Removing High-Pitched Noise from Canon Powershot Videos

I used to use a Canon Powershot A630 for all of my photography. Since it has a built-in video feature (as most digital camera these days do), it also became my default video camera. In the mid-2000s, once I had a memory card large enough, I found it completey unneccessary to use my little video camera at all, so I started recording all my video with this little pocket camera from about 2005 onward.

If you're ever used this camera for video, however, you may notice it had a high-pitched hissing all throughout every video it shoots. This was an irritation for me before I stumbled upon a website that explained how to remove it flawlessly using a free program called Audacity. It involves removing the audio, entering a strange, cryptic code into a NyQuist prompt to remove the sound, and then putting the audio back in with the video (I usually separate tracks using Final Cut).

Unfortunately, the web page that explains how to do this (located here) decided to lock itself behind a password for some reason. Fortunately, I was able to save the instructions, which I'll share here for anyone who wants them.

Using this tip on audio removal from the wiki for the software Audacity, I managed to figure out that the high-pitched noise has a frequency of 4290 Hz. I extracted the audio from the video using VirtualDub, and opened it with Audacity 1.3.4 beta. Like the Wiki page instructed, I used the Nyquist prompt and the command (notch2 s 4290 50) (yes the brackets are necessary), and this removed the noise flawlessly! All that needs to be done is now to reinsert the audio into the video file. I can combine this with re-encoding the video with a more size- (and web-) friendly codec.

Happy videoing!

Technology sucks

I think we can all agree that personal computers are quickly growing worse with every generation rather than better. Case in point: copying sections of a DVD. I have a bunch of home movies compiled on several DVDs, and I want to create a compilation by copying bits and pieces from them. This used to be simple with a free program called MPEG Streamclip and a $20 MPEG2 plug-in from Apple. Of course, Apple has since dumped all over their software and made their plug-in completely unusable.

Fortunately, I still have an older laptop that runs 10.5 instead of 10.7, so I can still get my work done. Maybe I should consider "upgrading" my newer iMac down to an older version as well.