Poor, corrupt audio in some of audio, can it be fixed?

JN- wrote on 3/29/2020, 5:30 PM

This is audio from a video clip from an old Canon IXUS 50 camera, mono. I've put a small .PCM extract here if anyone cares to have a go, thanks. The problem starts about 2 seconds in on the 8 seconds extract.

I have a few more clips where I could hear it was starting, coming and going, (maybe a camera recording failure), also, but not as bad as this piece.

I'm very far from audio expert, but I tried lots of VP audio FX, (for me a bit like throwing stuff at the wall and seeing if anything sticks) nothing came close to having any appreciable improvement, but then I wasn't sure what I was looking for.

It was taken outdoors, but although there was some wind rumble, its worse than that, and I don't think it is that, perhaps simply audio stream recording error?

I suspect it may not be fixable.

The above screenshot is from the original video clip, it shows the relevant audio.

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 3/29/2020, 6:00 PM

It's 8 bit 11 KHz. Unlikely any improvement is possible.

JN- wrote on 3/29/2020, 7:53 PM

Ok.

rraud wrote on 3/30/2020, 11:30 AM

11kHz/8 bit is inherently awful sounding.. a high noise floor with very a limited high frequency response (or lack thereof). Wind noise is repairable in some cases.. It depends. Can you post a file somewhere?

JN- wrote on 3/30/2020, 11:51 AM

@rraud Thanks for chipping in, I had already uploaded a sample, see my main post, first sentence line.

rraud wrote on 3/30/2020, 5:29 PM

Sorry, I missed the "here" link. I don't think you can fix that w/o replacing. You could try Spectral Layers Pro or iZotope's RX Advanced though.

JN- wrote on 3/30/2020, 5:55 PM

Ok. Thanks for giving it a go.

Dexcon wrote on 3/30/2020, 6:13 PM

@JN- ... A gave it a try in SpectraLayers 6 followed up with a bit of smoothing in SoundForge Pro 13. Getting rid of the wind noise was the easy bit. The hard bit was the 2nd half where the voices are so broken up, I used the Clone Stamp to 'copy/paste' the missing bits with the existing voice bits, but the result is still very choppy; hence the smooth process in SF.

JN- wrote on 3/30/2020, 6:42 PM

@Dexcon Sounds very impressive Dexcon, but, and don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure that the piece you posted isn’t the original? Again, thanks for going to the trouble.

Ok, just played the original and your edit, different all right.

The worst part on the original is about 5s in.

I think given your obvious level of expertise and Ricks, it looks unfixable.

Dexcon wrote on 3/30/2020, 7:54 PM

@JN- ... Thought I'd give you a screen dump of the SpectraLayer timeline to give an insight into how a lot of the second half of the clip is broken up. This snapshot is after the wind noise has been removed. Particularly with the last bit of voice, you can see all the little vertical lines (artifacts) in between the main voice horizontal voice frequencies - it is those little vertical lines that are contributing to the croaky sound. And at 6.7 to 7.3 seconds in, the reason for the broken up sound is apparent.

JN- wrote on 3/30/2020, 8:40 PM

@Dexcon Yes indeed, thanks. I have Sound Forge Audio cleaning lab, but didn’t even try, I did try an awful lot of the VP fx though and given no improvement at all I figured, guessed, it was even beyond SF ACL , (my own expertise in audio of course is main limiter, so asking here).

Its really weird, I had used that small pocket camera for years, and never observed that issue before, I believe this was the only time I had this corruption, the video clip was recorded in 2010. I took it out today, not used since, recorded a piece of video to see if there was a similar problem but aok.

My best guess as to how it may have happened is a mixture of wind noise, the operator maybe shaking the camera simultaneously and if the mic. vibrated a bit with the quick movement, but of course it doesn’t matter really. Thanks again Rick and Dexcon for giving it a go. I had come across an SD card from my sister a few years back from the event, I dumped the photos, 100's onto my PC and only got around to checking them out now. I discovered about 24 new photos for this event, a christening, and integrated them into the project. It was only when putting the finishing touches to it again that I became aware of how bad that last few seconds of the very last video clip was. So anyway, I rendered out the event today anyway.