Complete newbie Audio DVD question

nozzferrahhtoo

Hi all, great forum here it seems and I hope you can help me with an issue I have.

I got a documentary in German on DVD for a Television company here in Germany. I was to edit it for sending back to family in Ireland.

The documentary has, as most documentaries, a voice over presenter who never appears in the video itself, and lots of people in the video who are interviewed and talk German.

My hope was to do some subtitling of the German speakers in the video and a complete replacement of the audio voice over from the presenter (probably with my own voice, not subtitles) without harming any of the rest of the audio on the video.

The DVD that came however has a VIDEO_TS directory and no AUDIO_TS directory. I am a complete newbie but I am guessing this means the Audio was coded into the video and not separately so I will need to separate it myself some how?

Does this make it impossible to do what I need or are they still separable... I have read through the sticky on editing software at the top of the forum but still not clear what would be the best software for my requirements here... I do not want to do any actual video editing, it would be all audio..... the subtitling I imagine would be easier but if possible, for scenes with more than one speaker, I would like to have different color fonts for the subtitles for each speaker.

nozzferrahhtoo

Well I learnt a lot reading the net this week.

Ok just in case any other newbies come along theres a program you wanna try called DGMPGDec. It will seperate DVD into video and audio.

Documentries are a hard one though because most of the software out there is made for music. I COULD switch the faze but that doesn't work here. I found a plug for my software called "Centre" which is good at killing off voice overs that are panned. I can abuse Center and get much of the german voiceover out but am left with very thin audio. Only the music is panned quite a lot to the sides. So I can remove most of the voice(s) and keep a thin sounding music track... not great

It seems to be more designed to work with pop tunes where the vocal is mixed front and center and the band spread out over the sides. So then you remove the center of the mix. But that will still include snare drum, bass guitar and the like which most people seem to have to then replace.

Theres another app it seems from Adobe called Audition which has a similar problem. These things are designed to work with certain types of music (and even then it's dodgy at best). Basically, you can EQ out the frequencies that the voiceover occupies but then of course you're also EQing out ALL the sound in those frequencies. In my case the voice over is quite "bassy" which means when I eq it out you're left with a very thin sounding track. Not nice at all.

Plus, the human voice occupies a huge part of the frequency spectrum. So I'd have to remove a huge chunk of sound.

So I should just do a voiceover over that whole audio track as is. Then Duck the original to fit my own. It's not ideal, but there's really no other way. Short... of course.... of tracking down the original film makers and getting the original sound files completely seperate as they were before they were made into a DVD.

That was some learning curve since my last post, but I am glad I can give a semi coherent reply to my original question.