It's always better to record a voice over for your video without background noise.
But sometimes it's just unavoidable. I don't mean background noise like
recording under the flight path of a busy airport or on a construction site. I
mean those constant background sounds like a fan, air-conditioning unit, or even
the hum of a computer. In this video I'll show you how to remove the background
noise by using audacity, one of the best audio tools around. Even better it's
free and available for Windows, Mac OS 10 and Linux. Stick around to the end of the
video for access to free video training and the link to the official audacity
download site. First, a quick overview of the interface and then I'll demonstrate
the noise reduction effect. Over here you've got the usual toolbar. You'll go in to that
to do one or two things like opening files, saving audio files, using some
effects and maybe going into the preferences. Over here you've got your
monitoring of your input. Next to that you've got the monitoring meters for
your playback and to the right you can control the the level of your input from
your microphone. And you can also control your playback volume using this control
over here. Below the playback meter and input levels you've got your input and
output selections. At the moment I'm using a Focusrite Scarlet 8i6
USB sound interface, so I've got my line in selected to the Scarlet, and for the
output, again I've got it selected to the Scarlet but if you're using a USB mic
you would select that for your input obviously. We're going to be recording a
voice over so that's going to be mono so you select a mono track. If you were
recording a stereo track obviously you'd select stereo but we're recording a mono
track in a moment. The only thing for us left to
do is to set our gain on the microphone, so click just there.
You'll notice that we go into pause mode and you can see the level on the meter.
Ideally you want to peak somewhere between about -12 to -6 probably, because
then that gives you a little bit of headroom for those little loud moments
and hopefully you won't end up overloading the input. So when you're
ready to start recording just release the pause, and you can see immediately
the waveform is being created on the screen on that track. Once you've
recorded your voice over you might actually want to record a little bit of
silence or at least you be quiet and record a little bit of ambient noise
normally I would record voiceovers in my voice booth which I have in my office so
that acoustically isolates me from any noises.
However today I'm actually wanting to demonstrate how you would deal with some
background noises. If it's a constant sound then you can actually remove it in
audacity or do a pretty good job of removing it in audacity. In this case
the sound is the fan or fans on my computer and I will be quiet for a few
seconds so that I can record just the sound so that I can then have a
reference to remove from the rest of the voice.
So they are you have now got some background noise recorded into your file.
So I would stop the recording there's the silence that I recorded you
can actually see it's not absolutely silent because there is a little bit of
noise if I open up a little bit you can see that it's not entirely clean audio
so if I click and drag so I select a few seconds I'll now go up to the effects
noise reduction and click on get noise profile now the profile or the the
computer has sampled that part of the track so I can now use that to remove
that noise from the rest of the recording so select all of the recording
and go back to effect and noise reduction again and this time just click
OK and you can see that a lot of that noise has actually gone let's just play
that so you should just hear silence I'll let you hear what that noise was
like I'll just do an undo and yeah you can hear the sound of the fans
there but let's redo the noise reduction and it's pretty much gone to get our
fire out of audacity we go to file export audio and go to wherever you want
to save it I will call it or audacity lesson and then hit save
if you want to put in meta tags then do so but I would normally just hit okay
and that's it now saved so that's audacity a superb free tool
for anyone who records voiceovers for their videos if you haven't already got
the program at highly recommended the official download site is audacity
team.org if you want to learn more about making videos to promote yourself or
your business I have four free lessons available from my course make great
videos on a budget click the link or the one in the description and look for the
free training marked preview thanks for watching and please hit the thumbs up
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