When recording sound out in the real world, you can often run into some unwanted ambient noise in the background. That can mean less clarity for your desired sound. Sometimes the background noise doesn’t seem like much, but when added to other sounds in the mix, it can add up to something really messy sounding. Luckily, these days there are more and more tools to help cut through the noise and get to your desired sound.
Enter: iZotope RX. For those of you who have worked in audio editing and mixing for a while, you are probably already familiar or have heard of iZotope’s vast array of tools for “audio repair.” From eliminating (or at least lessening) unwanted background noise from a dialogue recording, to repairing clipped and distorted audio, iZotope RX has been the industries go-to program for rescuing bad recordings from the depths of audio hell. Although, as mentioned, there are more and more tools that have hit the market recently, such as dxRevive, Acon Extract Dialogue, and various others that work similarly.
In this case, it isn’t dialogue that we are trying to revive — it’s bird noises. This video is a quick demonstration of how Derek was able to take an old recording that Ryan had made over ten years ago on a cheap recorder and make it more usable. As you will see in the video, the bird sounds are plagued by some broadband rumble, hiss, and distant noise from the neighbor in which they were recorded. And possibly some self-noise from the recording device itself. The goal here was to try and eliminate as much of the unwanted background noise as possible and isolate the bird sounds so that they could then be placed into any ambient sound effect you want. For example, a forest with a river, a neighborhood, or even a city with traffic going by. Having a clean, isolated track means that there won’t be any of the unwanted noise to muddy-up your final mix.
For the purposes of a quick demonstration, Derek used some fairly extreme settings to isolate the birds. It is often said with iZotope, “less is more,” and that doing several de-noise passes at more conservative settings usually yields better results. With this case however, we found that actually having those higher settings seemed to work the best, and for the purposes of making the video shorter, it worked just fine.
Although ideally a sound effect is recorded in a controlled environment with high quality equipment, we don’t live in an ideal world. This video demonstrates what this technology is becoming capable of and that some audio issues can be, dare we say… fixed in post.