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Selective audio masking
I am working on a high school football video. In certain portions I picked up fan conversations not related to the game and would like to remove or muffle them. I have had some success using distortion and delays in Sound Forge Studio but feel there’s got to be a better way. In reality, I really want to mask sound or turn it into background noise as opposed to removing it entirely. Is there a good technique for doing this that will work in Sound Forge, Audacity, or any other wave editor? Is there any facility in Vegas (Studio) that will do this?
– Arthur
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6 Replies
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How about just deleting those areas and replacing them with “generic crowd noise”.
Edward Troxel
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Tha’s a good suggestion. I could just take some “good” crowd noise from another parth of the timeline. Still, I tend to believe there is a way to make the audio unintelligible through a filter or noise generation function.
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After digging around a bit on solving this crowd conversation problem, I found two ways to deal with it. One was with a multitrack sound editor, specifically Audacity, where I overlaid normal “good” crowd noise on a separate track where the conversational noise was occuring. I then enveloped the conversation down and let the overlay track come in.
Another approach was to use Goldwave which offers a “Reduce Vocals” filter amongst its tools. This actually worked fairly well, requiring a bit of volume boost to complete the edit.
Both solutions are a bit tedious, requiring some manual effort to mask the offending audio and then to save out the audio file, bring it back into Vegas Studio, and then synch it to the original video track. I’m still interested in an easier way to deal with this, but the bottom line to avoid conversation in the background in the first place if at all possible.
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[arthur144] “where I overlaid normal “good” crowd noise on a separate track where the conversational noise was occuring. I then enveloped the conversation down and let the overlay track come in.”
You can do the same thing directly in Vegas. Just add the crowd noise on another track and use Volume Envelopes to control the levels.
Edward Troxel
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Thanks for the advice. Certainly I could have used Vegas (Studio) rather than Audacity to multitrack the audio. My first thought was to took for an audio filter so I ended up in an audio editor. In addition, I was interested in audio way before becoming interested in video, so my tendency is still to edit audio in an audio editor. In fact, that interest in audio led me to Sonic Foundry which subconsciously led me to find Vegas as a preferred editor. I imagine many Vegas users came to Vegas this way.
– Arthur
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Vegas *IS* a multi-track audio editor. Version 1 of Vegas did NOT edit video! It’s root is multi-track audio editing.
Edward Troxel
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