It can be really frustrating when you get back from a production and your audio picked up some background hissing that totally wasn’t there during the shoot. The good news is that it is quite simple to remove the white noise with Adobe Audition.

Removing the White Noise

The first thing we’ll need to do is load in our audio clip we’ll want to repair. Simply go to File > Import > File. 

Once the clip is imported, we’ll need to find an area in the clip that isolates the whitenoise. For most cases, a longer isolated whitenoise clip will have a better chance of success. Click and drag the area in the timeline of the isolated whitespace. You can use the two handles to get it in the correct position. 

Once you have the whitenoise selected on the timeline, we’ll need to add the noise reduction effect. Simply go to Effects > Noise Reduction / Restoration > Noise Reduction (process), or by pressing Ctrl + Shift + P.

Next, we’ll want to click Capture Noise Print. This will bring up a frequency timeline and some settings to play around with.

The goal of removing the noise is to ride the line between removing the noise, but keeping all of the other frequencies so it sounds normal. If you have a hissing/treble sound that is higher pitched, you’ll want to target the higher frequencies on the right side of the chart. If it’s a louder bass sounding noise, we’ll target the lower end frequencies on the left side.

Moving the line in the chart will provide more noise reduction. Remember, we only want to target the annoying background noise. Using the chart will help us dial in the exact frequency the noise is at.

For this case, we’ll be removing a lower frequency white noise. Start by pressing Space or click the play icon to start listening to the playback. Following the information above for this case, we’ll want to target the left side of the chart and will look something like this. Moving these nodes will ramp up the effect to the frequency that is causing issues.

If we deselect the audio clip in the timeline, we can hear the clip fully with our narration. Now we can fine tune it even more. Moving the nodes, changing the noise reduction percentage and the amount it is reduced by.

Once you dial in your settings, click Apply. That annoying audio clip should sound a whole lot better.

Unfortunately some audio clips won’t be able to be saved. Get it to the best that you can and make some changes to prevent this from happening in your next shoot.