Hi, I want to make a short "Harry Enfield Public Information" style of film, complete with poor telephone quality,scratchy sound track, does anyone know of any filters, Soundforge 4.5 settings etc, that will allow me to get the effect I'm after.
I have recorded the video onto DV and edit using Premiere 6. the basic Quicktime Old film effect is good enough for the visuals.
Any Ideas?
hi, you should just be able to resample the sound at a lower frequency - bit rate -
ie
cd quality = 44khz
telephone = 11khz
i think at least, you could use something like cool edit or soundforge to resample the wav file, in fact i think you can do it in windows sound recorder just by saving to a different quality.
This may well produce the effect you desire, although I'm sure there are some plugins for most popular audio editors to add crackle etc
hope that helps
Thumper, if you re-sample it, won't it drift out of sync and/or produce nasty little sound artifacts/squeaks as Premiere attempts to 'see it' as 48Khz?
Maybe applying the notch filter (Audio effects under bandpass) at higher frequencies to suck all the HF content out would be better?
quote:Originally posted by andy wright:
Hi, I want to make a short "Harry Enfield Public Information" style of film, complete with poor telephone quality, scratchy sound track ... Any Ideas?
OK – Let’s start at the beginning…..
The soundtrack was never as bad as “telephone quality†as the microphones of the day were very good.
However, on film, the soundtrack would have been an optical soundtrack with a restricted frequency response and an increase in noise – the crackles would be from scratches on the film resulting in a damaged soundtrack.
Not good, but a lot better than telephone sound.
To reproduce the sound, how about copying it onto cassette (without Dolby) through an equaliser with reduced treble – do this going on to cassette as you need the restricted frequency response and the hiss.
Then play the cassette back onto the computer.
OK – I think that should approximate the sound – now all you have to do is to add the crackles.
John 
You might also like to try something I used to do before everything got digitised and we forgot how much fun it is taking everything apart. I took an old phone and wired the mouthpiece mic to a normal jack plug and fed it into the mic input, and simply played the material that I wanted to mosh up in front of it. Obviously, the two aren't meant to work together, impedance matching went right out of the window but the worse the better, as it were.
This is probably a rather more extreme option than John's suggestion (which I love cos you get the hiss too) but worth a go.
Obviously, don't try to 'borrow' the mic off a live phone as you'll get between 25 and 50 volts up your mic input which is not only nasty but makes all the phones in the house ring and a man in a van from the GPO appear (tried this 33 years ago!).
Have fun.
Try DX Plug-in "Vinyl" from OPCODE, it is quite cheap plug-in with fantastic options how to "poor" your audio, you can even add vinyl scratches.
I might try the telephone idea for a live show - Bugsy Malone, theres a reporter bit... Thanks Mark
Try using an Eq filter to completly remove all frequencys from outside 400hz - 3500hz using cool edit. The FFT filters (in effects-Filters) in cool edit 2 have telefone presets.
have fun !
Hang on, folks!
Don't forget the original question was about the sound for public information films - not - telephone quality.
The frequency response would be much wider than a telephone.
You would have a reasonable top end (though not as good as nowadays), you would have surface noise / hiss from the optical soundtrack and you would have noise from scratches on the acetate.
Trying to make it sound like a telephone would be going too far and would not sound realistic – just horrible.
John