Technical Help required for a Fan Edit: 'Sonic X' - with the Audio Mixes...

I have been working on a fan edit of the Sonic the Hedgehog anime, Sonic X.

The show was dubbed by the now defunct 4Kids Entertainment. They changed many things about the original Japanese show, such as changing music and sound effects. I wanted to take the original show while also dubbing it with the English voice actors by 4Kids.

I’ve been working on the series for a year now, and I’ve had some difficulties when it comes to audio mixes. There are 78 episodes in the series, and the first 39 episodes were mixed in 5.1 for the Japanese release on DVD. The remainders contained only Stereo mixes. The English dubs were also only mixed in Stereo, which makes it hard for me to be able to mix things properly. I’ve tried my best at extracting, but I’m not necessarily the best when it comes to this level of editing.

I was hoping someone here could help me in removing the voices in the Japanese version and extracting only the voices from the English dub.

I can provide sources to both Japanese and English versions.

UPDATE: I was wondering if someone could tell me and possibly provide the audio mixes from the versions of Hulu if they are 5.1.

Thanks!

Wish I could help you mate… though hopefully one of the tech wizzes or fellow fan editors here may be able to help you out - or point you in the right direction.

Good luck with it 😃
 

oojason said:

Wish I could help you mate… though hopefully one of the tech wizzes or fellow fan editors here may be able to help you out - or point you in the right direction.

Good luck with it 😃
 

Yeah, not sure if this topic should be moved or not yet.

I’ve actually tried doing this (before I made a permanent switch to the sub, hate the 4Kids VA’s now) and I was somewhat effective in removing the Dub VA’s, but the audio sounded awful. On top of the fact that 4Kids cut many lines or scenes entirely, it can be messy. Ultimately, there’s no easy way of doing this. I’d play around with Audacity or Audition and see if you get a better or good result. Good Luck!

ThatPixarGuy said:

I’ve actually tried doing this (before I made a permanent switch to the sub, hate the 4Kids VA’s now) and I was somewhat effective in removing the Dub VA’s, but the audio sounded awful. On top of the fact that 4Kids cut many lines or scenes entirely, it can be messy. Ultimately, there’s no easy way of doing this. I’d play around with Audacity or Audition and see if you get a better or good result. Good Luck!

I have used Audacity, and I’m still not too good with audio mixing and extraction. What about the second half of the Japanese version?

That I don’t know… Hulu has Sonic X subbed, there’s a chance that they may have 5.1 mixes for the remaining episodes. If only we had an official release in the US…

ThatPixarGuy said:

That I don’t know… Hulu has Sonic X subbed, there’s a chance that they may have 5.1 mixes for the remaining episodes. If only we had an official release in the US…

I don’t have Hulu. Do you think you could check to see if both the English and Japanese versions are mixed in 5.1 on there?

My two cents…

I have a pal who’s a professional movie audio guy, and the studio he works at — which does sound mostly at the documentary/indie films level (not huge Hollywood) — has lots of high-end sound software to (try to) accomplish all kinds of weird clean up of audio that low-to-no-budget indie and docu filmmakers throw their way. For some of my movie restoration work I’ve thrown him small clips — less than a minute long — for cleaning out dialogue or music from something already mixed to stereo or mono, and while this is totally in his wheelhouse and while his results were decent-to-good (but not perfect) some of these bits took him an hour to do; an hour of his time using all the resources at his studio/work to clean out music or dialogue from a .wav file under a minute long.

So my two cents is that it seems things aren’t there yet as far as your initial request and that you look well into the alternative mentioned by ThatPixarGuy as your solution…although it would be cool if someone chimed in here with a cleaning method that works really well and is not nearly as time intensive.

WXM said:

My two cents…

I have a pal who’s a professional movie audio guy, and the studio he works at — which does sound mostly at the documentary/indie films level (not huge Hollywood) — has lots of high-end sound software to (try to) accomplish all kinds of weird clean up of audio that low-to-no-budget indie and docu filmmakers throw their way. For some of my movie restoration work I’ve thrown him small clips — less than a minute long — for cleaning out dialogue or music from something already mixed to stereo or mono, and while this is totally in his wheelhouse and while his results were decent-to-good (but not perfect) some of these bits took him an hour to do; an hour of his time using all the resources at his studio/work to clean out music or dialogue from a .wav file under a minute long.

So my two cents is that it seems things aren’t there yet as far as your initial request and that you look well into the alternative mentioned by ThatPixarGuy as your solution…although it would be cool if someone chimed in here with a cleaning method that works really well and is not nearly as time intensive.

Thanks for letting me know. Sounds great, I don’t have Hulu, so I don’t know if those have 5.1 mixes. I won’t even know how to even extract those as well.

Could anyone let me know if Hulu offers 5.1 mixes of both versions of the show? If so, could someone please extract them and send them to me via a private message? Thanks!

Wasn’t the German dub (based off the 4kids English dub) available on dvd with 5.1 audio mixes? You could use that to help remove the dub score from the English dub.

There’s also this. https://github.com/lazydevyo/SpleetGUI

Danfun128 said:

Wasn’t the German dub (based off the 4kids English dub) available on dvd with 5.1 audio mixes? You could use that to help remove the dub score from the English dub.

There’s also this. https://github.com/lazydevyo/SpleetGUI

I’m not sure. I don’t own those DVDs and I wouldn’t be too sure if the English track is in 5.1. The closest to the Japanese version is the French version, and I’m not sure if those have 5.1 audio mixes.

I found this image from one of the German DVDs. I think the English track is just stereo.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51WrnLsgdFL.jpg

Any new updates or news for this topic?

Been able to find ways to get around these issues, even though it’s still not perfect. Also, I’ve gotten voice actors to dub in scenes 4Kids deleted.