Month: May 2012

Audio noise reduction in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

So you have bought ‘Adobe Premiere Pro CS5: classroom in a book’ and you are searching for a way to remove noise from an audio file? Your frustration might be skyrocketing when you find out on page 256 you need Adobe Soundboouth to do that and you don’t have an Adobe Master Collection license. Don’t despair, you won’t need Soundbooth to do that or any other third party software like Audacity .

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t mention this trivial solution for such a common problem.

Here’s how you can remove noise from an audio clip in Adobe Premiere itself. The benefit of this procedure is that it doesn’t change the audio-file in any way.

– Make sure you have an audio clip on your timeline
– In the effects panel (normally to the left of the timeline), look for ‘DeNoiser’ (Audio Effects 5.1 (or Audio Effects stereo / Audio Effects mono) > DeNoiser)
– Drag and drop this effect onto the audioclip in the timeline
– Double click the audio clip and it will be loaded into the source monitor (by default the ‘monitor’ to the left)
– Go to the effects control tab/panel: you will notice that the ‘DeNoiser’ has been added here)
– Play around with the settings (I prefer using the custom setting and set the Reduction button to -5Db or anything around that area). Start playing the video in the ‘program monitor’ and listen to the effect on the fly (while changing the settings to your liking)

Clipping Mask: a crop tool for Illustrator CS5

Looking for a crop tool in Illustrator CS5? Try a clipping mask instead! This way all your outside canvas drawings won’t be lost.

  1. Draw a rectangle above the area to be ‘cropped’
  2. Select all layers that need ‘cropping’
  3. Select Object > Clipping mask > Make

Still looking for cropping ways? Here are two examples:

Multiline regular expression problem in PHP 5.3.3

Recently I came across a very strange behaviour in a regular expression I wrote years ago.

The webserver upgraded to PHP 5.3.3 and it suddenly stopped working.

Case as follows: I use PHP to read a text-file and with the aid of PCRE (preg_match & preg_split) I look for certain matches in that text-file. The program splits different paragraphs into seperate records. But suddenly preg_split stopped working:

<?php
$paragraphs = preg_split("/\n\n/",$contents_of_file);
?>

Multiple newlines could not be detected, whereas

<?php
$lines = preg_split("/\n/",$contents_of_file);
?>

generated no problem at all. At first I thought I had to use the multiline modifier /m but that didn’t work out either.

Although a HEX editor didn’t indicate any carriage returns in the text-file I managed to get things working by doing this:

<?php
$paragrapgs = preg_split("/\r?\n\r?\n/",$contents_of_file);
?>

Curious thing: previous and newer versions of PHP (e.g. 5.3.8 in a XAMPP test environment) did not require to look for possible occurrences of carriage returns (\r).