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I have a movie that i'd like to "cuff", ie reverse a few swear words which crop up in it, to make it a bit more family friendly. Can anyone recommend a good free video editor tool for this?

I don't need to edit the actual visuals at all, just the audio. I use Audacity already, and had wondered whether it would be better to extract the audio component, edit THAT standalone, then combine it back into the movie. But i was worried that i'd end up with it being out of sync somehow.

I'd be looking for something where i can just drag over the offending word, and then choose some "reverse audio" function or something.

Any advice welcome. I'm using Linux Mint Maya 13.2 btw.

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I would recommend doing as you said, extract the audio, use Audacity or something similar to "cuff" the audio, then use ffmpeg to re-add the audio without re-encoding the video.

Their are multiple methods for censoring words in Audacity.
- First, the method you specified, you can simply reverse the audio.
- You can select the audio, mute it with Generate > Silence.
- You can use a TV-style censor beep: you can select the audio and use Generate > Tone. Setting Waveform: Sine, Frequency: 1000, and Amplitude: 1 generally works well, but feel free to experiment.

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  • Thanks - i've done five minutes worth of the film as a test and it's worked well i think. The nice thing about "cuffing" is that it's not as jarring as a bleep or an overdub of someone else saying a different word (which you sometimes see in tv versions of movies). It's pretty quick to do in audacity too. I tested combining the resulting wav (have just done a couple of minutes worth rather than the whole movie) back into the original film with ffmpeg and it's worked well. I reckon i could do the wav for the whole film in a couple of hours. That's tonight sorted, better get some beer :) – Max Williams Aug 13 '15 at 12:56

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