Audio Restoration with Soundforge question
 

In Soundforge, when you go to Processes, EQ, then Paragraphic, to edit the audio, and the Sonic Foundry Paragraphic EQ box pops up, and you can try the different filters there to restore it, is there a way that you can somehow skip ahead in the audio that you're picking filters for, to see if you might need to use different filters throughout the whole audio clip?

The way I've always done it is, I listen to a few seconds of the audio from the start, and just pick the filters from the 20-30 seconds or so of audio that I listen to from the start. I usually restore audio for 3 hr videos, so just because I pick a filter at the start and it sounds good, doesn't mean that the specific filter that I picked for the beginning will still work the same say, 2 hrs into the video. I've never been able to figure out how to skp ahead on the audio clip in that Sonic Foundry Paragraphic EQ box. Is there a way that I can do that?

No.

I wouldn't do that.

Correct. If the video is a continuous filming, it may sound the same. If your "3 hour video" is separate recordings smashed into a single 3-hour time frame, then you would need/want to break it up into individual filmed segments, and then restore each piece one by one. There's no shortcut for this -- it's long and tedious, and the only proper way.

Pick a random portion of audio that you feel properly represents the overall audio for the entire clip. Use your mouse -- click, hold and drag to highlight a section of the audio with your mouse. Then go to the filters. Instead of applying to the whole audio, you're telling the filter to only work with the small clip. Preview that way. Find what you want. Then leave, unhighlight, apply to clip.

Example image of what highlighted segment looks like:
Attachment 1698

And that's it.


Important note: Before you think "hey, wait, that's a shortcut!" for applying filters to segments, you'd be wrong. It's easy to see start/stop of clips by sight (viewing video) than by viewing the audio as waveform in the Sound Forge monitors. That's only really possible under certain conditions, and it actually takes longer than simply splitting up the video+audio in advanced, and working on each audio clip by itself. I do it sometimes, but try to avoid it as much as possible -- for that exact reason (takes extra time).

As an added FYI, Sonic Foundry was bought out by Sony a few years ago. While there are newer versions of Sound Forge available, the older versions work perfectly fine. I still use Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 6 on one computer, because it does everything that's required for the WAV filtering workflows. Other newer setups run Sound Forge 9, which has some added input/output abilities (save to AC3, for example).