How to repair cracked voice in Sony vegas

[kingjen]

Recently, I recorded an interview with my Panasonic AG DVC 30 camcorder and NTG 2 shotgun mic. I noticed during the editing that the subject's voice was a little cracking at some words (the subject was not very calm during the interview). Is there any way to repair or mitigate this problem with Sony Vegas pro? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[jaegersing]

I doubt if Vegas has any automatic tools for this type of audio repair. If you really need to do it, it could be very tedious, depending on how many "cracks" you need to repair.

The best way I know of how to fix this (apart from re-recording the vocal) is to try and identify similar sounds/syllables from other parts of the recording, but without any cracks. You can then copy a small segment of "uncracked" audio and paste it in sync with the cracked part that you want to repair, on the next track. You can fade down the "cracked" section to allow the clean audio to come through.

If you can copy and paste whole words at a time, it should be a bit faster, but sometimes you need to just copy out individual syllables, depending on whether the recording has "clean" version of the problematic words. As I said, it can be very tedious.

Richard

[kingjen]

Thanks Richard for your quick reply. Yes, cut and paste the "uncracked" audio and then in sync with uncracked audio is going to be very tedious and very time consuming. In the end, not sure how is the final outcome and worth that amount of time. Are there any plugin or third party audio tools that can fix such problem quickly? 

[jaegersing]

Most noise reduction and repair tools are designed to fix noise and interference type of problems. If I read you correctly, what you have is a clean recording of a lousy source, and the tools may not be geared to fix that. Otherwise I would buy a plugin for my singing recordings that makes me sound like Pavarotti!

But if you can post a short sample of audio with one or 2 cracks in it, I can try using Sound Forge Noise Reduction plugin to see if the Crackle tool can help. I don't think Vegas can do it.

Richard

[kingjen]

I have just tried Bias SoundSoap at my friend's PC and have used the crackle tool but to little or no effect. Yes, such tool is very effective to fix noise, hiss and hum that are related to equipment recording. Earlier, I tried the track compressor in Vegas with various parameters but they are far from addressing this problem.  At least, I have tried my best. Thanks for your feedback.