Is it possible to edit spoken dialog without interfering with the rest of the sound?

Question

I'm trying to piece together video clips from various movies, and in one of these clips the character swears strongly a couple times. Normally, I don't bother with this, but my audience is that of a "clean" nature and is strongly against profanity. Is there a way to briefly mute, or change the character's voice when he cusses and not interfere with the rest of the sound? Or is this asking too much?
Also, I looked in the "help" section and couldn't find anything to help me with this. But I have a bunch more questions. Where do I go that will explain all the features of Premiere Elements 8, without forcing me to spend hours figuring it all out and/or posting a billion discussions here in the forums and bugging all of you with my lack of knowledge?

Answer 1

What you are attempting to do requires a bit of work and then some luck.
It sounds as though you have an Audio Clip with both background noise and possibly music, plus dialog. You wish to remove just the dialog in a particular spot, or spots. Is that correct?
If so, then in an Audio editing program, like Adobe Audition, you can possibly extract the ambient sound/music with a Karaoke Effect, or with the application of EQ. This will yield a separate file with hopefully just the background and music, and no dialog. In a Multi-Track Session, place both files on a separate Track. Find the point where you wish to remove the dialog. Here, the workflow might differ, but I'd Cut out the dialog at that point, leaving only the Karaoke Track. To clean things up, when I had done this for each offensive passage, I would go to the Karaoke Track and do just the opposite - Cut out all that was NOT underlying the offensive passages, but leave a bit of that Track before and beyond the deleted dialog. Then, I'd add a Cross-Dissolve for Constant Power to those Karaoke segments to "ramp" the Karaoke Track into the mix, as it will never be perfect, and one wants as smooth a transition, as is possible.
Now, one can do this in other audio editing programs, that offer Multi-Track editing, and also VST plug-ins, or install with Effects like Karaoke and/or Parametric or Graphic EQ's. You could explore the great, free audio-editor, Audacity, and Google for VST's that will enhance its capabilities. Be sure to read the Help files on Audacity, as one does need to do a few things in setup to allow the addition of more VST's.
The work will be with the Karaoke (or similar) Effect, its result and also the frequency ranges of the speaker. That is where the "luck" comes in. Much human speech can be EQ'ed out, or at least greatly attenuated. Now, if you have a crowd talking in the background, or similar, and wish to retain that, all bets are off.
Also, if you only have ambient sounds, and no music, behind the speaker, just find segments of that ambient sound, where the speaker is not talking, and use that to "patch" where you cut out the dialog.
Good luck,
Hunt