- Now while it's always best to try and avoid
any issues with your audio at the time of filming,
sometimes background noise from things
like air conditioners or an open window
or a fan or even if you've got a noisy computer,
sometimes that stuff can go unnoticed
until you're in your editing process.
And leaving that stuff in the background of your audio
can be really annoying and distracting for your viewers.
So in this video, we're gonna show you
exactly how you can remove background noise in your videos
just using your existing video editing software
or with free audio editing tools.
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you amplify your business
and brand with video.
If you're new here,
make sure you click that subscribe button,
and all the links to everything we mention in this video
you can find linked in the description box below.
So let's jump into it.
Guys, the first things first, we're gonna need
a video clip that has some background noise.
So here's one that I have prepared earlier,
where it has a ton of background noise
from an air conditioner.
I mean, we're coming up on summer here and it's pretty hot,
so this is what it sounds like.
(air conditioner humming)
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you amplify your.
So you hear that there was an absolute ton
of air conditioner noise at the start here,
(air conditioner humming)
which is just constant throughout the entire video.
So that is what we are going to be fixing up.
Ideally though, in this scenario,
you're trying to fix that and remove that
while you're filming so that you don't have
to run through this process, but obviously,
it can happen, and I'm gonna show you how you can remove it
or any other similar constant noise
that you've got in the background of your videos.
Okay, the first option I'm gonna show you
is how you can remove the background noise
in most video editing software these days.
A lot of them have background noise reduction
or background noise removal tools built in.
So I'm just in ScreenFlow now.
I've got our video clip here dragged into the timeline.
We need to make sure that our clip here is selected.
We can come up here to Audio, and then down here
you've got the option to filter background noise.
So I'll play it first without that enabled.
(air conditioner humming)
Okay, now let's enable it.
You see the default setting here is 80%.
We may need to tweak and adjust that.
Let's go back to the start and play that.
(air conditioner humming)
So you see it's done a pretty good job.
It has removed a lot of that background noise.
It's not all gone, and when we're playing that through,
you could still hear it quite loud at the start,
and then it kind of faded that background noise out.
But the other thing to note is that it did
degrade the quality of my voice there as well,
quite considerably, so we could come back over here,
and we could experiment with this,
maybe drop it to 65 and play that back
and see how that sounds.
(air conditioner humming)
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you amplify your business
and brand with video.
So you can hear that it has removed quite a bit
of that background noise, but it is still present.
Now I just want to say at this point that while
most video editing software out there does have
some sort of background noise reduction
or background noise removal,
the next method that I'm going to show you
using a free program is actually going to do a better job
and give you far more control if you're finding the results
that you're getting in your video editing software
aren't quite good enough.
So you can see here that this is really all we've got
in regards to control, the amount of noise reduction
that is actually applied to our clip,
but we can't dive in any deeper and really get granular
with the noise that we'd like to remove.
But it has done an all right job and is definitely
an improvement on the original.
So this is a ScreenFlow.
The next option we've got which is gonna give you
that greater amount of control, and in most cases,
better results, is using a free program called Audacity,
which will work on both Windows and Mac.
So to grab your copy of Audacity,
you wanna head to audacityteam.org
and just hit the download button here,
and make sure that you are picking either the Windows
or the Mac version,
and follow through with the instructions on how to install.
So once you've got it installed, you'll wanna come up
to either Audacity Preferences or File Preferences.
Go down to where it says Libraries,
and you'll need to install this FFmpeg Library.
So you can just hit Download,
and you'll be taken straight to a web page
where you can install either the Windows version
or the Mac version of FFmpeg.
Now FFmpeg is a plugin or a library,
it says, that allows Audacity to import
a much larger range of audio formats,
which is what we'll need to be able to clean up our audio.
So you wanna make sure that you're installing
this FFmpeg as well.
So once it's installed, you'll just need to hit Locate here,
and that's gonna link that plugin up with Audacity.
So that's all the hard stuff out of the way.
Now let's get to cleaning up your audio.
So in Audacity, you're gonna need to bring in
your video file itself, just choosing File, Import,
Audio, and selecting your video file,
and it'll bring in the audio piece of it.
Or if you're already editing your video down
and you're in your video editor of your choice,
for us here, we're in Final Cut, you can simply export
the audio portion from your editing project
and then clean up or fix the audio in Audacity.
So you want to go ahead and export the audio.
So we can come up here to File, Share,
Master File, come over here to Settings,
let's choose Format and go Audio Only.
