Separating Sound Effects, Dialogue and Music?

[Captain Khajiit]

^^ Here.

 

[TV's Frink]

I have no idea if this would be helpful or relevant since I don’t realky do any editing.  But there’s a program I use to help me transcribe music called Riffstation that recently went to a free model. It allows you to isolate certain frequencies. For example, you could isolate the frequencies where the guitar is in the track to allow you to more clearly hear what is happening. I don’t know if there’s a tool like that for editing. It’s not completely clear as, of course, most sounds share frequencies. But it might help.

Audacity can do something like this with the noise removal tool.  You can pick out a section of music-only sound and tell audacity to "remove" anything in the track that sounds like it.  It doesn't remove the music but it can often reduce the sound enough that you end up with essentially just dialogue.  It is definitely hit-and-miss but I have used it a few times recently.

 

[Ryantology]

Awesome! Really appreciate the responses.

 

[Flubly]

Can anyone tell me the circumstances wherein they were able to effectively use the "invert waveform" method of dialogue isolation? This isn't assuming that there's a method that makes it effective 100% of time, I'm just curious what the work-flow looked like for a time when it did work.

Did you down-mix the surround into stereo first? I've mostly experienced this method in DAWs with music, not film editing, so I've never really thought about stereo interacting with surround when it comes to inversion.

 

[DigModiFicaTion]

Can anyone tell me the circumstances wherein they were able to effectively use the "invert waveform" method of dialogue isolation?

Initially I used this method to turn my 2.0 stereo audio track into a 5.1 surround for my Shipwrecked edit. Ultimately I used the vocal removal effect.

 

[Flubly]

Can anyone tell me the circumstances wherein they were able to effectively use the "invert waveform" method of dialogue isolation?

Initially I used this method to turn my 2.0 stereo audio track into a 5.1 surround for my Shipwrecked edit. Ultimately I used the vocal removal effect.

Hmm, yeah it seems like the best route for getting better results is just getting into more and more sophisticated noise reduction. I have an engineer friend who owns the Izotope RX bundle (I'm not sure if he has the egregiously expensive "advanced" bundle). I've been thinking of asking him if he'd be interested in taking a look at some Ladyhawke stems.

I've seen phase inversion recommended once in a while, but it didn't make much sense to me since it's the dialogue that's in mono and music that's in stereo. You could do it with the soundtrack, but often with older movies there's so many variables against them matching. The movie is often just the capturing of the optical strip which makes it a different sound signature than the cd, and if it's a remastered copy the mixing and mastering can be different enough despite them both being clean.

If someone has ever been able to phase invert using a CD copy of soundtrack against a movie, I'd love to hear how that worked. I've never been able to do that effectively because of the above reasons.

 

[addiesin]

Can anyone tell me the circumstances wherein they were able to effectively use the "invert waveform" method of dialogue isolation?

Initially I used this method to turn my 2.0 stereo audio track into a 5.1 surround for my Shipwrecked edit. Ultimately I used the vocal removal effect.

Hmm, yeah it seems like the best route for getting better results is just getting into more and more sophisticated noise reduction. I have an engineer friend who owns the Izotope RX bundle (I'm not sure if he has the egregiously expensive "advanced" bundle). I've been thinking of asking him if he'd be interested in taking a look at some Ladyhawke stems.

I've seen phase inversion recommended once in a while, but it didn't make much sense to me since it's the dialogue that's in mono and music that's in stereo. You could do it with the soundtrack, but often with older movies there's so many variables against them matching. The movie is often just the capturing of the optical strip which makes it a different sound signature than the cd, and if it's a remastered copy the mixing and mastering can be different enough despite them both being clean.

If someone has ever been able to phase invert using a CD copy of soundtrack against a movie, I'd love to hear how that worked. I've never been able to do that effectively because of the above reasons.

I've never gotten phase inversion to work for film audio cleanup but also haven't experimented with it as much as I'd like to.

