On 21 Feb 2003 05:33:17 -0800, no0spam@yahoo.com (*no spam*) wrote:

>I've got an avi of a discussion at a restaurant with a lot of ambient

>noise (people talking at other tables, glasses & silverware clinking,

>etc) The voices at our table are fairly strong, but the background

>stuff is really distracting.

>

>I've got Sound Forge 5. Any suggestions on techniques I could use to

>dampen (or remove) the background clutter? I've also got access to

>Cool Edit and Premier if those are any better...

The Sound Forge noise reduction module is sold separately

(and is rather expensive); Cool Edit includes a good

noise-reduction module that works well on continuous noise,

but is ineffective with sharp, irregular noises. For

situations like yours, I generally do the best I can with

Cool Edit, then in the video editor I manually raise/reduce

levels around the speech of interest, keeping the

raise/lower "edges" soft enough to not be distracting...

If you want to get fancier (after basic noise-reduction),

you can copy the main audio track, filter the high and low

ends and overall level down some (and possibly compress the

louder parts, also), and mix it in as needed to replace the

less-wanted parts of the original (noise-reduced) track.

Be subtle, though, or your work could be more distracting

than the original noise...;-)