Video editing - remove music from existing film?

[Terak Rall]

Hi all,

I'm a composer and I'm looking to start learning to score for film/TV by rescoring existing material. The problem is, I don't know how I would go about removing the music track from an existing DVD while leaving dialogue and sound effects intact.

The project I plan to start with is a rescore of the Babylon 5 movie "A Call to Arms" - this seemed easy enough to me since in many scenes Evan Chen's..."music"...is very much in the background and restrained to minimal percussion which could easily be overwritten. There are, however, several scenes with more prominent music.

Would the best bet perhaps be to completely cut out, or reduce the volume on everything except those moments where there's dialogue? If so, is there a good freeware software solution out there I could use to do so?

Thanks!

 

[BCI]

Easy in the sense of requiring no other tools except your editing suite is EQing the music out. Take the equalizer on your audio-track, and take down all sliders until only the vocals remain audible.

 

[Jim Steele]

BCI said:
Easy in the sense of requiring no other tools except your editing suite is EQing the music out. Take the equalizer on your audio-track, and take down all sliders until only the vocals remain audible.

Yeah, and if that's effective I'll eat my hat.

The truth is, you can EQ all you like - you will never be able to remove music from the mix without seriously damaging the parts of the mix you want to keep.

I don't know how I would go about removing the music track from an existing DVD while leaving dialogue and sound effects intact.

TBH it's next to impossible. If the DVD is mixed in 5.1 you may find that only taking the centre channel - which is usually where all the dialogue is placed, but not exclusively - will help.

You may as well practice scoring on entirely silent sections of film.

I have a suggestion though - why not offer to help amateur filmakers score their productions? You could try TBBS's own fan productions forum. Alot of DIY film makers find it difficult to get original music down for their mixes so it's surely worth a shot.

 

[BCI]

True, it's impossible. Sorry for your hat.

 

[Jim Steele]

BCI said:
True, it's impossible. Sorry for your hat.

No no, my hat is perfectly fine.

 

[tharpdevenport]

It's not possible. It's hte holy grail of collectors of unreleased scores to rip a score without SFX (talking and sound effects), and if it were possible to remove the music and leave just SFX, then likewise it would be possible to rip just the score.

Best bet is what someone here already told you.



I know someone who has access to film prints wit hthe elements not mixed in, and he's been restoring Gabriel Yared's rejected score to "Troy". It's fascinating to watch.

 

[Ptrope]

Well, if you do find an answer, I'm looking for an audio clip of The Shat giving the "Space, the final frontier ..." voiceover without any of the music.

Actually, I can think of a way that one could conceivably remove music from a track, but it would require an exact recording of the music itself. With a clean music track and the right software, one could program an exact opposite wave to the music within the audio track of the film, canceling it out and leaving only the audio that doesn't match the opposing wave; they've used this noise-canceling technology for years in other applications (Lotus even experimented with it as an 'electronic muffler,' where the noise of the exhaust was analyzed as it passed through the pipe and built-in speakers would broadcast it back in at 180° opposition).

 

[Terak Rall]

Oh well...I was hoping there would be a simpler answer. I've always HATED the music in A Call to Arms and have long wanted a crack at redoing it.

 

[David cgc]

Ptrope said:
Actually, I can think of a way that one could conceivably remove music from a track, but it would require an exact recording of the music itself. With a clean music track and the right software, one could program an exact opposite wave to the music within the audio track of the film, canceling it out and leaving only the audio that doesn't match the opposing wave; they've used this noise-canceling technology for years in other applications (Lotus even experimented with it as an 'electronic muffler,' where the noise of the exhaust was analyzed as it passed through the pipe and built-in speakers would broadcast it back in at 180° opposition).

I've tried that a couple of times to get rid of the music so I could rip the sound effects. Naturally, I found that the version on the soundtrack wasn't identical to the version in the actual movie, and it didn't work. I suppose if I wanted to have the best chance of succeeding, I'd have to do it with a movie that had a score-only track on the DVD, which would guarantee that the two sound files were aligned perfectly. There's something for me to try on a slow day.

 

[JustAFriend]

You can't separate the flour or sugar from a cake once it's baked.

Forget the fact that its a digital file.
You have an analog wave for the left speaker and an analog wave for the right speaker.
Everything is cross-connected to those two sets of waves.

'Ya ain't gonna get a clean separation of the elements.