To much air in audio from VHS tape in captured .AVI

[dman777]

I am capturing some old VHS tapes I have to .AVI useing virtual dub and ATI 650. The problem is though that the audio(mono) is weak and there is alot of air in the volume. You could say the volume level is weak, but the wierd thing about it is when I have the volume meter on in Virtual Dub it hits pretty good levels (-10 to 0) for as weak as it sounds. In otherwards, it sounds a alot weaker than what it should for being between -10 and 0. Then again, it may be all that air that is makeing it hit those levels. To counter this problem, in the ATI tuner control panel I have the volume turned up to max, along with the windows audio mixer and line in to get the air out and make the audio sound more stronger but didn't help. Any suggestions?

[jagabo]

Wind causes lots of high amplitude, low frequency noise. Use a high pass filter to remove that and you can boost the volume of what's left without distorting.

[greymalkin]

when you say "air" i'm assuming you mean tape hiss/noise. You can export the audio to an audio editor after capturing and do some noise reduction on it to help. You have to use it sparingly though or your audio will sound like it's being played out of a tin can underwater.

[dman777]

Yeah...I when I mean 'air' I mean a low volume that you have to turn up so loud that you here air in the speakers. The VHS tapes have recorded shows on them...so it's not like home videos or anything.

So I can export the whole .AVI file to an audio editor? Which audio editor would do that(one that would be free)?

Also, would be worth it if I went out and bought an adapter to hook my VCR audio L/R into the line in of my sound card to possibley boost the volume level so loud it would get rid of the air noise? or would that cause distortion from clipping?

[greymalkin]

Audacity is a freeware audio editing tool. I don't know if it has this feature, but I know some audio editors have an option to "Open Audio from video". If this is the case then you can just point to the video file and it will open up the audio.

The trick to noise/hiss reduction is to find a spot in the tape that is supposed to be silent (of course it's not because of all the his). Select that "silent" portion and tell the software to build a noise reduction profile from it. Then when you apply noise reduction to the entire file it will try to eliminate just the hiss. Like I said earlier, you have to be careful with how much of it you take out because it may take out some things you wanted and leave the audio sounding funny.

If Audacity doesn't let you open audio from video then you will have to use a demultiplexor to seperate the audio from the video file. It will save it as a .wav. Then you can just open the .wav in audacity.

Does anyone know a free demux tool?