Remove Background Noise – Best AI Tools
Like a lot of features that are under constant development in the world of A.I., noise removal is a bit of an evolving subject.
Right now most video editing software at all levels is going to come with at least some kind of noise reduction system in place.
Some are more old school mechanical whilst others are more tied into the world of A.I.
Either way there is an underlying issue with handling background noise in your audio that causes this to be a difficult subject.
The issue I am talking about is what is known as shared frequencies.
Any sound that is created will be made up of audio at different frequencies so for example traffic in your video background will cover a range of frequencies.
At the same time your voice or the voices of the people in your videos will also be represented by a range of frequencies.
It is at the point where those frequencies overlap that we run into difficulty.
So I can sample the background noise of that traffic and feed it into my noise reduction module with instructions to remove those frequencies.
Unfortunately because the voices also have some of the same frequencies, those bits get removed as well.
On one hand we have removed that background noise but on the other hand we have just turned that vocal sound into Alvin from the chipmunks or Darth Vader!
This is where A.I. comes in by attempting to isolate exactly what is background noise to be removed and what is vocal sound that should be retained.
I have used the tools you see in the video below and both the Descript tool and the Adobe Podcast tools are very good BUT!
The Descript tool is expensive and sometimes the Adobe tool is too aggressive giving an unrealistic or over processed aspect to the vocal sound.
Right now I am using the Lark M2 Wireless microphone system to record all of my videos which has noise cancelling built in to the recording stage.
This has almost completely eliminated any need for heroic noise reduction at the editing stage.
How to Cartoonify Yourself With AI – PowerDirector
This is a quick run-through of one of the newer A.I. modules in CyberLink PowerDirector.
This one lets you upload an image of yourself or someone and the module then creates a cartoon character based on that image.
Using a prompt and the style selection you can determine what kind of cartoon character you want to look like.
From that point forward you can then add another prompt to create a short video with included audio and sound effects.
How To Crop Videos…The Right Way – PowerDirector
Although cropping videos would seem to be a pretty straightforward process there are still people who sort of get it wrong.
The reason it is important is that we are all trying to retain as much quality as we can in our projects so if you do this wrong you can end up with degraded footage.
The New Creator Hub – Filmora
This week Filmora released an update and for the first time in a long time, it wasn’t directly to the software!
They have created a new space online called Creator Hub which is a central point for many of the assets they have been building for quite a while now.
Up until now they have been adding all kinds of templates, workflows, tutorials and on and on with most of it being accessible through the Filmora interface.
Although that is still the case now they have merged the entire collection into one place that you can access which is really handy for those things you want but are not necessarily going into a project right at that moment.
How to use the New Anchor Point Feature in Filmora 14
Anchor points are new little feature that was added to Filmora recently but because they are not all wizzbang A.I driven, they have been a tad overlooked.
So here’s a demo of what anchor points are and how they can be used to create special effects and control assets in the timeline.
How to Improve Video Quality – Video Upscaling for Beginners
At the moment there are a number of A.I. services online that claim to be able to upscale or improve your existing videos on a semi-automated basis.
I have tried many, many of these websites and so far for me the results have been mediocre at best.
You can actually see a few of them in action in the video below from the guys at Movavi but unless you are going to go to the top of the food chain with A.I. upscaling then nothing else is all that great just yet.
The best advice so far is to export your videos at the best possible quality BUT!
Keep copies because A.I. upscaling and enhancement is improving all the time so next year it may be a totally different story.
As far as I am concerned, my thoughts and recommendations on the subject are fully covered in this post here: A Guide to Video Upscaling.
How To Remove Video Background – Top 3 AI Tools
One of the first tools that was released when A.I. driven features for video started to appear was background removal.
This has always been a pretty popular type of tool because for many content creators it has been a way of simplifying the shooting process enormously.
Rather than having to design and light an attractive shot for both the subject and the background all you had to do was make sure your subject looked good.
After that you just loaded the clip into a background remover and then replaced it with whatever you wanted.
Of course development of tools like that couldn’t go on free forever so these days the options for freebies has reduced.
Many video editing programs have their own background removal features these days and off the top of my head I am pretty sure Filmora, PowerDirector and CapCut have a feature like this.
Anyway here’s a rundown of some background removers that are still free or at least reasonably priced if your own software doesn’t do it internally.
The Key to Saving Hours on Set
Once the initial shine of shooting, editing and uploading that content you just created starts to wear off, one thing becomes inevitable.
That creative process is really time consuming, mind numbingly repetitive and ultimately begins turning into some kind of insatiable beast.
Give it a few weeks or a few months and total burnout is on the way!
The key to avoiding this regardless of the type of content you are creating is planning.
Intelligent planning based on your knowledge of your own creative process will save you every time.
Here’s an example of one creators planning process from start to finish.
It may not suit your process exactly but it is a good starting point.
DaVinci Resolve 20.1 – A Surprisingly Big Update
There was a recent update to DaVinci Resolve 20 taking it to version 20.1.
This is considered a sort of major..ish update and traditionally is the one where bugs and shortcomings from the most recent major update are addressed.
It is also one where some features that were not quite ready for the big update are added.
No-one that I am aware of has done a comprehensive run through of how things have changed so here’s a new video from MrAlexTech on what’s up.
Some of the new and improved stuff in for the Studio version only but he makes it very clear in the video what’s what with all of that.