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I've just read an old blog post about "internal editing", a special kind of audio post processing of recorded interviews. It basically consists of removing the unnecessary interjections, like the "ums" and "ehs" that we normally say while speaking. It improves the rhythm of conversations, and make your interviewee look more intelligent.

If you just have audio, it is simple. You crop out the interjections. But if you have an interview recorded in somewhere with background noise, if you delete the interjections, there will be an weird silence. Deleting it, would unsync the audio and image.

Would someone give me some tips to remove just the voice using an audio editor? A step by step guide would be great.

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  • Hey neves, I saw you requested a move to sound design. It would also fit there, but it really fits just fine here. We handle sound related to video here and given that there are going to generally be video related recommendations in the answer, it's probably a better fit here. If you still want it moved, just reflag it and I can move it, but for now I'm going to leave it here unless you really want it moved. (I'm a mod on both, as is Rory.)
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Nov 25, 2016 at 15:15

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Instead of deleting the offending bit, overwrite it with room tone, a section of nominal silence either recorded specifically for this purpose at the time of filming, or just taken from a nearby bit of silence.

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  • But how do I integrate tire room tone with three rest of the clip? When I do it, there is a failure when the new sound starts. I'd like to have a kind of blur for audio.
    – neves
    Nov 25, 2016 at 1:56
  • @neves Maybe if you describe what you're actually doing, and what you mean by 'failure', I could give a better answer. As it is, overwriting a section of audio means replacing it without changing the duration.
    – Jim Mack
    Nov 25, 2016 at 15:46
  • I'll try to explain better. When a person sttuter, the audio you want to remove is mixed with the adjacent audio. You will remove it and put some background noise. Since the audio waves won't match perfectly, you will hear a mismatch when the noise starts. What can I do to minimize this mismatch? I'd like to "blur"the two sounds.
    – neves
    Nov 25, 2016 at 16:37
  • @neves The idea is to replace the unwanted audio with something that closely matches what's 'underneath' it. When the environment is noisy it's hard to get a close match, but audio from very nearby in the timeline is the best bet. And instead of cutting in the segment, do a short dissolve in and out if possible -- place the room tone on a separate track and crossfade.
    – Jim Mack
    Nov 25, 2016 at 23:23
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instead of completely removing the interjections and background sound from between the spoken word try just cutting the actual "umm" (for example) leaving a gap, then copy a bit of the background sound from somewhere slightly bigger than the gap, insert it and crossfade it between the audio. It will then sound as if the background is there with no obvious cuts.

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