How to reduce repating (noise) pattern in ambience recording

SpectraLayers
1

The following situation:

  • some long ambience recording with some walking.
  • while walking, the shoes are clearly audible (recording between walking is perfect)
  • is it possible to - at least to some extent - reduce or even remove the walking noise.
    If so, how to do this?

Here is an example of the walking noise.

Here its spectrum

image
image1404Ă—1290 147 KB

Is it possible to reduce this repeating, but not exactly repeating, pattern in other tracks?

This is not static noise, but a pattern.

Maybe there could be some self learning for a future version of SL, where on can select a patern (like the selction of a noise pattern through selction), which the AI removes afterwards?

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2

Okay! This is fairly simple to do using “masking” techniques. You can do this in a non-destructive fashion. Some steps to take below:

Hilight and select a major portion of the noise (you can choose the rectangle selections tool or the time selections tool) and learn the noise profile then duplicate that layer and then denoise it. Once denoised you should have a unadulterated layer with the denoised layer. Duplicate the denoised layer and flip the phase and then merge the unadulterated layer to the denoised layer and you should be left with noise, if there are still heavy sounds that are resonated within the noise layer then you can refine the process by simply repeating the process (duplicate layer, learn noise profile, flip phase, merge)

Let me know if you want an additional video explaining this (I have to figure out another way to post it because this forum doesn’t allow videos beyond 4mb).

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3

Hi, thx. I tried this already, but the DeNoise-Module is not “sharp” enough for this method. It either removes to much, than we’ll have lots of artifacts, or it removes far less. Since the foodstep are only semi-periodic in time and frequency, it’s probably quite a challenge for todays techniques. Or maybe, and this is more probable, I didn’t find the right way to do it, yet…

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4

I would certainly try by manual removal

once you find the pattern for a footstep, the others will become evident

that said, I seriously doubt you will get clean ambience out of it

unmix levels may well be your best friend for starting on this task

the way I work on stuff like this is to create a layer for unwanted noise and either shift-X the selections or transfer tool…I usually use selection brush/ lasso and poly and transfer the selection…you need to pay special attention to transfer percentage. The reason for a sending unwanteds to separate layer(s) is to work non-destructively in case you remove too much and need to get back some removed audio. Another way to do this is keep safety layer(s) of the original audio. Working with different colors will guide in this endeavour rather than amplitude brightness of a single color.

then fill holes with the clone tool. and maybe try to heal that cover to randomize

I think your FFT size is good, but I’d need to refine the Min/Max amplitude and the REFINEMENT would need to be max if I was working on this

funny, these shoes sound like rubbing a balloon

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5

Ok, thx. That seems conclusive.

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