With the support of iLok, more tips & tricks from the community. Here is one from James Hixon…

Hi, guys.  The community tips have been very helpful.  I’m enjoying them.  I have one I’d like to suggest. A lot of the post work that I do involves interviews that were shot in less than ideal environments.  It seems like there’s always noisy HVAC, a running refrigerator, etc.  Or, the shooter used the awful “preamps” in their DSLR.  Noise reduction plugins are great for this, but if you have to push them too hard, the artifacts they leave can be almost as bad as the noise.  

A very effective way to deal with this is to use two different plugins together. What I usually start with is the Waves Z-Noise.  I will select an area of the track where the noise is isolated.  Then, I’ll click ‘Learn’ in Z-Noise and play the audio to have the plugin sample the noise.  Clicking ‘Learn’ again will take it out of learn mode.  I then push the ‘Reduction’ fader all the way to to the top, and, if need be, I’ll bump the ‘Threshold’ up to maybe 2.  Whatever makes most of the noise go away without doing too much harm to the track.

Now, we have a track with reduced noise, but in many cases, there’s a warbly artifact left over. Then, I turn to Waves NS-1.  You don’t need much of it.  I’m usually only pushing the fader up to five.  I might push it up to 10 or 15 in extreme cases.  Use your discretion.  This plugin will eliminate the artifacts of the first plug-in, and leave you with a very clean dialog track.

Mike - Multiple passes with lighter amounts of noise reduction is the way to go. I would recommend that you get iZotope RX3, it is the best in my opinion, it is my go to restoration bundle, especially now RX3 Advanced has the new real time zero latency dialog denoiser and dereverb modules.

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