Solved! How do I take out the narration of a video and leave only the other sounds?

[Rafael Mestdag]

I've got tons of F1 videos and in some of them I'd like to be able to extract only the narration and leave the rest of the audio, such as the ambient sounds, the cars' sounds etc...

Is there an easy way to do this through a software on Windows 7?

 

[getochkn]

Not really without the master audio tracks. You could try the poor man's way to audio removal. You would extract the stereo audio track, sum it to a mono signal, invert the signal and then play it back with the stereo track and mix that down. Odds are racing sounds are in stereo planning from left to right, while the narration is panned mono dead center, and the above method would remove a lot of it.

Can't go through step by step on how to do it, but that's the process for making ghetto karaoke tracks from back in the day. Lol.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

Not really without the master audio tracks. You could try the poor man's way to audio removal. You would extract the stereo audio track, sum it to a mono signal, invert the signal and then play it back with the stereo track and mix that down. Odds are racing sounds are in stereo planning from left to right, while the narration is panned mono dead center, and the above method would remove a lot of it.

Can't go through step by step on how to do it, but that's the process for making ghetto karaoke tracks from back in the day. Lol.

And how would I get the master audio tracks for my videos? And in the 'ghetto method' how much of the narration would I be able to remove more or less? And what software exactly are there for the poor man's way?

 

[getochkn]

Don't know what the videos are encoded in, but some free FFMPEG based software would do it probably. Audiocity is a free audio editor that could do that. As for how much, no idea, depends on how it's panned in the stereo sound space. Might sound like total crap too.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

Don't know what the videos are encoded in, but some free FFMPEG based software would do it probably. Audiocity is a free audio editor that could do that. As for how much, no idea, depends on how it's panned in the stereo sound space. Might sound like total crap too.

So basically it's not even worth it...

I've tried FFMPEG once but i found it a bit too complicated to use, in fact, I found on google a way to do it but it wouldn't work and all I got was an error message. I guess I'll try Audiocity though it seems like it wouldn't be worth the try.

 

[USAFRet]

This is like being at a party, and recording ALL the sound with the sound app on your phone. voices, music, doorbell....
Resulting in 2 stereo tracks...Left and Right.

Then later, you want to remove only the human voices, leaving everything else.
It can be done, but not with consumer grade software and hardware. $$$$$.

 

[getochkn]

If they recorded narration after, it's more like recording all the background noises in stereo, sounds, audience, etc, and then adding a mono narrative track over top, which can removed kind of decently with the above method and some testing. Now if the person was talking during the races on the field, then no, no so much if all sounds came from 1 mic.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

This is like being at a party, and recording ALL the sound with the sound app on your phone. voices, music, doorbell....
Resulting in 2 stereo tracks...Left and Right.

Then later, you want to remove only the human voices, leaving everything else.
It can be done, but not with consumer grade software and hardware. $$$$$.

I'll be sure to get the proper equipment in order to do this as soon as possible, by the way, could you point me to a site with the said needed software/hardware?

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

If they recorded narration after, it's more like recording all the background noises in stereo, sounds, audience, etc, and then adding a mono narrative track over top, which can removed kind of decently with the above method and some testing. Now if the person was talking during the races on the field, then no, no so much if all sounds came from 1 mic.

As I like and am reasonably good at video editing, I'd simply edit the on track/field part out and leave only the race itself with the narrators in the commentary box above the track.

 

[USAFRet]

This is like being at a party, and recording ALL the sound with the sound app on your phone. voices, music, doorbell....
Resulting in 2 stereo tracks...Left and Right.

Then later, you want to remove only the human voices, leaving everything else.
It can be done, but not with consumer grade software and hardware. $$$$$.

I'll be sure to get the proper equipment in order to do this as soon as possible, by the way, could you point me to a site with the said needed software/hardware?

That depends completely on what you actually have.
If it is individual tracks....pretty easy.
If it is just a single track audio file....you'd need something that can precisely filter on specific freqs.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

This is like being at a party, and recording ALL the sound with the sound app on your phone. voices, music, doorbell....
Resulting in 2 stereo tracks...Left and Right.

Then later, you want to remove only the human voices, leaving everything else.
It can be done, but not with consumer grade software and hardware. $$$$$.

I'll be sure to get the proper equipment in order to do this as soon as possible, by the way, could you point me to a site with the said needed software/hardware?

That depends completely on what you actually have.
If it is individual tracks....pretty easy.
If it is just a single track audio file....you'd need something that can precisely filter on specific freqs.

I guess it's just a single track audio file, judging by what I've seen using Handbrake to edit my videos. It's almost always a single audio track on all videos.

EDIT: Yes, I've just confirmed, it's a single stereo audio track on my most recent F1 HD video.

 

[Alabalcho]

You should ask first yourself the question, is it "legal"? Sport programmes (and F1 in particular), are copyrighted, and what you want to do (with "professional-grade equipment" you're ready to get) does not fail in "Fair usage"...

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

You should ask first yourself the question, is it "legal"? Sport programmes (and F1 in particular), are copyrighted, and what you want to do (with "professional-grade equipment" you're ready to get) does not fail in "Fair usage"...

I don't intend to put any of my editing on the internet or something like that, it'd be just for myself.