Star Wars 5.1 Audio

Apparently not...

...Although you could wait more than 48 hours before bumping this thread...twice.

mrbenja0618 said:

I've heard from so many that this seems to be impossible... I'm hoping someone has found success...And if so, PLEASE SHOW ME STEP BY STEP! Thanks.

It's not impossible. But, in most cases, it'll be a time consuming manual method. (I've watched a fanedit, which utilized that method on an entire movie - worked magnificently. Haven't done it myself).

(What is impossible - reliably removing speech, while keeping all of the music and sound effects).

But first, a quick lecture. :-)

Dude... I've been in your shoes, and I hate it when no one answers. But... (1) That happens a lot on the ol' web. (2) You're asking an awful lot - wrting a step-by-step can be a ton of work, especially since it'll only be for one group of software. (3) You didn't mention whether you're PC, Mac, or Linux. (4) A lot of this has been covered, here, before - you could find a fair amont of info by searching - for instance: "dialog" (5) It seems unfair, but, on the net, it's more rude to keep bumping a question, than it is for others to ignore it. (6) The forum has a rule against replying to your own post - you're supposed to edit the original post (7) It's unnessecary to bump, in this particular sub-forum, because it isn't very busy - it'd be a long time before it scrolls off the first page (8) Your title didn't have your question in it. (You can change the title, by editing the first post - please do, so that others might actually see this discussion).

Now that the lecture is over with. ;-) I'll guess that you're new here, and if that's the case, welcome. :-D

Note: I'm in a hurry, so it'll be kinda sloppy, and basic. But this should be enough to get you going (everything else is searchable, here, or on the web at large).

Key point: Check the center channel. Dialog is typically concentrated there. (Some older movie mixes don't follow that rule, though). Typically, the other channels will only have a little reverb, of the dialog. (A really good edit would use various ambience plugins, for audio editors, to restore the dialog's reverb, during the remix).

How-to stuff:

First you want to rip the 5.1 into discreet wav files.

For that part, look upward, a few threads, to this sticky:

"ADigitalMan's Guide to MPEG2/AC3 Editing"

(Assuming you're on a PC. Otherwise, you'll have to find out how to do that with other software).

Almost everything in that guide is freeware.

If you're lucky...

...the center channel will only have dialog (without music or sound effects).

If you're unlucky (in most cases):

In most movies, the music and sound effects spread into the center channel.

So you clip out the sounds, between words.

That aforementioned faneditor said that the music is almost always drowned out during the words. (And he was working with 2.0 - having the 5.1's center channel should make it much more effective).

He once had a site, with an explanation. But it doesn't appear to exist anymore. He used movie editing software, but I suspect you could do it with audio editors. (Womble probably isn't suitable).

Tip: If you ever have the ambition to work with a moive that only has a 2.0 soundtrack, ADigitalMan's guide also gives info on how to turn 2.0 into 5.1.

If you're really unlucky:

Some movie's mixes are a mess, as I've noted above.

But you can try to get a good result, from a 2.0, by playing with the PowerDVD module's options.

If you can't get the dialog concentrated into one channel, then get the best 2.0 you can find, and isolate the words on both channels.

Tip: Once you have a clean dialog track, you can put in your own music and sound effects. The guide, that I referred you to, will give you some good info for that part.

Once you have your center channel with the voices and some background noises/music (hopefully the voices are somewhat louder than the rest), a quick way to 'cut out' the words is to use a 'gate' audio plugin and tweak it to only let the voices pass... and then add some ambience/reverb/echo again as needed as mentioned above.

Here should be a couple of free noise-gate plugins, haven't used them myself though.