Removing cameraman breathing sounds

KevW wrote on 11/11/2024, 3:40 PM

Hello, Just seeking some general advice on how to deal with this if possible. I have iPhone footage largely consisting of people talking around a table. Would like to put the web but the person holding the iPhone is breathing so loudly that it is impossible to put up as is. Every tutorial I can find is removing breaths while someone is speaking into a microphone and nothing where the person doing the loud breathing is the one holding the camera. Anything in Vegas that can help? Do I need Sound Forge? Currently using Vegas 18 but am planning to update to 22 soon. Windows 11 Pro with 32GB memory and very fast AMD processor.

Comments

Dexcon wrote on 11/11/2024, 4:09 PM

You'll need a plugin such as Breath Control from iZotope's RX11 product which works as a VST3 plugin in recent Vegas Pro versions that can accept VST3 audio plugins (Vegas Pro 20, 21 and 22). Unfortunately, RX11 is very expensive so is probably not an option unless you can get it to work in its 10 days free trial version.

You may need to take into account that if the breathing is very close to the phone's microphone and thus dominant, there may be little audio left after the breathing is removed because the breathing might be smothering any other sound including other people's conversation. An alternative approach may be just to lower the audio level of the breathing.

In Vegas Pro 18, try the Track Compressor (at track level) to see if any of its settings can reduce the sound level of the breathing.

rraud wrote on 11/11/2024, 4:32 PM

Lke iZ's RX, Spectralayers Pro has a (voice) 'Unmix' tool that would probably work, but that ain't a low cost tool either. There are free voice extraction tools available ,but I have not tried any of them nor do I recall the names.
Compression would probably make the breath sounds even more noticeable. An expander/gate with a built-in EQ trigger (side-chain) may work.

LdM_Edit wrote on 11/12/2024, 1:07 AM

SOUND FORGE Audio Cleaning Lab 4 includes SpectraLayers Elements 10 with the voice unmix feature. It's on sale now.

It was unsuccesful when I used it, but the situstion was different (more complicated).

Dexcon wrote on 11/12/2024, 6:43 AM

Spectralayers Pro has a (voice) 'Unmix' tool that would probably work

I've recently used several times the 'Noisy Speech' unmix option in SpectraLayers 11 (with some added SL11 processing - using the full version, not the Elements version which only has the 'vocals' unmix option) - on audio from a Samsung S23 Ultra phone. It was a live musical performance on a cruise ship. The resultant unmixed vocal audio quality was dreadful, but when added as an overlay on another track in Vegas Pro over the original audio track, the resultant audio result was surprisingly very good - the vocals were lifted and became 'forward'. Overall and IMO, the audio quality from inbuilt phone microphones is awful.

But the above in no way I think goes to solve the breathing problem which may be akin to trying to find dialogue under significant wind.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 11/12/2024, 9:29 AM

If the breathing is only noticeable between words and phrases, which is often the case, the Track Noise Gate might help. If you find that the threshhold setting that triggers it between vocal phrases clips off the tails of content too much, a manually drawn velocity envelope may do a better job. Flying-in a high-pass filter with an envelope can effectively knock the wind out of a breath sound and works particularly well when the content voice is higher pitched. When all that's not enough, I bounce out to Sound Forge and use its Noise Reduction tool to capture a noiseprint of an isolated breath sound and apply it to the whole clip. Vegas shows that fx if Sound Forge is installed but I've never figured out how to capture and apply noiseprints without bouncing out to Sound Forge first. The Noise Reduction approach works great if the content is louder than the breathing. But the louder the breathing, the more content suffers suppressing it.

johnny-s wrote on 11/12/2024, 10:59 AM

Similar noise reduction tool can be used in Audacity.