Removing Rain Noise from an Interview Without Damaging the Dialogue

We recently handled the audio for a promotional video shot in Japan for an overseas brand launch — a YouTube piece built around interviews with a well-known actress, shot on multiple cameras by a single videographer.

A denoiser plugin, pushed too hard

Just before release, the actress's talent office rejected the video on audio quality grounds. The cause: it had been raining lightly but continuously during the interview, and rain noise had leaked into the recording. Based on the final result, it looked like whoever edited the audio had leaned hard on the denoiser plugin built into their editing software — a single denoiser can only clean up so much before dialogue starts sounding processed and unnatural, and that's exactly what had happened here.

This isn't unusual. As more editors take on audio duties they weren't necessarily trained for, projects increasingly hit the limits of what a single built-in plugin can handle — especially continuous background noise like rain, which is much harder to remove cleanly than a single click or hum.

No room for a reshoot

With a well-known actress involved, a reshoot wasn't a realistic option for the client, and the deadline was close. We reworked the audio using a more careful, source-specific process rather than relying on one plugin's preset, and delivered dialogue that held up at broadcast/release quality without the processed, artificial character of the original edit.

If you're facing a similar problem — audio that got worse, not better, after running it through a denoiser — we're happy to take a look, whether you're a professional production or an independent filmmaker.

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