Reduce Noise - Removing hiss or noise floor

Hi there, in this video we're going to remove the hiss that's in the background of your recording. You can kind of see it there, bubbling away, it is noisy, down at your noise floor, we need to fix that using the Repair Reduce Noise, and we'll dive into the corresponding effect that appears in your Effects Controller, as well, get a little bit more advanced with this sound correction. All right, let's jump in. 

All right, bring in the 'Sound 04 Hiss', I'm just going to stick it on the same Timeline, down here, now I have hiss, basically in everything I record. So let's have a little listen, I'm going to set my in and out points, kind of around this chunk, because I want to, it's really handy to have some pre-roll that's quiet, rather than fully edited, because you'll be able to hear the hiss in here. Let's actually do an out point there, and let's play it through. 

Now I won't turn it up, I'll turn it up a little, actually, I won't turn it up in here, because you'll have your own speakers, so turn it up, see if you can hear it. Oh, actually you've got the exercise file loaded in, didn't check it. We can see it visually down here together, and we'll just use this, there's this noise floor, they call that the floor, and there's all this noise around the noise floor. It happens, mostly when you're recording, and you can tidy it up, and it's often with the DeHisser, or removing hiss. 

So I am going to expand not only this, because I want to see if I get rid of it here, but I want to see what happens to the voice, because sometimes you can spend ages just clearing it out of this empty area, only to find you sound like an alien. "Now if you're excited to turn your passion and skill…" "Now if you're excited to turn your…" 

So what I need to do is make sure that this is selected, it's dialog, it's auto matched, I've actually already done that pre this course, and under 'Repair', 'Reduce Noise', and crank it up, and see how good it is, let's have a listen. "Now if you're excited to turn your passion…" I sound a little bit robotic, but can you see, especially down here, in this empty area, oh, look at it, it's just gone, it's flat. 

So I've got rid of that noise floor, but we're at maximum, "If you're excited to turn your passion in…" So again, this slider here is for, I'm not going to say amateurs, because it's for people like me, but we need to dive in and go, "Okay, let's get a bit more advanced." 

What got applied, it's this effect called DeNoise, which they've called over here, Reduce Noise, so let's have a look. Custom Setup, we can learn a little bit, let's have a look. So what's happening here is, basically this blue stuff down the bottom is, "Now if you're excited…" My voice, that's my, all the dialogue that's in there, at the top here, what the Denoise is trying to do is, see the red stuff down the bottom, sorry, at the top, the red stuff is being fired at my stuff, to reduce parts of the frequencies in my voice, to try and remove the hiss, there's like,-- let's crank it right up, so we can see, can you see this slider is the same as this one over here, you can kind of play with both, see the slider, that kind of connected. 

Basically this, "your passion and skill…" trying to pause it on a bit, where it has lots. There you go. So at about 2000 Kilohertz, that's where hiss appears, according to this effect, and it's firing this, like anti 2000 Kilohertz at it, to kind of neutralize it. The trouble is that I'm going to lose that part of my voice, so that's where, if you crank it right up, you end up kind of sounding a bit funny, because it's removing this part of that particular part of my voice, or, can you see it over here, "decided to turn your passion…" removing bits of these parts of my voice as well. It's just interesting to kind of dive in here, and get a little bit more control. 

This other one's useful, Output Noise only, so this is going to only play the stuff that's being taken away, can you hear it, let's crank it right up. You'll have to do this in your own video, or with your own Premiere Pro. I can kind of hear it, you can hear some mumbled bits, and that's what's being removed from my voice, those are the bits that I'm not going to have in this dialogue anymore, so that can be interesting as well, but anyway, we've dug in, we've removed the hiss, it works really good, for that kind of background noise, if you are suffering from that. 

A couple of tips for removing hiss, if this is not working, like physical removing, the easiest way is to grab background music, you know, there's a lot of background music on my stuff, because you-- I'm going to, "Now if you're excited…" the noise floor is all mixed up in the audio, so that's the easy trick. 

The other one is, just with your gear, if you're a-- I'm an amateur, remember, so the troubles I've always had, is if you've got lots of hiss, it's probably that your microphone's turned up too loud, and if it's turned up too loud, it might be because the microphone's not powerful enough, and you might need something like a preamp to help the microphone be more powerful, give it some phantom power. 

The other thing is, change your audio cables, make sure they're okay. I've had a bad audio cable for a long time, and didn't realize it. Don't use really, really long cables, I had that as well, problem with audio, when it was just going through a really, really long set of cables. If you're recording straight into a laptop, like a USB mic, like I do for these tutorials.

You might find that it actually works a whole lot better when your laptop's not plugged into the wall. There could be a lot of grounding issues, and the actual laptop can actually send stuff through, the power cord can send stuff through the microphone. Make sure that your laptop actually has an earth. In New Zealand, for some reason they give us plugs for our, like Macs, that don't have an earth prong, it's just like a two pin plug, and if you buy an adapter to give it an earth plug, the little doohickey for the battery pack, for a Macbook Pro, that gets rid of a lot of the microphone problems. Also, play with the port, that your actual microphone is plugged into, they're not created equal. Some of them allow power, some of them don't, so do move them around to see which one actually gives you no noise. You might find that one plug is better than the other. 

Anyway, those are my short tips for fixing, kind of mechanical issues before you get to Premiere Pro. Once you're in Premiere Pro, drag the noise slider up, and then don't be afraid to dive into the Effects Controls, to fine tune any of these sliders. So I'm not going to go through every single one now, and explain all the effects. It was more of a, like a, to get you to figure out, that this slider is connected to effects, and that those effects can be adjusted, which gives you a bit more kind of advanced control. Let's look at the next one, let's look at DeHum in the next video.