On Fri, 23 Nov 2001 06:40:40 -0500, "dmac" wrote:

>Bruce Feist wrote in message
>news:3BFCFC8C.6070903@flock.org...
>> I'm new to editing video. I have a bunch of digitized video from
>> several sources, and I want to make a simple movie out of them --
>> probably no music or anything, just some titles and the clips. But I
>> have a problem -- the audio is very uneven. For instance, some of the
>> clips are interviews of me talking to relatives; my voice is much louder
>> than theirs. So, I need to edit the audio to increase the volume in
>> some tracks, preferably within clips as well as clip-at-a-time. I'm
>> working on a Macintosh running system 9.x, and currently have iMovie,
>> Premire 5.1 LE, and VideoShop 4.5; since this is just for putting
>> together video for my family, I'd rather not spend much more money,
>> although buying software isn't out of the question.
>>
>> So... what should I do? As far as I can tell, none of my video editing
>> software has the capabilities that I need to fix the audio... is there
>> something that I'm missing?

>Up a little higher in the string, you mentioned that you would like to boost
>sections of the more faint dialogue without affecting the stronger of the
>two. As was mentioned with the reference to auto gain or normalize this does
>take the waveform to it's highest peak level without distortion and
>proportionately draws the gain up. This is a good technique to use when your
>source audio is in good shape with little background noise.
>In your example of having two needs - Draw up the gain on the second person
>dialogue, while knocking down excessive hum, noise, HVAC motors and airflow.
>This can be done by exporting the audio to an external program that can
>display the waveform for more precise editting. Cooledit can perform a very
>acceptable noise reduction based upon sampling of the unwanted frquency
>within the track. Once this is done followed by selective normalize of the
>quieter dialogue, you will have a timeline ready track that will not show
>signs of heavy digital adjustment. There are also a few ways to drop out
>breath pops without making the whole thing sound too fake.
>Look for a more advanced editting program and experiment.

This technique can work if the edit cut points are carefully
selected for maximum silence - but even so, there will be
abrupt shifts in levels evident at the cuts. These can
probably be compensated for manually with ramping of
the level "rubber bands" near the cuts (and by possibly blending
in a bit of stock noise at the cuts) - and this may be the
easiest method overall for solving the problem above, short
using properly-implemented overall compression...