Trying to understand audio editing

[Snakebyte1]

I've been editing a lot of VHS captured material lately and as a result have had to clean up the audio quite a bit. There are lots tools out these days which all have a huge number of settings and options, most of which I haven't a clue of when to use then, let alone how to use them. For example what is Normalization?

I've been using Abode Audition to do some noise removal recently. I find that after I remove the background noise (which works pretty well) the audio is, for lack of better words, hollow or flat. I generally try to play with some Bass and Treble settings to improve things. Play is the optimal word here as as I must admit I don't really know what I am doing. I just changes settings and hope something works. Often I make a mess of things and start over from scratch.

I know that each audio project is different and some applications are better at somethings that other - that there is no magic bullet - but I was wondering if those of you who are well familiar with audio could explain some of the settings, attributes and options that you would consider the most useful when editing audio.

Thanks
D.

[Soopafresh]

You have to be careful with the amount of noise reduction you use. Sometimes a bit of hiss is preferable to the "hollow sound". I only add noise reduction if the sound is absolutely horrible.

If it's mostly spoken word stuff, you can cut the bass at 150hz and below and the treble at 7500hz and above to create a more natural hiss reduction.

Here's a technique which works much the old Dolby NR (which was actually a pretty effective noise reduction method)

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic333036.html#1728587