The Sound of Sholay team was in Pune recently, for a ceremony to honour the original music director of Sholay, the legendary RD Burman. Here are a few pictures from the event. Labels: Background music, Bollywood, Dolby Atmos, Hindi 3d, Kunal Mehta, Parikshit Lalvani, Raju singh, sholay, Sound design, Sound engineering.
So let’s continue on our quest on removing unnecessary background noise from the videos that we record on our phones (or tablets or other portable gadgets). We are going to extract the audio from the video, process and remove its background noise and then join the audio and video file.
In our last post we saw how to use Audacity to remove the unnecessary sound from an audio file. So, in this post we will focus on joining the cleaned up audio with its ‘parent’ video (for the lack of a better phrase).
Note: While working on videos and audio, it’s always recommended to install codec packs on Windows. I prefer K-Lite codec pack as it’s free to use and comes with all the necessary codec packs.Extracting the Audio from the Video
There are two ways in which you an extract/convert the audio file from the video and we have discussed both in the past. You can either use Audacity or use VLC media player convert option to save the video file as an MP3 File. While the latter method is easy to implement when the video is not lengthy, the former can be used if it’s hours of video you want to convert to an audio.
After you have extracted the audio and processed it for the background noise using Audacity, let’s see how we can merge them together using Windows Movie Maker.
Merging the Audio and Video Together
Step 1: Run Windows Movie maker on your computer. If you don’t already have it, you can install it using the Microsoft Essential Pack which can be downloaded from their website.
Step 2: After you have imported the video to Movie Maker, select it and click on the Edit option under Video Tools. Here select the option Video Volume and minimize the slider to mute the existing audio in the video.
Cool Tip: You can use the option Video Stabilization under Video Settings to stabilize the videos you take from your smartphone.Step 3: Having done that, again open the Home tab in Movie Maker and click on the button Add Music. Here select the option Add musicfrom PC and import the processed video from the Audacity tool.
That’s all, preview the video once and finally save it as a video on your computer. You can also upload it to YouTube or SkyDrive directly from Movie Maker.
Conclusion
So that was the complete guide on getting rid of unwanted background sound from recorded videos. The process might look a bit lengthy with multiple tools to switch in between, but it’s simple to implement and the tools are free to use without any limitation.
So try out the guide on the next video you wish to upload on YouTube. If you have any doubts, just drop a comment and I will more than happy to help.
Top Photo Credit: simbiosc
Also See#audio #Video Did You Know
Brian Eno composed the old and popular Microsoft Sound.
More in Windows
How to Make a Video with Pictures and Music in Windows 10
Is it possible to separate voice and background music from a video file?
I only need the background music.
Type of video: MP4
Working on Windows XP 32 bit SP3
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3 Answers
Unless they're separate audio tracks in your video, not easily. What you'll probably have to do is extract the audio track from the video into a separate file, edit the audio file with a dedicated tool, then remux the result back into the video.
The demux/remux part is easy. What's going to be difficult is attempting to isolate the background music. You'll probably have to experiment with different effects, all of which will most likely result in either a significant loss of fidelity in the audio or not entirely removing the dialogue, if not both. What's more is that you're going to be re-encoding that output into a new mp3/aac file, and between the re-encoding and audio processing, your output is going to sound much worse than the original.
You may have better results by trying to re-master the background music and replacing the audio track in the movie file entirely.
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Audacity – a free and open-source cross-platform audio editor – can do this, using the Vocal Reduction and Isolation effect. You should first extract the audio from the video file, e.g. using
ffmpeg
:And then load the
audio.wav
file into Audacity:If you only want to get background music, select the Remove Vocals option; if you want the opposite, choose Isolate Vocals.
Note that this is never going to sound perfect. Vocal isolation is a hard task, as everything you hear is basically mixed into two tracks. An algorithm will never be as good as your brain in isolating different sound sources. Your audio source should be a stereo file with the vocals being panned dead-center. It might also produce false-positives, removing other instruments in the process.
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I managed to remove background conversation/noise from a video by running a low-pass filter that was built in to the editor that I was using. The whirrs of my robot, which was the target of my video, remained.
Note that I am not an audio expert, and I cannot guarantee this will work for your particular case, but it's worth a try.
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