Removing audio (profanity) without removing video

[ultracheapskate]

Hello,
I have been searching the forums to see if I could find a good way to edit out certain portions of the audio of a movie while retaining the video, but I have not been able to find a good answer. The best I have been able to find was this post: http://forum.digital-digest.com/show...ght=edit+audio and it does not seem to have a satisfactory answer that will work.
It would be very nice if the solution were free (I don't care to pay for software, especially when so much good free stuff exists). And if there are several free solutions, which would be the simplest way of doing this, especially since I want to burn the movie back to DVD after I am done editing it?

Another thought, is there anything like a software version of the TV guardian (www.tvguardian.com) which would automatically remove the objectionable language without my having to hear it while I am editing?

Thank you for your assistance.

[Experi-Mentor]

welcome to the forum

there are several audio editorst that can do this but, it all seems so time consuming & hardly worth the effort (for me anyway).

the 1st 2 on the link (audacity & goldwave) seem to be mentioned in other forums - indicating that they can do the job, as also, "soundforge" is too
i've never done it

http://www.spectra-nyc.com/video-editing/6/free-audio-editing.html

hope that helps

[sfheath]

Re: removing audio (profanity) without removing video

Originally posted by ultracheapskate
... which would automatically remove the objectionable language without my having to hear it while I am editing?

If you'd ever tried getting IBM ViaVoice speech recognition to work with just simple words, I think you'd realise just how tall an order you are asking there

[ultracheapskate]

Yes I am aware of how difficult it is to get voive recognition to work (I have tried viavoice and it once iterpreted "This program does not have the intelligence of a small child" as "this program does not have the intelligence of a small guitar", maybe it is better than I give it credit!) However, there is more than one way to determine what is being said. For instanec the TVguardian uses the closed captioning (cc) system. It works quite well (as long as the closed captioning is reasonably in sync with the audio). That system, howver, removes the entire phrase that the objectionable language occured wuth, not just the owrd (its a microprocessor, how much do you expect?)

Perhaps a combinational system could use cc to narrow the "field of view" and find the words to be removed, then a voice recognition system could find the word. This is a rather very different problem than a voice recognition system like viavoice. This is because the word is known and the time of the audio is limited.

But I really do not need something quite this sophisticated (it would be nice though). All I really need is a good (preferably free) way to manually edit out the undesired audio.

I am aware that it is possible to extract the audio from the video, edit the audio with a program like Audacity, then put the audio back with the video, but this seems overly complicated, and I wonder about synchronization problems, even if I am careful to retain the length of the audio exactly as it was.

[reboot]

Audacity.
Load the audio, insert blank silence the exact same length as the removed profanity.
Save.

[ultracheapskate]

Ok so it seems there is no really easy way to do edit the audio. I know free tools like besweet exist to help me extract the audio from the video. I found this guide for extracting the audio from the video http://www.digitalfaq.com/edit/editdvd/editdvd.htm, but it does not include information about going back. Is there a guide somewhere for the complete process? I know the process for converting back is probably quite easy, and probably can be done with the same tools as the extraction, but I would like to see a guide first before I attempt to do this.

[Experi-Mentor]

hope this is of some help :

http://www.atozediting.com/audioediting/

[ultracheapskate]

Unfortunately your link did not seem to have any useful information for me. However I am making progress (though I have to learn all the terms, find the proper software, understand what I need to do, etc). This certainly is different from comparitively simple audio editing I am used to! I think that I am making progress towards doing what I want. So far I have managed to demultiplex the desired audio track from the vob file (using DVD decrypter) and convert the resulting ac3 file to something editable (using beSweet). Now what needs to be done is editing (using audacity, I think), remultiplexing with the vob (using vobEdit, I think), and insert the modified vob back into the original (using vobBlanker, I think (see here http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...&highlight=ac3)). Perhaps once I get this figured out I will make a tutorial for others (beginners) like myself.

[Experi-Mentor]

what is the offending dvd title ?