Mute the background music in a movie sample

[Ormion]

Here is a question.

I dload some movie samples from the web, ok? Now, almost all of them have the background movie music/noises. How can I mute the music/noises and have only the speech? How proffesional artists do it?

[Reznik]

you will need to search and eq it out.

open the file in a prog like wavelab or soundforge.

look for the frequencies that disturb with a parametric eq and eq it out.

 

there are also other techniques announced to work like magic, but infact this is the only way i know that works.

 

good luck

[frisbee]

expander or gate help sometimes. at least you can try it out

[Reznik]

expander or gate help sometimes. at least you can try it out

606774[/snapback]

how is a gate supposed to work in this case?

[Daniël]

First of all , it all depends on the volume & behaviour of the background sound, it's difficult to tell if it would work and which technique you should use. Don't count on a good result if the background is louder or equally loud as the sample you want to extract.

 

And you'll always damage the sample. The trick is to minimalise that damage.

 

for these kind of problems i would recommend to use adobe audition.

 

Search some tutorials fro adobe audition on the net, i'm sure you'll find something usefull.

 

If the background is a repetitive tone you can use audition's noise removement.

It's a great tool, i use it all the time to clean up outdoor recordings.

You select a "noise" (the empty parts of the recording) and then adobe audition automatically deletes all the frequencies of the noise so the noise sound is gone. It only works with repetitive sounds.

[Reznik]

unfortunately most of the time the freqs such tools cut out are also part of the voice

just my experience

 

you can google for your problem, there also are tutorials for wavelab and sound forge

involving some mirror technique, but i forgot how that worked..

 

it will take long time, prepare yourself

[Reznik]

even with eq you can have the same prob, if the freqs of background and speech are too near together.

 

but you can try

 

if they overlay themselves you have no chance

[frisbee]

how is a gate supposed to work in this case?

606780[/snapback]

if the foreground-sound is louder than the background that has to filtered out, set the gate to trigger just above the volume of the background-sound. the parts of the background that get through now could be drowned out by the sounds you really want to hear. it worked for me once, but i guess there are many cases where the result sounds too scatterd and dirty...