I think if you're lucky enough to be able to do the following it may work:
Rip the video source from its disc with all audio tracks
Demux the stereo audio track from the ripped video source
Rip the stereo soundtrack audio cd
Line up the soundtrack file with the demuxed audio file in your editor
Change the volume of the soundtrack file to match the volume of the music that is mixed in the demuxed audio file
Invert the soundtrack file.

There is only one broad reason this might not work, and that's of the waveform on the soundtrack doesn't match the source. 

But there are many specific reasons they may not match up.
If the original sound editor of the film or show had access to the unmastered tracks from the soundtrack (like all the separate files straight from the recording engineer), they may have applied new effects (like reverb or eq), changed relative volumes (like maybe lowered the strings and raised the brass), or separated the channels into a surround mix that was then downmixed into stereo or they may have mastered the tracks differently somehow. If they only had access to the final mastered audio (like from a CD, the same as what we'd buy from the store), they still may have applied volume fades or envelopes that may be hard to match, changed pitch or timing, or may have recut or rearranged songs. Even the bitrate may affect results, I don't know.

Really interested in what others have learned trying this out.

 

[smursalin]

For my project I needed to make some video on social development. I collected some videos from YouTube and other sources. But as I am new in this field I don’t know many of the easy processes and the ways of separating sound effects from a video.

[size=medium]Can anyone help me with any software that is easy to use and can help me to separate audio effect from the video?[/size]

 

[DigModiFicaTion]

For my project I needed to make some video on social development. I collected some videos from YouTube and other sources.

@"smursalin" ,

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[CathyFulcherBaker]

Hi, I am editing Attack of the Clones, and I have discovered due to this website there is no version with a clean centre channel. My next step is to use a vocal isolation add-on or programme. I've heard of an add-on for Audacity, but one for FCPX would be better. Any help or advice would be very much appreciated. 

-Cathy.

 

[Captain Khajiit]

There's a stickied thread on this issue in this very sub-forum.

 

[CathyFulcherBaker]

There's a stickied thread on this issue in this very sub-forum.

I just made this post in case anyone had any specific information.

 

[TV's Frink]

Threads merged.  Please don't make separate threads looking for specific information, post in the existing thread.

 

[CathyFulcherBaker]

Threads merged.  Please don't make separate threads looking for specific information, post in the existing thread.

Okay, thank-you. Sorry for making newbie mistakes.

 

[thebutcher]

Lots of links in this (very old) thread lead nowhere so I thought I would ask for an update. What is currently the best way to remove, or reduce, music in the Center channel of a 5.1 mix, once this mix has been split in 6 WAVs?

I played around with Sound Removal in Adobe Audition, to mixed results.

 

[The Danger Zone]

Hey. I own the Blu-ray of Batman Forever, and upon extracting the disc to an .mp4 file using DVDFab 10 and examining the file in VEGAS Pro 15, I noticed there were 14 different audio tracks.

I assumed some of them were the film's differing language tracks and the audio commentary by director Joel Schumacher, so I removed them until I was left with the main 6 audio channels for the English dub.

I removed 5 of them, leaving me with the center channel, where dialogue and SFX are most prominent. Any advice on removing Elliot Goldenthal's score?

 

[Horrifyingly Hillarous]

Does anyone know why there would be no sound from a part of the center channel, it’s all fine on the timeline but fully rendered it’s just the music

 

[Captain Khajiit]

It's possible that you haven't panned the tracks properly in your NLE.

 

[Horrifyingly Hillarous]

Anyone have any idea as to why the center channel of one source will be mute upon rendering but the rest of the timeline is find, it all plays when watching on the actual program too

 

[Captain Khajiit]

To what format are you rendering?  What NLE are you using?  Did you check that all the tracks were panned correctly?  If you provide more information, someone might be able to help you.

EDIT.  You might also attract more of a response if you post your question in another thread.  It sounds as if your problem is related to rendering rather than separating sound effects, dialog and music.