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Separating Sound Effects, Dialogue and Music?

Synovia

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ThrowgnCpr said:
is this a technique other than inverting the music track?

That's pretty much it. Just invert the music track and throw them together and you're pretty much good. Takes a little bit of playing around with the panning and volume to match them perfectly, but I've never had a problem. I took a glance around the thread a bit and did notice people trying to do this and it not quite working for them. I would say if it doesn't work it's probably because the two tracks aren't perfectly matched and all you have to do is play with their panning and volume a little bit to get it. I made a tutorial to show

 

TMBTM

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Synovia said:
That's pretty much it. Just invert the music track and throw them together and you're pretty much good. Takes a little bit of playing around with the panning and volume to match them perfectly, but I've never had a problem. I took a glance around the thread a bit and did notice people trying to do this and it not quite working for them. I would say if it doesn't work it's probably because the two tracks aren't perfectly matched and all you have to do is play with their panning and volume a little bit to get it. I made a tutorial to show


Nice tutorial. I played a lot with that invert method but never was 100% satisfied with the result.
Most of the time you just end up with what is in the center channel to begin with, because what is left of music in the center audio channel is often not 100% what is on the the other channels so the frequencies do not mute when they are inverted (plus they need to be at the exact same volume.)
I guess there are some cases where this trick could work though. But I doubt it could be used on most movies from the beginning to the end in one pass.
i'd gladly work on this again to be proven wrong though.
 

Synovia

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TMBTM said:
Nice tutorial. I played a lot with that invert method but never was 100% satisfied with the result.
Most of the time you just end up with what is in the center channel to begin with, because what is left of music in the center audio channel is often not 100% what is on the the other channels so the frequencies do not mute when they are inverted (plus they need to be at the exact same volume.)
I guess there are some cases where this trick could work though. But I doubt it could be used on most movies from the beginning to the end in one pass.
i'd gladly work on this again to be proven wrong though.

Exactly. Unfortunately iShowU HD didn't record Audacity's audio for some reason so you can't really hear it, but yes when you first invert the instrumental you almost hear no difference. It does require tweaking the volume and panning to get it exact. Usually that's the secret to getting it working though. I only had to increase the instrumental volume by +2 db and pan the original 50% to the right (or the instrumental 50% to the left I suppose) and it made a world of difference. Inverting the instrumental isn't an instant fix. It takes some listening to find that sweet spot and from what I've noticed it has to be precise. Panning it 48% or 52% or increasing it by 3 db instead of 2 didn't do it. Go bit and bit and look for the sweet spot and you'll find it.
 

TM2YC

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I've tried similar things with Star Wars (A New Hope) and had zero success. I know it can work because if I invert the phase of the exact same bit of audio it comes out as silence.
 

Kal-El

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I have FCP and Audacity so if this works I'm buying drinks for everyone :p
 

tylerdurden389

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Which release of T2 would be easiest to isolate the dialogue with? I plan on doing an edit of T2 that requires a complete re-build of the entire audio (music, sound effects, etc...) but I still need the dialogue. Thanks!!
 

ThrowgnCpr

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tylerdurden389 said:
Which release of T2 would be easiest to isolate the dialogue with? I plan on doing an edit of T2 that requires a complete re-build of the entire audio (music, sound effects, etc...) but I still need the dialogue. Thanks!!

none of them. The skynet bluray DTS is probably the best to work with though. You're in for a lot of work if you are rebuilding the entire audio. I just did redid the audio for the Bad to the Bone scene and it was a lot of work. I was able to get a few sound effects from the original audio, but I had to create new sfx for most of it.
 

tylerdurden389

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ThrowgnCpr said:
none of them. The skynet bluray DTS is probably the best to work with though. You're in for a lot of work if you are rebuilding the entire audio. I just did redid the audio for the Bad to the Bone scene and it was a lot of work. I was able to get a few sound effects from the original audio, but I had to create new sfx for most of it.

If that was your edit of T2 that had a new voice actor do the bar owner's voice, yeah I remember seeing that a few years ago. I actually did my own edit on the same scene right around that time (not sure if you gave me the idea or if I had the idea already and seeing you do it inspired me to make this idea a reality, lol). It took me a whole day to do that entire sequence (I think it's about a minute and half long), but granted the audio files I used weren't nearly as good as yours since I just scoped out whatever free sound effects I could find. I ended up still using a few bits from the original audio sounds myself.

I tried to release my edit of T2 here, but I think this was before all the BS happened, and my in-the-works/unreleased edit never made it during the move. Doesn't matter cuz that was only peanuts compared to what I have in store now. Thanks for the tip, but from what I hear, this new re-release of T2 on blu looks much better than the skynet blu. Check out the discussion on the thread for it on bluray.com. The screencap comparisons show a much better grain detail. If the audio is the same, I'll buy it since it's only like 10 bucks :)
 

ThrowgnCpr

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tylerdurden389 said:
If that was your edit of T2 that had a new voice actor do the bar owner's voice, yeah I remember seeing that a few years ago. I actually did my own edit on the same scene right around that time (not sure if you gave me the idea or if I had the idea already and seeing you do it inspired me to make this idea a reality, lol). It took me a whole day to do that entire sequence (I think it's about a minute and half long), but granted the audio files I used weren't nearly as good as yours since I just scoped out whatever free sound effects I could find. I ended up still using a few bits from the original audio sounds myself.

