Getting Rid of Echo?

[Dee Boz]

Anyone have some ideas on how to get rid of some really bad echo? The footage was shot inside a cavernous barrel room at a winery and the words are almost indistinguishable because of it.

[Maureen]

reverb filter use negative numbers

[MediaConcepts]

You could try a noise gate and eq but there's probably little you can do.

Joe

[Mathew]

There's really not much you can do. There's filters for adding echo but none for removing it that I'm aware of. The best thing to do is get a mic as close to your source as possible. I'm guessing that this was a reception right? Look into picking up a mic stand and placing a wireless handheld near the PA/DJ speaker if possible. Of course if your winery was anything like my last reception and the speakers are installed in the ceiling and the toasters are using the house system then you're pretty much out of luck.

[Dee Boz]

reverb filter use negative numbers

I tried that first and it didn't do anything. :confused:

[kirklandvideo]

It's not much help but I remember reading an article somewhere about reducing echo... From memory it involved copying the track, adding a high pass filter and inverting the phase so that the reverberations cancelled each other out. It might have been in the DMN Vegas forum a couple of years back - If I can find it, I'll let you know...

[sonydude]

reverb filter with negative numbers I love it! Like wiring a lightbulb backwards so the room goes dark when you switch it on. It just might work.

you cannot remove echo with any filter. You could theoretically go in and finesse the tail of each phoeneme by hand but it would take days and very likely not be usable.

[Dee Boz]

It's not much help but I remember reading an article somewhere about reducing echo... From memory it involved copying the track, adding a high pass filter and inverting the phase so that the reverberations cancelled each other out. It might have been in the DMN Vegas forum a couple of years back - If I can find it, I'll let you know...

thanks!

[kirklandvideo]

I agree you can't get rid of it but if you can reduce and make everything a little less muddy it's better than nothing. I did try the technique I'm trying to think of and it worked surprisingly well - just wish I'd filed it away for reference.

[Maureen]

I know there is something. Quite a while ago, I did post production audio as a college class. We had to remove echo from a soundclip. We were using protools. There was a filter for adding echo, that also flattened echo when using negative numbers (at least that is how I remember it) I thought it was reverb, but it might have been something else.:innocent0007:

[RatVega]

I talked to a guy at LAFCPUG a year or so ago who was into that sort of thing but I got the impression that he had some pretty exotic equipment to do it. I imagine that something like a ProTools set-up (as Maureen mentioned) night be capable.

A half-baked way might be to run some serious noise reduction on the track and then mix it back with the original to subordinate the echo.

[kirklandvideo]

I can't find the post I was thinking about but it has been at least a couple of years since I read it... any chance of posting a small sample of the audio - I might be able to play enough to remember how it worked...

[kirklandvideo]

I read today that you could isolate the echo frequencies and apply a phaser with a very small amount of modulation t reduce it. I'd personally like to try sampling a small part of the reverb and applying it with reversed phase to the original clip.

[ssvp]

Can you just use a compressor such as a dynamics compressor in Premiere or Audition?

[sonydude]

maureen and kirkland, if you come up with any filter or methodology that can remove echo, or even substantially reduce its impact please post back. Theoretically some sort of gate combined with a compressor could work, if the recording was made in perfectly controlled conditions. But the problem is unlikely to arise if you record in perfectly controlled conditions. In the real world attempts to remove echo will almost always introduce other problems that are far more distracting than the echo.