Anyone Using Sony Noise Reduction with Vegas

dtudela wrote on 12/21/2004, 10:24 AM

I recently purchased Noise Reduction to use with Vegas 5. Upon looking at the manual I was surprised to see that only 1 1/2 pages were devoted to its use with Vegas--very sketchy at best. I managed to find my way to invoke the plug-in but was stumped at the lack of instructionas to how to use it effectively. I am not looking to be hand-held with its use but thought someone might point me in the right direction to speed up the learning curve--maybe a tutorial to be downloaded, etc. Any suggestions is appreciated. Great forum--I've learned a lot and hope to be a contributor down the road a bit.
dtudela

Comments

DGrob wrote on 12/21/2004, 10:31 AM

You definitely need Spot's excellent article at:

http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/articles/artofnoise.htm

NR works like a charm when you get into it. Darryl

Grazie wrote on 12/21/2004, 10:37 AM

Doesn't work on me though! . .. Yup, great package .. .got me outta scrapes and I've assisted Pro videographers with their "problems".

Spot's Tute made it simple to use and experiment with.

Grazie

dtudela wrote on 12/21/2004, 11:22 AM

Thanks Daryl and Graze for the quick response. Can't wait to check out Spot's article.
Darrell

TheHappyFriar wrote on 12/21/2004, 8:08 PM

So you did read the manual? It has a (short) tutorial in it. That tut is basicly it. Don't try to "overthink" that app. It's amazingly simple. The part about Vegas is just how to access it in Vegas.

I think the tut is only about 1/2 to 1 page long.

Chanimal wrote on 12/22/2004, 1:48 AM

Thanks for the site on NR. However, I was aware of how to capture the noise print and the advise to use multiple passes. I have more questions about which settings to use when and how each affects the outcome.

Any tutorials on these?

heymj wrote on 12/22/2004, 5:47 AM

I "play around a lot" with the various Reduction Types and the other sliders, with the "keep residual output" box checked. This way I can hear how much of the violin or flute or what have you is being *removed*.

I ran out of patience before I got good results, with tweaking the noiseprint itself. You can do that on the "noiseprint" tab by grabbing one or more points and moving them about. I would love to understand that a little better.

My last project was trying to eliminate flourescent buzz in a very reverberant room. NR helped a lot, but I wasn't able to completely eliminate the buzz - I guess the reverberations smeared the sound too much to be identifiable as noise.

Next time I recorded there, I INSISTED that the lights and the heating system be turned off. Saved me about 4 days of fiddling with NR and the results were incredible! fwiw

Rednroll wrote on 12/22/2004, 7:05 AM

Just click on the "Help" buttion, when you open the plugin. There's a quick start under there and also some guides on using it, as well it explains what each parameter adjustment does.

vitalforces wrote on 12/22/2004, 11:03 AM

I really only understood Noise Reduction after reading a great book on "Audio Postproduction for Digital Video" by Jay Rose (about $30 on Amazon). It comes with a CD with sample audio clips which demonstrate the different results from different settings of various plugins including noise reduction (also gates, equalizers, expanders, compressors, etc.)--and the order in which you're supposed to chain them.

You may be way ahead of me on this, but once I understood the universal frequency ranges of various sounds, especially male & female voices, I got the hang of the ranges of overlap between, for instance, voice and environmental noise frequencies, and the tradeoff compromise often necessary between noise removal and sound quality (sometimes you have to add noise to the "silent" parts of a track, making everything a continuous low-level noise, in order for the perceiver not to hear it).

Once I had that down, I knew where to "point" the settings in Noise Reduction (and Track Eq, Parametric EQ, and other Vegas & Sound Forge plugins). I use NR's "Keep Residual Output" setting a lot now, which helps to salvage more voice and minimize artifacting.

Probably overtalking this subject, but it's just the enjoyment of my "aha" when I figured out that the high whistle from an HVAC fan on a dialog track which I had struggled with, required not one but two very narrow frequency "slices" via Sony's paragraphic EQ--one for the loud part of the whistle, and another for the harmonic about 100 cycles above it. Keep the bandwidth of the "slices" narrow and you salvage more voice, etc. In fact, sometimes the judicious use of an equalizer to put a noise floor on a hum or echo, may make NR unnecessary--or at least make it a lot more efficient to use on the fraction of noise left over. This I learned from Jay Rose's book.