Quicksand Fans

I have a 1984 videotape of a high school drama project I would like to re-edit using modern tools.

Unfortunately, the 3/4" tapes that mastered the project were property of the school and are long gone by now.

I have the 1/2" VHS dub of the project which, as far as I can tell, merged the dialogue track with the background music track into a single stereo track.

I have ripped the tape to DVD using my VHS-DVD deck but saw no options to separate tracks.

Does anyone know of any software that can detect and separate these tracks?

I think it extremely unlikely you can separate music from dialogue tracks, because while separate tracks would have been present in the source material they were almost certainly combined into one trackon what you have, with the exception of data for left and right speakers. I suppose you might be able to use filtering to capture separate tracks according to bandwidth but I doubt if this would accomplish much unless the reason for separating tracks is to eliminate some portion of the sound.

QuicksandMania wrote:I have a 1984 videotape of a high school drama project I would like to re-edit using modern tools.

Unfortunately, the 3/4" tapes that mastered the project were property of the school and are long gone by now.

I have the 1/2" VHS dub of the project which, as far as I can tell, merged the dialogue track with the background music track into a single stereo track.

I have ripped the tape to DVD using my VHS-DVD deck but saw no options to separate tracks.

Does anyone know of any software that can detect and separate these tracks?

It's not clear from your description whether or not the dialogue was 'mixed' with the music (in stereo), or, if the dialogue is one track (left or right) and the music is the another.

It makes all the difference.



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You may try this: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/?lang=en

dlodoski wrote:It's not clear from your description whether or not the dialogue was 'mixed' with the music (in stereo), or, if the dialogue is one track (left or right) and the music is the another.

It makes all the difference.

Our school had just gotten (in 1984) a brand new, state of the art, 3/4" broadcast quality editor. As I recall, the final tape we assembled had at least four tracks because we had one track for the raw dialogue, one for dubbing sound effects, and two for stereo music. But my careful analysis of the dub I got to 1/2" tape and the resulting recently ripped DVD makes me certain that all those audio tracks got mixed into a single stereo signal. Someone else at the school did that dubbing because we finished the 3/4" product and premiered it literally two nights before graduation. Had I understood that aspect of the technology and anticipated what would come, I would have insisted on finding some way to make the 1/2" version more editor friendly!

Billie, thanks for the link. I tested the rip with Audacity and it confirmed my suspicions. So I will find other creative ways to play.

I don't know effectively this might work, but I have heard of products that can separate the vocalists from the music. For your case, if the music itself doesn't have any vocalists, then perhaps that might work to separate the dialogue from the music.

Yea, that's the basis for all early karaoke boxes. Because for years, it was common practice to 'center' vocals in a stereo mix (pan pot straight up for the voacl channels on the board), while dishing the instruments left and right.

It was pretty easy to design circuits (even analog) that could just about eliminate everything centered and pass the rest.

But in this case, I'm fairly certain that there will be all kinds of phasing differences for all the content of both channels, making that procedures useless.

Sorry

QuicksandMania, as far as I remember, the Audacity does have a filter that was suggested by Boggy Man. It attempts to remove vocals from the track, and I suppose it does it digitally, based on assumptions of the voice spectrum. I didn't try it, it may work or not work, and anyway it shouldn't give a perfect result, but it may help.

In the old analog days when stereo was just getting going and most old stuff was monaral, I used to be able to improvise an acceptable "psuedo-stereo" mix by manually cycling the right/left aspect of the mix off of center in time to the music, gave something of the illusion of stereo if you could keep in time...