How can I eliminate strong wind noise with audition?

Question

Hi, I have some recorded tape of a wedding on a beach on  a very windy day with a fairly ordinary digital jvc video camera. I tried to use the equaliser but did not really achieve or improve much of anything. Would Audition allow me to do this?
MM

Answer 1

Unfortunately I don't think that anything is going to help you much here - it's why pro recordists (and anybody else who realises what the problem is) use big fluffy windgags on mics outside - even when there's hardly any wind at all. These break up the direct blasts considerably, and randomise the air movements around the gag itself. As a consequence, inside the gag there's an area of still air around the mic itself, and that stops the blast effects on the diaphragm.
The problem with wind is that it's not constant in level or sound type - the bandwidth varies too. Audition can reduce constant background sounds quite effectively, but wind doesn't even begin to qualify here - and as a consequence, there's no way that Noise Reduction can help you - even the newer adaptive sort doesn't fix wind problems. And before you ask, there's no other software that can help either - this random high level noise is all over the wanted parts of your recording, so whatever you do, it's also going to affect that.
That said, often you can fix some of the problems by rolling off all of the bass in the signal - say, everything below 100 Hz, because that's usually where the worst effects are, and there generally isn't much speech content below 100Hz anyway. But once you've done that, you don't really have anywhere else to go with this, I'm afraid.