selectively reducing sound of one voice on home movie DVD

[hikergirl]

I recently had a couple old VHS home movie tapes copied to DVD. However, the voice of the person manning the camera is much louder than the rest of the people. How do I selectively reduce the volume of the person doing the taping? I have no idea if I need to rip the DVD to my computer, or rip+convert (I was trying to read another post on here but got lost). I eventually want to make copies to give to family members, as it is conversations with my now deceased grandparent.

[smrpix]

Rip, do not convert, your DVD to your computer.

You can extract the audio into an audio editing software -- Audacity is a good free one.

Depending on the severity of the difference you can either add a compressor effect to the whole track to limit the volume or add keyframes around the louder voice and manually lower it.

You can then remux your new audio with the original video. Unless you're an expert with vobs you will probably want to re-author your DVD with something like AVStoDVD.

[hikergirl]

Appreciate the response!
What is the best way to rip, not convert, the DVD to the computer?

[pandy]

If this track is stereo you may reduce center content by mixing negated (phase inverted by 180deg) one channel with some weighting to another and vice versa i.e. (0.75*R)+(0.25*-L)=R';(0.75*L)+(0.25*-R)=L' . In theory signal in center will cancel partially but this assume that voice is centered across channels.

[Skiller]

You want to reduce the dynamic range of the audio.
It means you make the loud parts quieter so that the differences in volume become smaller. Of course this makes any loud noises quieter, not just the camera operator.