Is there a way to minimize background talking and emphasize foreground sound?

I have a clip that was recorded with the camera and shotgun mic pointing at a person talking but the people behind her are loud and almost overpowering the sound. What is the best way to isolate the foreground voice from the background voices? The video can not be reshot.

Download the trial for Izotope RX4 to see if that works for your needs. www.izotope.com/en/products/audio-repair/rx/

I tried Izotrope RX 4 and it did not seem to have any effect as far as background dialogue.

It's a very difficult problem to tackle and almost impossible to fix. RX is a good tool and you may have to get busy with the Spectral Editor removing as many harmonics as you can that is not related to your source.

This takes time and heaps of experience and even then you maybe unsuccessful.

If it were just a standard noise problem I might have suggested this, which seems to be on sale this weekend.
www.fcp.co/forum/10-third-party-products...oise-reduction#59011

Or even this
www.waves.com/plugins/wns-noise-suppressor

Those tools are great at isolating your signal from unwanted background noise, but there is a limit to what any technology could achieve.

If the background talking, ESPECIALLY other human voices talking, are as loud, or louder, than your target voice, you may not be able to do much about it. You've a very difficult task ahead of you. Lesson learned, ALWAYS monitor the sound being recorded during the shoot ("recorded" sound, not the live feed that goes directly to the headphones).

I did not shoot the footage. When I shoot I make sure that my sound is good. I have shown him now how to get good sound, turn off auto focus and auto exposure. The bad audio footage has some relevant information so probably we will just caption it and forget about trying to clean up the sound. What little I tried using RX4 I was not very successful. Also my boss is not going to buy a $1000 plugin. So we live with the bad sound on this clip.

Hey, you could get pretty creative with the subtitles, too. There's an interesting challenge.

Unveil by Zynaptiq does this kind of stuff. It's quite good at reducing reverb (which I always think of as sorcery) but, since we've not heard your audio, it's difficult to say if it will be of any use on this occasion. It's $399 but there's a trial so you can see if it's useful.

Reverb is one thing, trying to kill off some human voices, and isolate just one, that's a huge challenge for any software.

BenB wrote: Reverb is one thing, trying to kill off some human voices, and isolate just one, that's a huge challenge for any software.

Agreed; there is no effective way I know of to do this with ZX4 or anything else. If it was forensic dialog extraction for surveillance, it might be possible using spectral editing to clarify the target speaker at great cost of artifacts. However it would be unusable for general purposes.

Besides voiceover, re-shooting or subtitles the only real solution is ADR (dialog replacement). ZX4 allows matching reverb, room ambiance and EQ between two different audio sources, so the replacement dialog would more or less sound compatible with the recorded dialog.

Turns out that most of what the woman talked about in the bad audio, she also talked about the same subjects in other video footage. In the end I only had to use about 15 seconds of the bad audio.

Hi there,
If you want to send me the 15 seconds of audio I'll see if I can improve it and send it back to you...
Cheers

Dave

Such a stroke of good fortune you were able to find most of the same info elsewhere in your footage.

It certainly would be an extreme challenging. I think your idea of throwing some subtitles up is a great idea. Creative subtitling as Ben suggests is also an interesting idea.

I would be still tempted to bring more focus to your dialogue, as much as you can, as affordable as you can with out introducing any noticable artefacts. That way the subtitle will lead the viewers ear and they will "think" that they can hear the dialogue more clearly.

Zynaptic do make great tools also, but nothing that will help you in this situation.

If you can't afford a program that does spectral repair, perhaps taking Lizardpoint up on his offer might prove beneficial. If it's just 15 sec I'd offer to have a go at it myself, but Lizard did just get in first.