- This video is best with headphones.
When you're editing audio in an ideal world,
silence should look like a completely flat line.
But if you notice that your flat line looks a little fuzzy,
that means you've got a bit of noise and hiss.
So I'm gonna show you how to use Adobe Audition
to make that noise history.
Perfect.
We're gonna jump straight into the nuts and bolts
of how to do this,
and then after that,
I'll go into a little bit more of the whys behind it
and we'll do some comparisons too.
This is my test audio.
And when I stopped talking, it should be completely quiet.
But since I'm using a shotgun microphone
not positioned directly in front of my face,
and there's an air conditioner going in the background,
and I'm using a camera preamp,
there is a little bit of noise.
And that noise you can actually see right here
if I zoom in by pressing the plus button,
this flat line looks fairly flat
but it's kind of got a little bit of
sort of like bumpiness to it.
And it's actually more noticeable a little bit later
in this audio file.
After the air conditioner kicked in,
you can kind of see right here, especially,
this line which should just be super clean and crisp
almost like these lines up here
that are just part of the interface.
It does not look that clean. It's a little bit fuzzy.
And if I play it, you can hear some of that fuss or hiss.
And the way you fix that is pretty simple.
Just select a portion of your audio
that has the noise you wanna get rid of,
click and drag to select it,
go up to Effects,
Noise Reduction and Restoration.
And you wanna capture a noise print.
After that, you can go back to Effects,
Noise Reduction/Restoration,
and then do Noise Reduction Process.
And you're gonna get a window
that lets you choose a bunch of options.
I've just been using the default settings
because Audition is super smart and I trust it.
But if you have an extreme situation,
maybe there's a crazy air conditioner
or a lawn mower or something in the background,
you can kind of play with this to suit your specific needs.
I've been having really good luck
just with the default settings.
I click Apply,
and then it now applied that to this section of the clip.
So you can hear a difference right now.
This is what it sounds like before noise reduction.
And this is what it sounds like after noise reduction.
So there's a pretty big difference right there.
And you can see the line is just a crisp, flat silent line
while the other one is still a little bit fuzzy.
Now, because I only selected this portion of the clip,
it only applied that noise reduction process
to that portion.
So if you have your whole clip and you're ready to go,
you can just Command + A to select the whole clip,
go back to Effects and then add the noise reduction process
to the entire clip.
And then you should be all set.
And of course, whenever you're working
with an effect like this,
it's a really good idea to go back
and actually listen to what you've recorded
to make sure that it's sounds good
after you've added the effect.
If it's not sounding how you want, just undo the effect,
adjust some of the settings, and then apply it again
until it starts to sound the way that you want it.
Now, that might be the basics
of how to reduce noise using Adobe Audition,
but there's a lot that goes into the why behind
why you might actually want to do that.
If you have the option to use a really great pre-amp
and a clean sounding mic, then avoiding digital processing
I think is a very good thing,
but sometimes that's just not possible.
And I will say on a few of my more recent videos,
I've taken just the audio track from the video,
thrown it into Adobe Audition,
played with the noise reduction
and then adjusted a little bit of the levels
and just kind of sweetened the overall sound
just a little bit,
put it back into final cut and exported it.
I didn't say anything about that,
but then I started getting messages and comments
where people were saying,
"Wow, the audio sounds really, really good."
So it showed me that even though it sounded good before
and it sounds good afterwards,
there's enough of a difference
when you start paying attention to your audio at that level
that people will notice it,
even if it's at an almost subconscious or unconscious level.
In the example I used in this video
is just me talking on one audio track.
So, if I had left in that room tone, that hiss,
it probably went to have been too extreme.
But if I'm recording a podcast or something
where everybody has different audio tracks
and we all have that tone,
and now there's three or four tracks
that are stacked on top of each other,
that's when it can start to be really, really noticeable.
And by eliminating it, things just sound a whole lot better.
And let's take this just one step further.
This is the Shure MV7 which I did an entire review video on,
a 35-minute review.
So if you wanna check that out,
that's your whole evening spent right there.
This is a great microphone,
it's kind of quirky, but it's really good.
I have this running into the RODECaster Pro.
And, typically, when I'm recording directly
into the RODECaster Pro,
especially if I'm using the cloud lifter
which is connected to it,
when I put that audio into Adobe Audition,
it usually does not need to be cleaned up
or have noise reduction applied to it.
So right now I'm recording directly into the RODECaster Pro,
and when he put that audio into Audition,
you should notice that the noise floor
is really, really quiet,
which means I might not need to add
that type of processing to this audio.
Now, while we're recording with the RODECaster,
there's something important to address
because there's a lot of mixers like the RODECaster
and a lot of software applications like Adobe Audition
that can apply a noise gate in real-time
while you're recording.
And I think it's a reasonable question to ask,
why wouldn't I just use the noise gate while I'm recording
to eliminate that hiss in-between sounds
instead of having to go through this entire process?
And that's a very reasonable question.
And my answer is,
because I've never found a software program or a mixer
that has a noise gate that I really trust,
which basically means, as the audio is going up and down,
the mixer or the application is deciding on its own
when to open that noise gate and when to close it.
And what I've noticed,
especially listening in headphones or on like a car stereo
to something like a podcast
where a noise gate has been applied, is,
every time somebody talks,
you can hear the noise gate activating and deactivating.
And I find it super distracting so much so that sometimes
I'll just turn off whatever it is I'm listening to.
Obviously, if you're making something
that's not what you want people to do.
So, for example, on the RODECaster Pro,
if I go into my mic channel and I go into audio processing,
right now I don't have anything turned on.
But if I turn on processing and then go into the noise gate
and enable the noise gate,
let's see if you can hear what I'm talking about.
And to RODE's credit,
the noise gate has gotten better with every release,
but still right now,
when I stopped talking, you can hear it turn off,
and when I start talking again, you can hear it turn on.
And to me, that is just a little bit distracting.
This isn't too bad,
but it's not quite as seamless as the software version
through Adobe Audition specifically.
So now we're gonna switch just back
to the RODE VideoMic NTG up here,
and I'll take this audio
and run it through that same process in Adobe Audition
so you can hear what that sounds like
and hopefully kind of notice a little bit of an improvement.
The reason that I think this is better
than doing it with a live, so to speak, noise gate
or something like that,
is because when you're dealing with live audio,
no matter how good the system is
it can't predict what's going to happen next.
So it's trying to sort of keep up with things
as they're happening,
and sometimes it falls behind
and sometimes it gets a little ahead.
Whereas when you're dealing with
applying noise reduction through software like Audition,
it's already looking at the entire audio file,
or at least the completed audio file,
it can analyze all that,
apply a whole bunch of magic
and things that I just don't understand
and then make it sound better.
I got to give credit to the RODECaster
because every firmware update,
the noise gate gets a little better and a little better,
but I still don't have perfect settings
that I'm really confident in using when it counts yet.
There's an almost unlimited combination of software,
microphones, interfaces, mixers, all of those things,
so it's very important
for you to spend the time experimenting
with exactly what you have
to make things sound as good as possible.
But when it comes to using some of these effects
in Adobe Audition, I say, Adobe is scared to give it a try.
Look at me, I'm reaching for my microphone. Reaching.
That joke was reaching because it was, yeah.
(upbeat music)