Blackmagic Forum

I made a video tutorial where I am speaking at typing at the same time.

A few times I hit the keyboard with larger force which results in a much louder "click" sound.

What is the best way to only reduce the audio on these "clicks"?

The rest of the audio I am happy with but when listening to the track with headphones, the loud clicks are startling.

If the click are louder that your voice a compressor may help a little, but I very much doubt that's the case here.

Depending on what it actually sounds like, you may need special software like iZotope RX or similar.

I'm happy to have a go at it for you if you want. I have a bunch of audio repair tools.

Thank you, Mike, for the generous offer.

I was hoping to learn a way to accomplish this in stock Davinci Studio and have a process of approaching such scenarios.

Are third party tools the only way?

Would R7 elements be sufficient in my case?

Are the loud clicks at the exact same time as you are speaking, or are they in between words?

Andrei Andreev wrote:Would R7 elements be sufficient in my case?

I'm not sure. I have the advanced version plus tools from other companies. I find that there is no one tool that will always be best.

If you can export a small example I can play with it and would be able to advise you better?

xunile wrote:Are the loud clicks at the exact same time as you are speaking, or are they in between words?

xunile, they are all over the place. I was speaking while I was typing. So, both.

If you're face in not on screen, thus requiring visual sync, your best option is likely to re-record the VO.

Thank you, that makes sense.

But... am I hearing correctly that Resolve has no facility of any kind to limit the volume of only loud sounds?

Andrei Andreev wrote:Thank you, that makes sense.

But... am I hearing correctly that Resolve has no facility of any kind to limit the volume of only loud sounds?

Sort of. It's called a compressor, but won't achieve what you want. If you look at the waveform you probably won't even be able to tell where the key noises are.

It requires the software to have "intelligence" (and be directed by a person who can tell it what to look for) to work out which sounds are good and which are bad.

Andrei Andreev wrote:limit the volume of only loud sounds?

That's a very different question than what you originally asked. A Limiter will reduce the peaks. But it won't remove keyboard clacking from your VO.

Jim, I thought I asked precisely this question.

A few times I hit the keyboard with larger force which results in a much louder "click" sound.

What is the best way to only reduce the audio on these "clicks"?

I was hoping to reduce the audio level of the loud clicks -- which are the loudest sounds on the timeline -- without reducing the volume of the rest.

Sorry if this was not 100% clear but as the author of the question I can assure you that was the intended meaning.

Yep, that's my confusion. Sorry.

A Limiter will reduce the peaks.

Have you tried the noise reduction plugin in Fairlight?

I think what people are saying is that the audio track has two pieces of information: frequency and volume. You're describing the clicks by volume ("loud"), but it might actually be frequency ("harsh").

A limiter or compressor can make the loud parts of audio be less loud. But they affect all sounds, including your voice. And by lowering the loudest sounds, it essentially raises the quieter sounds, so if it affects your voice and you then turn up the volume, you actually make the quieter clicks sound louder, too.

An EQ can decrease certain frequencies, but unless the frequency is a very narrow range of frequency, it will also affect your voice at that frequency. Maybe it would make your "t" sounds muffled and thus make words harder to understand if the key click and your "t" hit the same frequency.

There are multi-band compressors/limiters which combine the two.

In Fairlight, there is Noise Reduction > Noise Reduction, as Gary Hango suggests. It is designed to cut noise, but the test you'll have to do is to see if what you consider noise is what it is designed to remove. Noise Reduction > DeEsser is meant to reduce siblance (the hard sounds) in your voice, and I guess your keyboard might sound like siblance in your voice. (Though I imagine it would also affect your voice.)

RTX Voice.

You can use Voicemeeter to process audio through RTX Voice and record it back.. Also it doesn't require a RTX card at all. Just CUDA. Works fine on a 1050 Ti here.

wfolta, thank you for this explanation!

Helped me understand better the qualities of the sound (harsh vs loud), and the limitations of the different approaches.

I am a newbie and this helps me build a mental model. Appreciate your time.

Andrei Andreev wrote:Would R7 elements be sufficient in my case?

This thread is a little old, but this just caught my eye. Not sure about iZotope Elements R7, but I have iZotope Elements R8 and from what I understand of your problem, the included de-Click should be able to handle this.

If you have a limited number of "that really annoys me" spots, you could apply it to just those spots by hand. I think that would be the ideal case.

If you have many such spots and want to apply it to the entire audio it could still work, though you might need to think about: a) it could remove other clicks that you do want, including maybe all typing or maybe only most of typing which could also be a bit weird, and b) it could take a fairly long time for a long audio piece.

I was able to remove the click-like sound that Slack makes when you have an incoming message, that got recorded in a screen recording session. It was so cool that I upgraded to Standard on a sale -- Advanced is crazy expensive, even on sale.