider myself, myself.
The luckiest man,
on the face of the earth, earth.
- Okay. It's a bit better,
but it's not perfect. Is it?
It really is not perfect.
Okay. So we'll hop over
into the premium solution iZotope RX.
What kind of a job can iZotope RX do?
Let's go to Dialogue De-reverb, first of all,
and we'll focus on the vocal detail preset.
Let's listen to Lou Gehrig's speech going through this.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today (statically)
I consider myself, consider myself,
the luckiest man, luckiest man,
on the face of the earth, face of the earth.
- Okay. That's still bringing quite a lot
of the background noise.
So let's go to Extreme Reduction
and see how this handles things.
Computing the preview.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today,
I consider myself, consider myself,
the luckiest, luckiest man.
- That's not bad but we can still hear the background stuff.
Dialogue Isolate is quite a good one.
And if we actually got to Isolate Noise and run this.
So this is just increasing the noise
and getting rid of the dialogue sensitivity of 10.
So really hard.
Let's go preview on this and listen to it.
And let's actually listen from the start.
This is quite a CPU intensive effect, by the way.
So it might take some time to render,
but this is a good quality render.
- [Lou Gehrig] The luckiest man (echoing)
on the face of the earth (echoing)
- Oh, that's good.
Now, it's actually playing just the echo.
So maybe we'll be lucky if we go Dialogue Gain to zero,
Noise Gain to infinity, so basically mute it out.
And sensitivity to 10.
Let's play this
and hear what we get with our CB.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today,
I can consider myself, consider myself,
the luckiest man, luckiest man,
on the face of the earth, face of the earth.
- It's not perfect, but it's good.
Let's go to best quality and try that again,
because maybe best quality render will do even better.
Let's play that.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today,
I consider myself, consider myself,
the luckiest man, man,
on the face of the earth, face of the earth.
- Okay. I reckon Dialogue Isolate
with the noise gain turned right the way down,
dialogue gain at neutral, sensitivity at 10
is probably the best result we have had yet.
Well done, iZotope RX,
you are worth every single penny.
Just for my own satisfaction
to make sure I've done the right things,
and gone to the right bits here.
Dialogue De-reverb and Dialogue Isolate,
probably using those in combination
would get the best result here.
I'm also gonna run the Repair Assistant, which is fantastic.
We can start from the start
and say that this would be dialogue
that we're trying to clean up.
It's gonna do it's analysis of all of Lou Gehrig's speech,
and then it's gonna suggest some different chains,
and we'll see if we can get a better result than I got
with my specific effects using the AI
that is included in iZotope RX.
So it's creating three different options for me
to process this speech and let's see what exactly we get.
Okay. So we've got the original here.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today,
I consider myself, consider myself.
- Chain A.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today,
I consider myself, consider myself.
- Chain B.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today,
I consider myself, myself.
- Chain C.
- [Lou Gehrig] Today, today.
- And I have to say, I don't think they do as good a job
as the effects that I chose.
So you can see, actually,
that there are different effects going
into all of these different chains.
But I reckon Vocal Dialogue De-reverb
and Vocal Dialogue Isolate are gonna be the way to go
if using RX to clean up such a speech
or something like this.
Thanks for watching to the end.
And let me know if there's a famous person
who has a speech that you'd like me to clean up.
Post it in the comments below,
and I'll do my very best to make the magic happen.
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