I tried to release my edit of T2 here, but I think this was before all the BS happened, and my in-the-works/unreleased edit never made it during the move. Doesn't matter cuz that was only peanuts compared to what I have in store now. Thanks for the tip, but from what I hear, this new re-release of T2 on blu looks much better than the skynet blu. Check out the discussion on the thread for it on bluray.com. The screencap comparisons show a much better grain detail. If the audio is the same, I'll buy it since it's only like 10 bucks :)

yes, that was my T2 edit. I used a voice actor, just a few of the original sound effects, some of my own recorded sounds, and some that I got from other collections.

I'll look into the new Blur-ay, but I don't really have a problem with the skynet edition. My own edit is my go-to now anyway. Thanks for the heads up though.
 

tylerdurden389

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Alright, I've downloaded a program called "DVD Audio extractor" and am getting the files as i type this. The DVD of T2 that I'm using is the American DVD that was released in 1998. It has 4 different audio tracks and I plan on extracting them all to see what works (sometimes non-English dubbed audio tracks have altered mixes, and on top of dialogue, I need certain sound effects as well, even though I plan on changing a lot of them).
 

TV's Frink

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(note: copied from another thread to proper location)

TomH1138 said:
So it was my understanding that the Star Wars movies didn't have clean center channels, which made dialogue replacement very difficult. Seeing how nice and clean JeremyMWestEsquire made the dialogue substitutions for TPM, I asked him how he did it. Here is his reply:

"Hey Tom- I used Audacity to remove the vocals using this method: http://www.howtogeek.com/56335/how-to-remove-vocals-from-music-tracks-using-audacity/ Then I created my own vocal tracks for Jar Jar and Nemoidians in Audacity, lowered the pitch a bit, then mixed everything back together in Premiere."

So ... is this groundbreaking news? Will this open up a lot of possibilities for editors of Star Wars and other movies without clean center channels? Or did everyone else know this already, and I'm just late to the party?

TomH1138, the invert process has been discussed before, with mixed results IIRC. However, I'm a little confused by the article. Am I understanding correctly that this process would be used on a stereo track, rather than the center channel of a 5.1 track?

Of course, the other part of this puzzle is going the other way - keeping the dialogue while removing everything else.
 

TomH1138

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TV's Frink said:
(note: copied from another thread to proper location)

Sounds good. I wasn't sure whether it was better to talk about it in the thread where we were discussing the edit or whether it was better discussing it in regards to overall editing.

TV's Frink said:
TomH1138, the invert process has been discussed before, with mixed results IIRC.

Ah. Good to know. Fwiw, I thought his changes sounded good.

TV's Frink said:
However, I'm a little confused by the article. Am I understanding correctly that this process would be used on a stereo track, rather than the center channel of a 5.1 track?

I'm not sure. The extent of the information I have is what's posted above.
 

TV's Frink

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I think people have tried it with the center channel, but I'm not sure if anyone has tried it with a stereo track. I was going to try it with my ROTS audio this morning, but I think my original disc is still packed away in a box somewhere.
 

TMBTM

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The main problem to remove voices still remains the same: echos and reverbs that are not focused in the center channel of a 5.1 mix or that are not 100% the same on a stereo track will not be removed properly.
Now in case of removing Jar Jar's voice it can sound seamless BECAUSE you are adding a new voice above it. That new voice helps covering the strange reverb that you can still hear in some scenes.
But let's say that you want to remove the "roger roger" line of the droids. Sometime it works, but sometime you'll still have the reverb coming for left or right. And removing that is pretty difficult, if not impossible. That's why very often faneditors prefers working from scratch on the sound of a scene. Using the original soundtrack, using the center audio channel, and remove what they want to remove and in some cases add themselves some echos and reverb back, if needed.

But removing voices, even if sometimes difficult is doable.
What is difficult is removing completely the music and keep the voices intact. Sometime what's left of music in the center channel (or what is the same in both stereo tracks) is just too much to be covered properly by the new music; or maybe you don't want new music and in this case it's even more noticeable.
In this case a thing that can work is:
- Make an audio file of the scene you want to work on, with the center channel with voices and what's left of the original music.
- Find on the soundtrack of the movie the part of that music and make a file that match the first file you did before.
- Use audacity's "noise removal" to get the "profile" of your music and then use it to remove those frequencies on you center channel file.
You should end, if you're lucky with a file without music and with your voices more or less intact. But even then it depends ofthe frequencies of the music. Violins have frenquencies very close to the human's voice and sometime the voices will be degraded.
And using the "invert method" to remove the music using the original score on a scene usualy does not work. Because the quality of the music is not the same, because you did not align the frenquencies perfectly, because it's simply not the same orchestra that plays on the movie and on your soundtrack version, because you need to adjust the volume to be exactly the same, etc... It basicaly NEVER works.
 

TV's Frink

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Have you tried using Spectralayers?
 

TMBTM

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TV's Frink said:
Have you tried using Spectralayers?

Nope but from what I've seen, even if it looks very nice, it's still not a magic "push a button and it works" thing.
That said i'm sure there are many tools more useful than the free audacity, and Spectralayers looks like one of them.
 

TomH1138

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TMBTM said:
Now in case of removing Jar Jar's voice it can sound seamless BECAUSE you are adding a new voice above it. That new voice helps covering the strange reverb that you can still hear in some scenes.

Ah, that makes sense. For some reason, that just didn't click in my brain at first. Thanks for your insights, TMBTM!
 

baileym43

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i searched around a little bit and could only find that Vocal Eraser is packaged with Sony Sound Forge 10. and i suspect is sitting there in Sound Forge 11 as well because they expanded iZotope's footprint. i think both of these are for the Pro versions.
i hope that helps.
 
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