Yesterday I pointed out the next issue to deal with, noise. It is inevitable that during the recording, especially between slides, I had to breathe. Sometimes I'm flipping pages of the script. There is just noise that is distracting if I leave it in.
So, I want to make those transitions silent. Fortunately Camtasia figured out that we would probably want to do that a lot and they made it easy for us. As you can see below, you select a portion of the audio timeline that has noise and then hit the "Replace with Silence" button. This will reduce the audio volume for that selection to zero.
I also used the buttons just to the left of them to sometimes increase or decrease the volume by a quarter. This procedure does a good job of eliminating noise in transitions, but what about noise in the middle of a slide?
There is a feature to help with that. It won't eliminate the issue entirely but it will help to minimize it. Open the "Audio Enhancements" sub-menu and you will find a bunch of additional options. Here is a very important rule: Save your project before messing around in this area. You can undo (CTRL + Z) a lot of things including audio enhancements, but we're dealing with big files and big files have a tendency to crash. So save your work, try an enhancement and if it doesn't work, throw it away and come back to the project from your last save.
First, I have not had a good experience with the "Even out volume" control. When you use it it replaces some other edits you may have already implemented. Don't use that feature. I do recommend using the "Automatically detect and remove noise" feature. This does a good job of removing any clicking or chirping that may existing in your audio track. It only takes a second to run. It surprises me how quickly it runs. Also, when it is done a potion of your timeline will be selected. Don't worry about that. You will know that it has worked when your audio changes from teal to red.
I do not recommend using this sub-menu to "Manually remove noise". We already took care of that. I also do not recommend using any of the vocal enhancements. I just haven't had good luck with these.
Here is one audio conundrum though. The final product is clearly my voice. While I like my current job and role, I don't expect to be doing this forever. I really wanted to try to find some sort of voice modulator or enhancer so that the audio would be less me and more generic. The reason I wanted to do this is for out-year maintainability. If there is a change in the regulations or policy, I would hope that someone (not me) can just record the audio for the part that is different and not need to record the entire audio for the module. However the options that fit my zero dollar budget were pretty limited. I could either sound like a Speak and Spell or an auto-tuned crazy person. So I decided that I could live with my voice on the audio. But my ears are always open to find a tool to make the audio more generic so that anyone could record the audio and it would sound similar to someone else.
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