Reduce noise and reverb

For this tutorial, I'm using the Audio workspace.

You can reset the workspace, by clicking on the Panel menu in the workspace's panel and choosing Reset To Saved Layout.

One of the great challenges in any media production is often in capturing clean usable dialogue without too much background noise.

Also, if there's reverb in the environment where you recorded, different microphones are likely to capture different parts of it which can make it difficult to match the audio from different shots.

In this sequence, we have clips that have both noise and reverb.

Let's have a listen.

Hello!

How are you feeling? - A little confused. - Excellent!

I'm going to select all of these clips and in the Essential Sound panel, I'm going to assign the audio type Dialogue.

And right away, in the Loudness section of the Essential Sound panel, I'm going to click Auto Match to give these all a reasonable level for dialogue.

In the Repair section of the Essential Sound panel, there's a Reduce Noise and a Reduce Reverb option.

These are simple to use and have great noise reduction technology behind them.

Let's start by reducing the reverb.

And this clip is a good example.

Let's have a quick listen.

This is the ancestor's simulation.

Definitely a lot of reverb on that clip.

I'm going to show you these controls separately.

So, first of all, I'm going to select just the dialogue from our first subject and with those clips selected, I'm going to enable the Reduce Reverb option.

Let's have another listen.

This is the ancestor's simulation.

A thousand years ago, this is what it felt like to be human.

The default setting seems to have done a good job.

The audio will get quieter because the reverb was part of the original signal, so it may be worth lifting the level a little bit later on when finalizing the mix.

Still, now, let's check out the second characters dialogue.

And I'll try the Reduce Noise option.

First of all, let's listen to this clip.

Oh.

That's good.

It's not very realistic.

So, definitely some noise in the background there.

I'll select all of these dialog clips and enable the Reduce Noise option.

Again, I'll leave this on the default setting and let's have another listen.

Oh.

That's good.

It's not very realistic.

Pretty fantastic.

So, the default settings done a good job but let's try an extreme setting for comparison.

I'll push this all the way up and let's have another listen.

Oh.

That's good.

It's not very rea...

Even this sounds acceptable, though we're losing a little more detail in the voice.

Too much processing can sound unnatural and too little might leave the audio unusable.

Sometimes the best way to find the ideal setting for your media is to drag the control from one extreme to the other and find the perfect result somewhere along the way.

When enabling these options in the Essential Sound panel, they're applied as a denoise or dereverb effect that you can access in the Effect Controls panel.

I'll just bring that panel up right now and select one of these clips, so you can see it.

In many cases, you'll find the simpler controls in the Essential Sound panel are all you need.

But there's an Edit... button in the Effect Controls panel that will take you into a more advanced set of options.