censoring cursing in a music video

dimipapa wrote on 12/8/2014, 5:05 PM

I've had a couple small jobs censoring curses. I've seen tutorials on youtube about how to mostly remove vocals but very often you can still hear it too good and it's a nightmare trying to do it for only portions of a song instead of the entire song. I've tried various ways to distort the audio but nothing that I really liked. My most recent idea was to simply reverse the audio, this make the curse indiscernible is somewhat distorting in itself and keeps the audio levels the same. I was wondering if anyone here is a good way of doing this while still being able to keep some of the audio. I also have soundforge pro if there is something it can do better but I find most of its functionality I can do in vegas.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/8/2014, 8:48 PM

Can you find the same instrumentation notes or similar enough elsewhere in the song that don't contain the vocal? You can highlight that little snippet, copy it, and paste it over the curse word. As a benefit this is probably faster and easier than what you have been doing.

Geoff_Wood wrote on 12/9/2014, 2:19 PM

Try the demo of SpectralLayers on it .

geoff

audio2u wrote on 4/19/2015, 11:05 PM

Assuming your song is mixed to stereo and you don't have access to an instrumental version, the most common way of removing language that's undesirable is to reverse the audio for that word.
How?
Cue through the song til you find a word you don't want to hear.
Split the video and audio (assuming they're still linked, as is the default) on both sides of the word.
Press the 'U' key to unlink the audio and video clips from each other.
Right click the audio section, and select 'open in trimmer'.
Right click and create a sub-clip of the audio. This will mean you have a new file on disc which is only 1 second in length or thereabouts (unless it's Samuel L. Jackson... then all bets are off!) :)
Drop the new sub-clip of audio (it'll be in the Project Media tab) into place.
Right click and select 'reverse'.
Voila! The video still plays in the correct direction, but the audio is reversed for that one word.

*If I missed any steps in this procedure, my apologies. I'm not at my workstation right now.

Chienworks wrote on 4/20/2015, 7:08 AM

You have extra steps. The entire part from opening in trimmer through to dropping the subclip is unnecessary. Simply select that section of the audio, press S to split, then reverse.

audio2u wrote on 4/21/2015, 10:43 PM

Fair enough! :)