How to get rid of environment noise when recording myself ?

Hello,

I am working on my future first Udemy course and I am facing a problem when recording my voice simultaneously with my screen. I am using a Blue Yeti micro which is very performant at capturing sounds and a video recorder and editing software called Free Cam 8. Since I don't have any 100% isolated room within my studio flat, my recordings are biased with noise from fridge, cars outside etc... I am also facing another problem which is reverbations.

Could you advise me how to get rid of such noise using some material and/or techniques or maybe denoising software ?

Thank you very much in advance,

Mehdi,

Comments

  • Setting up the right acoustic environment for your recording is for many the most taxing, time-consuming, yet important technical task in teaching on Udemy.

    It is an investment worth making, but you need to be aware of this:

    You need to:

    1. Sound proof the room

    OR

    2. Sound proof some part of your environment, like a walk in wardrobe

    OR

    3. Build a shell around your desk to make a DIY mini room and sound proof that

    AND OR

    Turn off appliances

    Before doing all that, you might like to try boxing the Yei into a cardboard box lined with foam. Search Google for 'Microphone Box'.

    You can use Duvets or foam to sound proof the environment.

    You tube is full of videos showing you various ways to do this.

    Search for how to do DIY sound proof for podcasters or something similar.

    Once you have done it once you won't have to do it again.

  • @SakjiMehdi359
    ,

    I use a Blue Yeti and had similar problems with computer sound being picked up (I foolishly bought an all-in-one that puts the computer fan about a foot behind my mic. Padding my environment with foam squares helped a little but I was able to greatly reduce unwanted sounds using a Kaotica Eyeball:

    IS575544-01-03-BIG.jpg

    The mic stuffs into a foam ball with a cutout to speak into with a blue pop filter over it. The thing isn't cheap ($199) but it cuts sound nicely without a lot of effort. I was barely able to stuff my Blue Yeti into the thing. I noticed they now offer a Fatboy option for larger mics.

    $0.02,

    ---Brian

  • Vigasan
    Vigasan Posts: 42 storyteller rank

    Hey Sakji,

    There's really only two ways around that problem.

    1) Change the environment - See if you can book a private conference room, other instructors have prepped in advance so they can book just 1-2 days and get their recordings done and done the editing at home. An alternative is to see if you can use a friends house, someone who lives outside of the city, to record. You can offer to dog sit, or house sit when they go on vacation for example.

    2) Change your set up - This won't help with all problems of course but the best thing to change out is the microphone. The Blue Yeti is a decent entry mic but is known to pick up a ton of background noise as well. Depending on your budget, I would look into good dynamic mics to pick up. There are mics out there that will pick up only objects super close to the microphone itself so definitely do some research and listen to sample audio before deciding.

    You can use software like Audacity to help remove noise but it works best when the same noise is present throughout like a hum or fan sounds for example. It's not as great for random sounds. Always try to get the best sound quality directly from the mic though.

  • BrunoG
    BrunoG Posts: 9 researcher rank

    Hi, I would suggest using a dynamic microphone such as a Sennheiser E835 as it does not pickup far sounds as condenser mics do.

    You have to speak close to the microphone as it's effective range is about 2 to 15cm.

  • Umar
    Umar Posts: 7 researcher rank

    nVidia recently released NVIDIA RTX VOICE. It removes noise in realtime in many applications. I started using it for my recordings and the results are amazing. The only catch is that you need to have nVidia GPU on your PC (non-RTX gpus also work through a tweak).

    Here is the link to setup : https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice-setup-guide/

  • Have been in similar situation where i tried few things like using a very closed room or using zoom inbuilt cancellation,but more efficient then it found recently a nice AI based tool named Krisp ,which helps cancel all types of background noise with its advanced algorithms.

    Give it a try,would be surely helpful.