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Audacity-like software for video? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5997 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 1 of 9 05 November 2009 at 1:18pm | IP Logged |
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Another software question: I've always used Audacity to crop out the whitespace or better organize pure audio courses. Recently I started ripping the audio track out of foreign language DVDs I'm watching using MediaCoder Audio Edition (which is awesome free software for that). The problem is that it is kind of boring to be sitting at a screen and cutting a movie down to JUST the dialogs while not actually seeing the video. Yes, it is fine for listening on my mp3 player while I'm walking around once I have it down to just the dialogs, but I'd rather watch the movie again with video while cropping the audio. (Plus it's one extra chance to study the subtitles for what I am hearing.) Does anyone know anything good and free that will let me do this?
Additionally, you would think that what I'm doing could be 90% automated -- does anyone know if there is automated software to cut a movie down to JUST the parts with spoken dialog? (All it would have to do is crop out any long segments when there are no subtitles show as obviously no dialog is going on.) I look forward to any tips!!! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5559 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 2 of 9 05 November 2009 at 6:12pm | IP Logged |
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This sounds good in theory but I used to waste hours trying to actually do it.
However, AutoGK, to convert to AVI, and VirtualDub to edit (audacity like) may be what you are looking for. Neither is exactly complicated, but they do take a while to get used to. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5559 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 3 of 9 05 November 2009 at 6:20pm | IP Logged |
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The problem with editing movie audio is the soundtrack hides the spoken dialog, which
means you can't spot it easily in audacity. All I can suggest to help is if you rip the subtitles (DVDSubRip or something) you will have their timing information, which is of course approx the same as the dialogue. Again, I can't emphasise enough how much this didn't work for me. I wasted a year of my life. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5734 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 4 of 9 06 November 2009 at 12:28am | IP Logged |
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mpeg streamclipper is a small little app that does simple editing and converting. I mostly use it to cut small pieces out of videos.
But I'll have to add my voice to the other posters... just don't. If you want to watch a movie, watch it in full. If you want to hear stuff, just put on your earphones with the movie dialog on, and do sth else.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5997 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 5 of 9 07 November 2009 at 10:25am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the tips. Please provide more details of why you recommend against it? My idea is to first enjoy the movie without subtitles or pausing, then watch a second time cutting it down to dialog scenes with subtitles on. Yes, the sound track does make it visually hard (in Audacity) to discern where dialog is -- but the time investment is still only the time it takes to listen to all the audio in the movie once (~2 hours) because all I'm doing is deleting non-speech parts.
My calculations of why it should work good are like this: Investment to watch a 2 hour movie 5 times: 10 hours. Investment to watch a 2 hour movie 5 times including cutting out non-dialog bits during my second watching: 2 hours (first watching) + 2 hour (cropping session) + 1.25 hours * 3 = 7.75 hours. And if I review the audio even more times, then I save even more time. PLEASE ADVISE as to where I am wrong or wasting time =) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5734 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 9 07 November 2009 at 1:24pm | IP Logged |
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I wrote it simply because it didn't work for me. But I guess you're right, YMMV. I found that it just bores the living shit out of me to sit down and edit a movie down to the dialogs.. so I personally would rather suffer through the non-dialog parts for three times, after which I'll probably be bored by the movie anyway, and will then move on to something new. So if you're less ADD than me, and you're more inclined to actually sit down and do the editing, then go ahead and give it a try! Who knows, it might just work for you :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5559 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 7 of 9 09 November 2009 at 1:43pm | IP Logged |
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Yes, exactly the same for me. Plus a bit of obsessiveness, meant I was never satisfied,
so I would end up editing it several times, and constantly be thinking of edits I could make and not concentrating on the language learning. But even if your a well balanced individual (on this forum? Surely not...) I think your being optimistic in thinking about editing a 2 hour movie in 2 hours. With audacity I think I waste at least 50% of my time just doing something routine like editing the beeps out (dammit, I hate those beeps. Why are they so loud? Why is the tone so particularly irritating? Why didn't the testers all go mad and kill the editor?) and the video editing tools available are not as simple as audacity. You can't just flick through it to find a bit of dialogue, you have to do a lot of fast forward and rewind. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| jerrypettit Groupie United States Joined 6025 days ago 79 posts - 103 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 9 14 November 2009 at 3:15am | IP Logged |
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I think the problem is wanting it for free. I have Sony Vegas, although I've not used it much.
They have some kind of entry level version. Seems like there SHOULD be something out there cheap that will (like Vegas) split your video to one track and your audio to another. Once you have your audio isolated, you might be able to tell by looking at the audio waves (or the video for that matter) when dialogue exists. Your program SHOULD have a feature for fast-forwarding back and forth (I think J-K-L does that in Vegas). You should be able to mark regions where dialogue starts and stops that way, and then you will be able to delete the unwanted regions. I think--but don't know for sure--that this would be doable in Vegas--possibly even its cheap version. You may want to GOOGLE for "video forums" and ask people in that community. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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