What is the best way to reduce wind noise from a sound track?

Question

I have many takes in a windy environment. No good microphon was used to avoid the wind hiss. The sound I want to keep are voices only (men and women, if it matters). Both left and right tracks are available: it is the integrated camcorder mic, but probably not worth a lot because the mics were very near another. The wind was not constant and to make it worse AGC was on.

I have started many tries with audacity and filters cutting off below 10Hz and 20kHz on a friend's advice. It already improved the tracks quite a bit.

But is there some technique that can yield better results like some spectral filter magic? I know it is maybe the worst case scenario, but if you are member, you probably like challenges, or? To make the question more general and useful to others, are there any good workflows to remove blowing wind from audio records?

COMMENT: And no, there is unfortunately no way to repeat the takes in a cleaner way anymore...

Answer 1

Your best bet would be to set your band pass filters very tight, probably from 1 kHz to 4 kHz and gradually add content back on either side to until you find the the speech is intelligible but wind noise is minimized. Unfortunately I don't think you'll be able to remove it all.

Obviously it would have been best to use a windscreen on a microphone, this is best practice even indoors or with low-wind conditions.

edit: To elaborate, a band pass filter is removing anything except specified ranges of frequency content. If you had a graphic EQ, that would mean moving all the sliders down except for the 1 to 4 kHz. This will result in the voices sounding like they are calling over a telephone. Then gradually bring back the sliders immediately to the right and left, one at a time, until you find a good balance of intelligibility/noise.