We can leave the audio format as AAC
or you can pick pretty much any of these,
are gonna work fine inside of Audacity,
so leave it as AAC, let's go Next,
and we'll save it on our computer.
So now we go back to Audacity and we import our audio file.
Okay, so we've got our audio in there now
from our video clip or from our edited project.
Now this is where we wanna clean it up.
So the first thing we wanna do is to find
a piece in our audio where it is just the background noise.
So you can see this graph here, our audio waveform.
This is all the spoken piece, if I play through this.
It's Justin Brown here from Primal Video.
Whereas the flat piece here,
this is just our background noise.
(air conditioner humming)
So what you'd wanna do first is select a sample piece
to show Audacity that this is the noise
that we actually want to remove.
So you just wanna draw out an area, just click and drag,
of just the audio you want to remove,
come up to Effects and then choose Noise Reduction.
Then you wanna hit Get Noise Profile.
So that's just set this area here of our entire file
as the piece that we wanna remove
throughout the entire audio track.
And so now with that done,
we wanna select our entire audio region,
so we can press Control + A or Command + A to select all,
or again, you might just wanna draw out a section
that you wanna fix up the audio on.
But for us, let's just fix up this entire track.
Select all, Control + A, Command + A,
and then we go back to Effects, down to Noise Reduction.
And this now is where we get more control
over the noise reduction itself.
So the amount of noise reduction,
the sensitivity, and also the frequency
or the smoothing of the audio removal process.
So you can see, instead of just one slider that we had
inside of those video editing applications,
we've got three here to really dial this in,
but it's also looking specifically at that audio
that we have captured to remove just that.
Now we hit Preview here, and that's gonna give us
a quick preview based on these settings.
Actually, I'll take this back to zero
so you can hear the original first.
(air conditioner humming)
And now let's put this back to the default, which was 12.
So you can see, it's already removed quite a lot there.
Now we are still hearing it,
so I would experiment with this and boost this up
to the point where that audio is nearly gone.
Let's try around 18.
Okay, so that's much quieter there.
Now if we just hit OK at this point,
that's gonna apply this to our entire track here.
So go OK, and you can see straightaway in our audio waveform
it has flattened out this back section here,
and if I undo this just to go back, you can see
that it was actually showing that background noise there.
And then when we applied it,
I'll just redo that noise reduction, it's gone smooth.
So if we play this now.
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you amplify your business
and brand with video.
You can see and hear that it's done a really good job
of removing that background noise.
Now obviously here, you might wanna go back
a couple of times and tweak and adjust
to really dial it in for the specific noise
that you've got in the background of your video.
It's not just a matter of saying Justin used 18
and a sensitivity of three or whatever it was.
You will need to adjust these
individually for your video file.
But what I would probably do here is just undo this
and go back into our noise reduction,
and I'd probably up the smoothing from three bands to five.
I've personally found that increasing the bands
when it's vocals, when it's someone speaking,
actually sounds a little bit better,
so we'll apply that now, and so this now is our end product.
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you amplify.
Let's compare that back once again to our original clip.
(air conditioner humming)
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video.
So you can see how easy this is
to apply that noise reduction.
So I'll apply that again now.
So now in regards to getting this audio
back into your editing project or back into your video,
just need to go up to the top here to File, Export.
I'm gonna export that audio.
You could use an MP3.
Personally, I would go with a WAV file.
And let's call this Audio Fixed, and save that out,
and then we jump back to our editing application,
Final Cut, as I said in this example,
and we can import our fixed audio.
So we go File, Import Media,
and obviously this process here is exactly the same
in pretty much any video editing software out there.
Import our fixed audio, drag that down into our timeline.
Now here we could either delete this other audio track
or mute it, turn the volume right down,
but we don't need the original now.
Now our audio clip is this new one,
the fixed one that we have cleaned up using Audacity.
Now while Audacity is a great free tool to do this,
the process is almost exactly the same,
capturing a noise point or a sample point
and applying the noise reduction in apps
like Adobe Audition as well.
So if you have access to Adobe Audition,
you're already on a plan with something like Adobe Premiere
that gives you access to Adobe Audition,
then the process is almost exactly the same in that as well,
but you get even more control over the noise reduction.
So that's how easy it is to clean up
and remove any background noise in your videos.
Now if you're looking for the most efficient way
to edit your videos down with minimal wasted time or rework,
then check out the video linked on screen now,
taking you through the ultimate video editing process.
And I'll see you in the next one.