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Written by phoenix
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Sunday, 16 March 2008 |
I'm sure you've seen videos that include audio from the episodes, meaning the dialogue. Now the other thing you've probably noticed is that there seems to be background music in almost every scene. This can cause problems for adding dialogue into the video. For those of you that have the DVDs, there is a solution to this problem.
There is a nifty little program out there called DVD Audio Extractor. This is a shareware program that comes with a 30 day trial period. After that it will cost $25. Depending on the amount of audio extration you plan to do, it may be worth it. What this program does is take the 6 channel audio found on a DVD and break it down into 6 files, one for each channel. Dialogue and some sound effects are isolated into one channel, usually channel 3. This will extract an entire chapter's worth of sound, so before you beginning editing, it would be best to determine where in the chapter the specific audio you want is. After I had the audio I opened it up in my editor and cropped it down to the particular bit I wanted and saved the snippet so that when I imported it into the video I was working with a 2MB file rather than a 40MB file. These numbers are approximate, but I would recommend isolating the small portion of the audio you will be working with for the editing of the video. I find that the smaller the size of the files imported into the editor, the better it works as there are less resources in RAM.
Okay, you've downloaded Audio Extractor and you want to know how to use it. It's a very simple program. Make sure the DVD is in the drive and that drive is selected.
1. Select the Title and then the Chapter number you are interested in. I use Windows Media Player to make that determination if I don't know which one I'm after.
2. In the box on the bottom left, chose "English AC3 (48kHz 6 Ch)" then click "next"
3. For "Use encoder" select "WAV PCM uncompressed wave". For "Sample Rate" I left it as "Same as input" but 44100kHz would also work and make a slightly smaller file size since this is the maximum sample rate most editors will encode.. For "Channels" ensure that "All 6 channels" is selected. If this option doesn't come up, go back and make sure that the 6 Ch option described in step 2 has been selected. I left "bits per sample" at 16bits. The last step is to make sure "Save each channel into a separate file" is checked.
Don't be alarmed at the number you see for file size. Once you have determined which channel has the dialogue, you can delete the other 5 off your drive. The dialogue will generally be smaller than the other audio tracks.
4. Click "Next" and select where you want the files saved. Track splitting is only needed if you are using more than one track at a time.
That's it. Click next and in a few minutes, you'll have your audio. Once it's done open the folder where you saved the files and check to see if Channel 3 was indeed the audio you were looking for. Now the fun task of synching the audio up to the video can begin. It's not tough, just takes a little trial and error. If you have an editor that shows you wave forms you can try to match the dialogue only up to the original audio. It won't be a prefect match, but I find that voices make a stronger imprint on the waveform than music and it serves as a good guide.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 16 March 2008 )
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