- Hello, I'm Mike Russell from musicradiocreative.com.
In this video, I remastered Winston Churchill
and here's what happened.
(upbeat music)
- So I've got a little bit of Sir Winston Churchill
and his famous beaches speech. Let's take a listen.
- [Winston Churchill] We shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence
and growing strength in the air.
- Now, you know, it doesn't sound too bad,
but on today's modern equipment
and with our upgraded expectations with audio,
I think we can do a little bit better.
So here's what I, as an audio producer would do
to make Sir Winston sound the best he can.
Today later on in the video,
we'll look at some artificial intelligence technology
from Adobe that might put me out of a job.
Let's get started.
So in Adobe Audition, obviously I've got the waveform here.
It's showing me a lot of information about the loudness,
how loud things are, the waveform.
And I can see in between all of the speech,
there's this audio here, which is yeah,
you guessed it background noise.
So let's work on this and make it sound better.
The first thing I'll do is open spectral frequency display,
which is this icon up here or shift and D on my keyboard
to give me an overview of what's going on.
Now, I can see a lot of the high frequencies
are already missing.
Some frequencies up till about 10 K are available.
Now it's worth to mention that we can't put back
what isn't there.
We can try our best,
but we can use some EQ
and some noise reduction to improve this.
So let's get started.
First of all, I'm going to capture a noise print
in Adobe Audition, which you can do with any audio
that has background noise and remove it.
What I need to do in order for this to work
is find the longest duration of background noise,
probably here and highlight it.
We'll zoom in so we can really see it and play it.
That is all background noise.
We don't want that. So into the effects menu,
noise reduction restoration,
and we want to capture the noise print.
Boom, click okay. It's done.
So now Adobe Audition knows that it's gotta remove anything
that sounds like that background noise.
So we'll zoom out.
We'll highlight the whole thing.
We'll go into effects again, noise reduction restoration,
and we'll get noise reduction process.
And you can see it's captured that print of the noise.
Now I can switch on before and after view
up here in the top right
and you can see it's done a good job of removing
quite a bit.
Let's play it.
Most that noise has gone.
- [Winston Churchill] That is what
we're going to try to do.
That is the result of it measures in government.
- Okay, perfect, so I'm really liking how this is sounding
so far.
Before I apply that effect I'm gonna copy this
and I'm gonna start a new file.
So I've got the original and I'll call this
Churchill original. There we go.
And we'll paste that so we've got like a reference file
and we'll go back to the one that I'm editing,
effects, noise reduction restoration,
noise reduction process.
And I can tweek this about if I want,
like I can change the amount of noise reduction,
push the percentage up a bit.
That's really gonna pull it down.
- [Winston Churchill] Generate.
That is what we are going to try to do.
That is all way with measures.
- Pretty, pretty happy with that.
I can see a lot of low end noise going on here
so I could choose to sort of increase
the amount of noise reduction on the low end.
- [Winston Churchill] Generate.
That is what we are going to try to do.
- Okay. I'm pretty happy with that as it stands,
apply simple as that.
So with a couple of processes in Adobe Audition,
capturing the noise print and noise reduction,
boom, most of our noise has gone
from Sir Winston's famous speech.
So that's what I do to start with.
The second thing is a little more complex and I'd go in
and I'd use EQ, equalizer.
Like the stuff you find on your high-fi, you know,
the high end, the trebble, the base, all of that.
I kind of tweak about with that
to get rid of some of the unwanted frequencies
and maybe pull out some of the frequencies
in Sir Winston's voice,
I think are really charming and nice.
One of the biggest problems with this speech,
it was given in a large open space
and there is a lot of reverb
and you can hear that in particular here.
- [Winston Churchill] Strength in the air.
- When he says air, and then we've got all of that reverb,
fortunately in spectral frequency,
that reverb information is retained right here.
And we can actually see if I get the marque selection tool
it's happening around here.
There it is specifically here and here and here.
Okay, brilliant.
So we can see frequencies 800 Hertz.
We can see a frequency of about 1.6
and we can see a frequency of just under three K.
So I'll bear that in mind now,
when I open this up and have a play
in let's put in here an effect, filter and EQ
and we'll go for parametric equalizer
and we'll go to default here.
So we've got the default flat line and I'm gonna pull down
some of the frequencies around 800,
around here and around just below three K.
And I'm also going to notch the queue width to make those
a little sharper, those little frequencies
I'm pulling out and we'll look at before and after.
So we can see the change it's making.
You can already see that some of the frequencies
that are undesirable are indeed being pulled out down here,
which is kind of helpful.
