Need Audio help/suggestions

csantelman wrote on 2/27/2007, 8:02 AM

I have pulled in a series of video's that I made of my daughter's volleyball matches. But I need to manipulate the audio portion somehow.

What I would like to do is muffle/distort the audio so the crowd noise is still there, but any individual speech would be un-recognizeable. In places it is too easy to hear individual comments regarding the play that I would like to mask out in a "mass" fashion. I really don't want to go through with an audio editor (i.e. Goldwave) - I just want to apply it to the whole stream.

I am using Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 6.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks
Craig

Comments

pjfarr wrote on 2/27/2007, 11:00 AM

Depending on how much you want to mask, my suggestion is this (assuming you know all the editing basics of VMS):

1. Select a generous section of the audio which is just crowd noise and make a separate copy of it (put it on its own track for easy reference, if you can).

2. On the OPTIONS menu, make sure "Auto Ripple" is NOT activated. Go through the full, original audio track and clip out the parts you want eliminated, which will leave "holes" in the audio track.

3. Right-click the audio clip you made in step 1, and select "Copy".

4. Click in the first audio "hole" to set the playback cursor to where the hole begins. Right-click and select "Paste".

5. Slip-edit the audio clip and/or the left/right edges of the hole until eveything flows smoothly in the audio stream. Enabling Automatic Crossfades on the OPTIONS menu may make the edits flow more smoothly.

Repeat steps 4-5 for each audio hole.

With white noise, such as crowd noise, ocean waves, traffic, etc., this technique should work to your satisfaction - I've used it myself plenty of times - as long as there isn't too much fluctuation in volume or tone. If there is, you can copy the audio clips from a few seconds before or after each part you want deleted so the edits blend better.

Hope this works for you.

~P.J.F