Lavalier microphone goes down during seminar - how to fix the audio? Options

[Curlz31]

So you're recording someone's speech at an important seminar.

There are three microphones. Lavalier, Podium, and on-camera.

The speaker is roaming around the room, and so the lavalier mic is critical .... but .... 16 minutes into the 37 minute speech .... the lavalier breaks down.

You are now an audio n00b with some dodgy audio, sitting in front of Adobe Audition (which you have never used), wondering what to do.

You just want to make the audio bearable.

You try Noise Reduction and then boosting the decibels .... but it still sounds bad. You watch several tutorial videos, but it still sucks.

You then finally give up and go to hydrogen audio begging for help.

The video is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuv8eQuzrJI (as I say, lavalier goes down at around 16mins .... then quality is variable as the speaker moves around, sometimes closer and sometimes further away, from the remaining microphones)

This post has been edited by Curlz31: Apr 23 2012, 16:18

[Notat]

There's a noise reduction technique sometimes called spectral subtraction that can probably help a bit. Its available in Adobe Audition and probably other audio software too.

[Dynamic]

There's a noise reduction technique sometimes called spectral subtraction that can probably help a bit. Its available in Adobe Audition and probably other audio software too.

A reasonable version is in Audacity (free software) but it seems to sound legible. I'd imagine it's not worth huge effort if its going to attract a few hundred viewers. One thing that makes the other mics sound different from the tie-clip radio mic and somewhat less clear is the reverberations from the room effects and sound reflecting off walls become much louder relative to the direct-path audio. That's very hard to undo anyway, and more so when the speaker is moving around. It would be possible to add room-reverberations artificially to the tie-clip mic signal in most audio editors, or increase the mix of the fixed mics as you approach the transition at 16:00 to make it more gradual degradation and increase in reverb, but I doubt consistency of audio beats clarity here.