need help filtering out noise in a wedding service audio/video recording.

[Mijoy]

Hello all, brand new here, this is my first post.

I am looking for direction in solving a problem. The problem is that my daughters wedding was video/audio recorded. The individual who did the recording was not a professional but a friend so the expectations were not high. Overall the recoroding worked out beautifully. Excecpt with one major flaw. The flaw is that the person doing the recording was standing next to a very large (and therefore very load) fan in the church. So the service is virtually completely masked by the fan noise.

Now my thoughts are that the fan noise is probably in a fairly narrow freq spectrum and can perhaps be editted out. However I do not know where to begin this effort and am looking for ideas.

Would a sound card provide a means to attempt to filter out this fan noise? If so what type? How much money would I need to spend? How difficult will this process be? I'd think there is probably software that would enable me to look at the audio of the service graphically and attempt to find the frequencies of the fan and filter it out? I can also go back to the church and record just the fan if this would help.

Anyway, any help appreciated. My knowledge base on what (hardware/software) is available to do this work is basically nil. My understanding of the electronics involved is a little better then nil.

Thanks much, look forward to responses.

 

[nivrip]

There is a program called Audacity, which is a free download, which might be worth a try. There is a specific Noise Removal section on it. I have used it in the past for removing the hiss from audio cassettes when transferring music to CD/DVD.

If you could take a section of the audio and record it on Audacity you could try it. The section of your audio must contain both times when there is no speech (just the fan noise) and another time when there is speech and fan noise.

The idea is to highlight a part of the recording that is just fan noise and get Audacity to analyse it (easy to do on this program). Then you highlight the whole recorded section and get the program to remove the sound which it has just analysed ( the fan noise) - again very simple to do.

Now, this works very well for removing hiss from cassette recordings but whether it will do a good job with your fan noise I've no idea.

Relatively easy to do and costs nothing. Worth a try?