I'm just gonna do this probably to the extreme.
- [Winston Churchill] Growing confidence
and growing strength in the air.
Growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
- Sweeping around. - [Winston Churchill] Growing
confidence and growing...
- Before - [Winston Churchill] Growing
confidence and growing strength in the air.
- That's probably a little bit too extreme.
So I'm gonna just push these notches up a little bit,
- [Winston Churchill] Growing confidence
and growing strength in the air.
- Okay. Now we can start to enhance some of the high end
to make him crisper and clearer.
- [Winston Churchill] To growing confidence
and growing strength in the air.
- [Winston Churchill] Growing confidence
and growing strength in the air.
- And finally, I'm just gonna add a high pass filter
to roll off any low end that we don't need.
Particularly we noticed a lot of the problems
with Sir Winston Churchill's speech were down
in the base frequencies. So let's roll some of this off.
- [Winston Churchill] Growing confidence
and growing strength in the air.
- Okay. He's getting very thin now.
So I'll pull it back.
- [Winston Churchill] Growing confidence
and growing strength... - And maybe I'll just
notch up a little bit on his base frequencies.
- [Winston Churchill] Growing confidence
and growing strength in the air.
- And we'll go to before and after.
Before. - [Winston Churchill] Growing
confidence and growing strength in the air.
- And then after. - [Winston Churchill] Growing
confidence and growing strength in the air.
- Starting to sound a little bit better.
So again, I'm going to apply that.
In fact, I'll actually undo
and apply it to the whole speech here.
So let's select everything and hit apply
with that EQ pattern and boom,
we have got improved Sir Winston Churchill.
Let's listen to quite a bit of this speech now
and see how it sounds.
- [Winston Churchill] We shall go onto the end,
we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence
and growing strength in the air,
we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
- That's really not too bad, especially when we compare it
to the original file that we have here
before we added noise reduction
and a bit of parametric equalizer.
- [Winston Churchill] We shall go on to the end,
we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence
and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island,
whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
- Okay. So hopefully you'll agree that's an improvement,
but could I be out of job soon?
Let's introduce some new technology from Adobe now.
It's a top secret project up until now
they've been working on called project Shasta
and here it is on my screen.
I'm currently in the alpha version of project Shasta.
It's not widely available at the moment,
but you can start new projects.
And one of the best things it has speech improvement.
So let's try it out.
New project right now in here.
Ready to go and I'm just gonna rename it
and I'm just gonna call it Churchill. There we go.
Okay and then I can upload some audio
or I can probably drag and drop as well.
But I think I'll click upload
to get in a piece of audio there.
Some Churchill audio, there is the speech.
- [Winston Churchill] at any rate that is what
we are going to try to do.
- Okay, perfect.
So that's exactly what we're expecting here.
This is Sir Winston Churchill
with his famous beaches speech.
I can actually go through
and I can actually select everything here.
And the first thing I'm going to do is
I'm going to try the transcribe feature
to transcribe this speech.
You can do this with your own audio.
If you're importing voiceovers or podcasts
or anything else to project Shasta,
one of the best things is it has transcribing set to go.
You can do splits, you can do fade-inns, backgrounds,
but one of the most impressive filters
is the enhanced speech.
And we can try that out once we've transcribed the piece,
okay, there we go.
Most of Sir Winston Churchill's speech
has been transcribed accurately
and again I can play back from any point I'd like,
so let's start from the word end.
- [Winston Churchill] we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans.
- Now you can see most of the transcription
is pretty accurate.
There are a few words that are missed or slightly different,
but this is what I'm gonna use now,
this is AI technology.
That's probably gonna put me out of a job.
Let me know in the comments, by the way, what you think,
filters, enhanced speech, tick it.
It's going to whizz over that speech and then let's go back
and see what exactly happens.
So I'm gonna go back to we and play again.
- [Winston Churchill] We shall go on to the end,
we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas
and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence
and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island,
whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
- Okay. So what do you think, let me know in the comments,
am I going to be out of a job soon
with the new AI technology from Adobe's project Shasta,
it's pretty decent but I still enjoy doing noise reduction
and parametric EQ.
I'm never gonna lose my passion for doing that.
So let me know and also if you wanna improve
the sound of your voice,
I'm accepting your submissions right now.
Just go to mrc.fm/yourvoice to submit
a recording of your own voiceover.
And maybe you'll be featured soon
on one of my videos right here.
(upbeat music) - Make sure
you like this video and also if you wanna see more videos
like this, subscribe to my channel and ding the bell.
So you never miss another audio video from me.
- (upbeat music)