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Resource Thread: Isolating Music and Voices in Star Wars — Page 3

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TV's Frink said:

That doesn't even cucumber.

That doesn't even mustache.

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Finding renewed interest in this.  For the first time I am in the contemplative stages of trying to actually do some serious editing and not a rough draft for others to potentially use.  For me, I'd love to edit the Battle of Yavin pretty heavily, but this is difficult with the music in the background.  Now I of course sound like a noob begging someone else to do the work for me when I say this, but I'm curious if anyone is able to extract the dialogue from the Battle of Yavin, specifically during the musical portions (as there is a surprisingly substantial amount without music), as such would allow for some tremendous re-editing.  Sound effects can be inserted well enough on one's own, but the dialogue cannot be duplicated.  Anyone interested in having a go? :)

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 (Edited)

@NeverarGreat:

In case you are still in search for a better quality of the Leia hologram dialogue, have you tried to use the one from “The Story of Star Wars” LP. The sound on the LP is mixed directly to 2 channel, no matrix-surround encoding, and you can try using the 2 channel music mix of the variety of LP releases. I would start with the music LP presentation that came out on CD from the Polydor label and work your way up.

EDIT: A correction:
The music over the Leia hologram at the Lars garage was available commercially in 1977, however, the music over the Leia hologram at Obi-Wan’s home would begin to be available in 1997 by RCA Victor and later Sony.

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Another suggestion:

Make a collection of audio files featuring the extracted Leia Hologram speech that contains parts of the speech that are clean and parts where there is still music leakage. These groups of audio files would be made up from several music mixes from either the CD or film, whether it be just the left channel, just the right channel, the sum of the left and the right, just the rear channel, the sum of the left, right, and rear, etc. You are basically throwing every music mix in any combination and seeing how much clean parts you can get.

Hopefully each extracted audio file will have clean parts of the dialog but not in the same places. Go to each audio file, select the clean parts, put them all in a separate blank audio file and edit them together into one clean audio file.

If after you do all that and you still have portions of the speech with music leakage, then listen to each portion and see what music instrument(s) is heard predominantly. Make up a music mix where that instrument is heard at that high level or try EQing.

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Is anyone still interested in this? In particular, I am trying to drastically edit the Battle of Yavin, and I am trying to isolate the vocals, but I am struggling, only able to reduce the music somewhat–probably not enough to be masked with the reapplied soundtrack. Anyone find any success yet?

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I stumbled upon a new resource for separating vocals from music: https://makenweb.com/SpleeterGUI

You can find the source files on GitHub, but the GUI is drag-and-drop easy. Unfortunately, that means that it doesn’t have much in the way of adjustable variables.

Just for fun, I ran the Leia Hologram audio through it to see what would happen, you can download the result here:
https://mega.nz/folder/yR0SERTA#o6bkOu2Rm4nGOJO-b39A0g

In this example, the Knockout program does a slightly better job at removing traces of the music at the cost of the vocals, while Spleeter retains more vocal clarity at the cost of some low-level music seeping through. While it wouldn’t be able to create a totally music-free scene, I’d bet this program would be able to facilitate a fairly convincing music replacement in many circumstances.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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If anyone’s still around on this thread and saw that last post, could someone try it with Poe’s lines “I know it’s a rough ride, but stay locked on Rey’s course” and “Look at that fleet!” from the Battle of Exegol? I would do it myself but it looks like this program only works on windows and I have a mac.

You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Am I making Carrie Fisher’s ghost proud?”
Well, are ya, punk?

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The method you suggested in the original post - using an identical recording of the music and inverting it to get rid of the music - could that theoretically be done with The Rise of Skywalker’s Awards soundtrack, since it contains the music used in the final cut of the film?

You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Am I making Carrie Fisher’s ghost proud?”
Well, are ya, punk?

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It’s not working. I tried it with the Rise of Skywalker soundtrack but couldn’t get it to sync up, so I tried use a bit of audio from The Last Jedi and then that same bit of audio (2:00:01 - 2:05:46) from the score-only version of the movie. That also didn’t work, I think because the sound is mixed differently so the music is at different amplitudes in the movie?

You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Am I making Carrie Fisher’s ghost proud?”
Well, are ya, punk?

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That makes sense. It’s definitely a long shot technique, as the music is spread across 5 channels of film and the soundtrack presumably is merely stereo with two different waveforms. You’d have to hope that the stereo version is exactly the one used in the film and identify if the tracks have been separated between left and right speakers or merged into several more. This process would probably only work if you had two identical recordings of the same channel number and processed in the same way with the only difference being the addition of vocals in one of them.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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Not sure if anyone’s suggested this or not, but Isotope RX is pretty good for this sort of thing. I don’t know much about it, though.