Click filter

farss wrote on 11/17/2006, 6:07 AM
Something I shot recently has one speaker who manages to make this quite unique click with his mouth, I mean it's really fast, under 1mS long! Great for lining up audio tracks but the problem is, it's well over 10dB above the peaks in his normal speech.
All attempts to tame this thing seem to do little, I've tried setting the track compressor as a brick wall limiter in the hope of holding the click at around the same as normal peaks but even at 0mS attack the track compressor seems too slow to cope. I could add the vinyl restoration / click and plop remove FX from SF (no, I didn't record to vinyl) but I'm kind of curious as to why the Vegas track compressor is so slow, is there anything else in the standard Vegas toolkit that'd cope with this. Am also using Eq to roll off the top end which should also slow the rise time of the click but that doesn't seem to help either. Unless, unless... that's making the problem worse, that dang Eq thing has plenty of Q at the corner frequency, might try that again.
Any other thoughts?

Bob.

Comments

Grazie wrote on 11/17/2006, 6:55 AM
Definitely not the metronome? You sampling back and forth the same? - g
Former user wrote on 11/17/2006, 7:40 AM
If I remember correcly, Audacity audio editor has an option where you can select the waveform and redraw part of it. You could use it to find the clicks and redraw them at a low or non-existent level.

Dave T2
DavidSinger wrote on 11/17/2006, 7:48 AM
My wife has exactly this problem. As a radio announcer's voice, her "snap" disappears in the overall broadcast compression. But the raw audio sounds as if she's snapping a small piece of plastic (or maybe it can be described as "click of a ball-point pen"). Until I played a video of her speaking, she never knew she had it, and all the radio engineers were "kind enough" not to mention it (they knew it would be subsumed in the compression going on the air, as are the rest of her sibilant sounds).

The saving grace is that the sound only comes as her first pre-speech "noise", when she starts to speak. If she pauses, then starts up again, yep, there's that pesky low-dB high-irritant snap.

My only recourse is to trim the front off, and for video insert a cutaway to notes, or mic, or a side shot.

I've never found a "sound" solution, so I'll follow this closely. Audacity, eh? I was unaware of the wave-form re-drawing feature. I'll give that a try next time I fire it up. Thanks.
Former user wrote on 11/17/2006, 8:04 AM
IN Audacity, you need to zoom into the sample level (where you can see each sample). At this level, you use the PENCIL tool to redraw the samples.

Would be painful if you had a lot of clicks, but it can be done.

Dave T2
rs170a wrote on 11/17/2006, 8:32 AM
Bob, don't you have Sound Forge? It has the Pencil tool as well.
I just checked mine (version 7) to confirm this.

Mike
Tech Diver wrote on 11/17/2006, 8:33 AM
I almost always handle noise spikes manually in Vegas by adding a volume envelope, zooming the problem area, and setting three control points to reduce the volume only at the narrow region.
farss wrote on 11/17/2006, 2:41 PM
Yes!
I have SF and I could redraw the waveforms, tedious.

I am using envelopes to mute them, again tedious.

I could just ignore them and let them clip, probably in digital land they'll not get any worse to the ear.

What's really got me surprised is that the track compressor just doesn't do what it says it's going to do. At 0mS attack it should chop these babies off at the pass but it doesn't.

I've used the SF Click Removal FX before on similar problems (really bad clicks due to sample rate conversion errors in FCP) but this is all fine for me. When I strike a not uncommon problem I like to find a way to fix it using the tools that ship with Vegas as my first line of attack. Just so perhaps others can use the same toolset without having to open their wallets.

This particular issue seems to raise another matter, that the audio FXs that ship with Vegas could use some reworking. Nothing has been done to them since V4 as far as I know.
MH_Stevens wrote on 11/17/2006, 3:23 PM
I have that click in my voice and I zoom-in and redraw like DT said above or I zoom in and cut each side and reduce the volume of that tiny bit.
Opampman wrote on 11/17/2006, 4:03 PM
One of my favorite audio editors is Diamond Cut 6 - or DC6. It has an automated click filter, the parameters of which can be changed to fit the size of the click. Or, you can zoom in on a click and hit "i" on the keyboard and it replaces the click with a sound interpolated from the surrounding audio. The program was designed to restore old discs or tapes and has incredible filters and noise reduction. Also used for forensic restoration.