Hey, I didn't say I knew what I was doing... I had to drive the noise down that far or it wouldn't go away. Believe it or not it sounds better with what I did there than without.

I do have sound forge but I hadn't thought of using it because it's a half hour video and I'm less skilled at this sort of thing using SF... if that's possible.

You have one buzz at 158 Hz, and then a whole lot of other strange harmonics and noise. This does not look like 50Hz or 60Hz harmonics. Even if the playback speed was too fast/slow, none of the harmonics line up. Strange stuff.

I killed the 158 Hz spike using EQ in Sound Forge. I then used the NR in iZotope to finish off the job. If I were doing it for money, I would have done several smaller passes in iZotope instead of one single pass. This generally gives better results.

Here's the slightly better version (good for 7 days):

soundproblem.wav

John that sound remarkable! I recovered the video from a 21 year old tape on my original betamax unit which was DOA when I first tried to use it. I roughed up and cleaned the rubber and got it working. The speed may be fluctuating during playback.

Now how would I apply that to the entire audio track?
I don't have iZotope. What I would really like is to be able to apply corrections using the Vegas controls. If impossible, I could attempt to do it with soundforge 6 (yes, old but seldom used). Trouble I see with that is I've diced up the video from that clip into many smaller clips and I would need apply the correction to every clip I fear - and I'm running out of time. That's why if you could achieve half the correction you got using vegas I would buy you a beer. Project is due for a Christmas gathering with family.

We could take it off line if you're so inclined. My contact info should be with my profile.

Thanks a bunch.

Jim

John... Excellent job of cleanup!

Yes, good job. John has skills and he has a copy of Izotope RX, it's an amazing piece of audio software.

Probably the fastest way to get it done is to finish the project, put all the clips on the Vegas timeline, and then render the entire audio as an MP3 clip. Post that and I'll clean it up and send it back as an MP3. Set the "quality" slider all the way towards "quality" when rendering. If you do that, you can use 128 kbps and it will sound just fine. The audio from a betamax doesn't have much fidelity.

Now, the next job is to clean up all the noise on that video ...

Is iZotopeRX a stand alone app?

Is iZotopeRX a stand alone app?

Yes. PLUS working from inside Vegas AND if you set IzoRx up as your preferred Audio Editor AND you save save on exit from Izo Rx you get a TAKE2 back in Vegas!

Love it!

Grazie

What I should also add, Harold, is that the IzoRx "tools" are made available to Vegas as Plugins, but for me I have found them to be unworkable. Instead, all my IzoRx work is done using the Preferred Audio Editor method.

Grazie

Thanks very much Grazie. I am downloading it and checking it out. I looked at it a few months ago on their website but never gave it a try.

Actually, for this job, Sound Forge might be better. The noise reduction in iZotope (the "lower end" version) doesn't always provide enough control to avoid "flanging," an artifact you'll probably hear in the clip I posted. In Sound Forge, you can take the noiseprint, and move individual points up and down. This is useful in a situation like this, where most of the bad stuff is in the lower frequencies. So, in this case, you can move the points above 1,000 Hz so that they are no longer part of the restoration process. This often lets you use more aggressive settings without getting the hollow flanging artifacts, and without loosing the "life" in the audio which often happens if you let the upper frequencies get changed.

OK John. I have music going on under the original audio so I'll turn off that track, turn off my "attempt" at correction, and render an MP3 of the offending audio track. I'm curious if I'll have trouble inserting the new track back in sync. Doesn't MP3 usuall tack on a bit of blank space in front of the file? Though I'm guessing I could tweak it if need be.

The video is another story. I'd love to know how to treat it. I did a little color correction but that noise is terminal I'm guessing. Won't have time with this project to play with that, but I've got hours of old beta footage on my table that will have the same issues. Perhaps we can talk about techniques for cleaning that up when I'm not under the gun.

Thanks again. I'm assuming your contact info is under your sony account? Perhaps you can send me an email in the mean time. I'm rendering another project right now so my main PC is occupied. I'm going to need to finish this baby on Friday for a family gathering Sunday. I'll get you the file ASAP.

Jim,

I got your email and the file. I did basically the same thing as on the test file. I tried Sound Forge, but didn't like the result as well as iZotope. Within iZotope, I spent a little more time tweaking things. I left a little more hiss, but got more aggressive with the remaining buzz (after I removed the 158 Hz spike in Sound Forge). Also, while in iZotope, I removed that watch beeper going off, and a few assorted thumps and bumps. I don't have time to give it the full treatment, but I think you'll like it. I'll try to upload it before I go to bed, although it's getting late here.

I've posted dozens of times about video noise reduction. The noise I saw on that short clip looked relatively easy to eliminate, without too much impact on the video itself (i.e., it shouldn't introduce noticeable artifacts). Within Vegas, most people here recommend Mike Crash's noise reduction filter, which in turn is actually just a port of a well-known VirtualDub temporal noise reducer. It works OK, but it is very easy to screw things up, and once you've worked with noise reduction, that particular filter isn't as good as others. Mike did a beautiful job on the port, but its the original filter and the way in which temporal denoising works that is the problem.

Neat Video is the other plugin often recommended to use within Vegas. It costs money (Crash's filter is free), but if you have the patience to learn how to use it, and a video which has the requisite flat blank wall to use to "train" it, you can get very good results.

My favorite filter doesn't work inside of Vegas. If you search on this forum under my name and use FFT3D for the search term, you'll learn more about it. Unfortunately, you have to learn to use AVISynth which is a pretty steep learning curve. At some point, if you can send a 30 second clip in some sort of reasonably high-resolution format, I can give you demonstration of what can be done.

As of this post, iZotope says it will be another one hour and five minutes.

. . and you know what? IzoRX is just plain FUN to use too!! - It really is!

Grazie