Become A Better Blogger - How I rescued the audio from this video...

Published: Tue, 06/09/15

Today I had a minor emergency…

I was due to upload a video to Instagram for a client project and when I went to watch it again before I uploaded it, I realized it had BRUTAL background noise.

I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed it earlier.

But the background sound was so awfully loud, it was unusable. 

You see… Janice had shot this quick video of me and my girls while we were outside. She recorded it on her DSLR camera with the same shotgun mic we use when we’re shooting indoors. 

Since it was just for a quick Instagram video, I hadn’t even thought about the audio quality. 

Janice normally edits our videos in Adobe Premier Pro, but since this video wasn’t supposed to have any fancy editing, she just sent me the file as-is. 

I watched it to make sure it worked okay, tossed a text overlay for the hashtag on in iMovie and then hadn’t thought much more about it. 

The client had requested I publish at a certain time, so just before I uploaded it, I watched it on my iPhone. And I almost FREAKED out.

How was I supposed to instantly get rid of all that background noise? Janice is the one who does most of our video editing and she wasn’t around. I didn’t know what to do.

So I asked a friend who recommended I watch this YouTube video and try https://auphonic.com.

A Second Option

So, I ran the video file through Auphonic and it did help a fair amount.

After digging a little more on YouTube, I realized I could do a similar thing in iMovie. I have a slightly older version of iMovie, but the settings were still there…

I actually cranked the “Reduce Background Noise” percentage to about 90% and set the Equalizer to Hum Reduction. 


The resulting video still doesn’t sound great, but at least it was good enough to publish.

I exported the file, uploaded to Instagram, and breathed a huge sigh of relief.

You can watch it here… and imagine that background noise 100 times louder. It was bad!
 

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Talk soon,

Susan (and Janice)
5 Minutes For Mom

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