WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO KNOCK OUT TRAFFIC NOISE IN SOUNDTRACK PRO

Question

I have watched apple pros knock out the sound of the boat noise and just had the people talking, could someone explain how you knock out that sound again, I am pretty knew to this program. I am trying to knock out the background sound of the traffic. Thank you for your help,
Bill

Answer 1

I worked on a project to cleanup up audio - where 'guerilla video' was shot in the streets of SF during the massive war protests - had:
a. sanitation trucks operating
b. wind
c. bicycle bell
d. heels/ footsteps
e. background voices
f. sound of the camera operators lens cap clicking against the camera body
g. other vehicular noises
I used:
Peak
Sound Soap
Eventide Harmonizer
Logic Audio / Pro plugins
Lexicon PCM 80
STP / plugins
and although we were able to reduce some of these, overall, I was quite unsatisified and realized, perhaps for the last time, that you simply cannot remove most 'aural debris' from a mix, period. If you want a quiet background, well now you know why most productions bother to shoot on sound isolated stages and love to yell "quiet on the set" (he).
And Ive had those who would argue with me in saying that 'old/dirty paintings can be cleaned up' - perhaps true however, usually the debris is on an outer layer and not mixed in much with the original artwork, at least to some extent. And even this kind of work is incredibly delicate and said to be quite difficult to do.
In the final analysis, the shooter was advised to realize that the very nature of the video - its completely urban setting, was still quite compelling.
fwiw