On Mon, 5 Nov 2001 21:38:38 -0500, "Scott" wrote:

>I'm looking for a (hopefully cheap/simple) way to deal with a problem I've
>got with some of my sound tracks to VHS tapes I'm archiving to DVDs. Having
>been recorded using the camera's cheesy microphone at low volume levels,
>I've wound up with some tracks where the vocal is so low-volume it's getting
>drowned out by background hum/motor-like noise by the time you crank up the
>volume loud enough to hear the vocals. I think if I could get the track
>loaded into some simple audio mixer with a reasonable number of separate
>frequency ranges that I could adjust, I could probably reduce the hum and/or
>boost the vocal sufficiently to serve my purposes (not doing this for
>commercial purposes - just archiving old home videos). However, all I've
>found in Premiere 6 so far are some too-simple gain/volume controls (and
>cross faders and other things) that seem to deal with multiple audio tracks
>in their entirety, but not to deal with making granular changes inside a
>single track like I need.
>
>Anybody out there got any suggestions that might work (and let me still get
>the altered tracks back onto the Premiere time line without too much
>trouble) without either (a) costing lots or (2) adding lots of time/steps to
>the process? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Within Premiere are an equalizer, hum notch filter, and a
parametric equalizer...(!) Beyond that (and more useful,
actually) is the noise-reduction module in Cool Edit
(export the WAV as 16-bit 48KHz, import it into CE, apply
noise reduction [the help file gets you going...], save,
and reimport it into Premiere [easier done than said...;-]).
Cool Edit is relatively cheap (www.syntrillium.com) and may
have a shareware version available. Within Premiere, you can
select "gain", then "normalize" to raise levels to the
point where peaks are just at clipping (max volome before
distortion); manually adjust peaks down so you can raise
the average levels even further; and/or use the compressor
in Premiere to automatically raise the average levels without
clipping peaks (takes some experimenting and testing to
get this one right). With these, I have dragged distantly
mic'd vocals (you don't wanna know....;-) out of very
loud crowd noises, and have performed other minor audio
miracles...;-)