How to reverse only the AUDIO of a video clip?

I need this to ‘censor out’ some bad words in some of my video.

Instead of beeping them out, I want to reverse only the audio part.

I can’t find how to do this. Any help?

Thank you all :slight_smile: LOVE this software!

I do it like this:

7 Likes

Amazing! It works!!! Thank you so much :slight_smile:

Hello, this is not working for me anymore and I don’t know why.

When I detach the audio and check for properties, nothing is showin up. So I can’t reverse the audio.

It seem that if I detach the audio, then I can’t select the clip anymore, so no properties are shown.

Any help?

Hello,
Works for me: Windows11 Shotcut version 24.02.20
Difficult to answer without knowing your Shotcut version. Have you updated recently?
If you’re working with version 22.01.28, when you detach the audio, the two files are grouped together.
To ungroup them, proceed as follows:


1 detach audio
2 right-click and : Group/Degroup
3 click on Track Head or Output to deselect the tracks.
4 You can now select the audio track. The properties tab is visible.

This has been modified in previous version 22.02.20 :

Stop automatically grouping audio/video clips when Detach Audio.

If you’ve already downloaded this version, it’s may be related to this:


in the topic: BETA version 24.02 now available to test

Fixed in nightly version #1355 for Windows, #1322 for Linux, #1157 for MacOS

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I’m using Linux version 24.1.28.
Group / Ungroup selection was gray, can’t use it :frowning: so I undid e re-did the detach.
Now I can group / ungroup.

But when ungrouped, if I select the audio part it show properties for both video and audio, and “reverse” still revert the video :frowning:

EDIT: I tried again and somehow worked. I’m trying to replicate how I did it so I can document exactly how to do this.

Still, I believe a “reverse” audio filter is SO MUCH NEEDED, please consider doing something about it :slight_smile:

1 Like

Glad it works. :slightly_smiling_face:
As I mentioned, this is corrected in the Beta version 24.02 which you can install (possibly in a portable version) to no longer have this problem.

OK I got it:

  • select the clip
  • detach audio
  • select the audio part
  • Group / Ungroup
  • then click another clip and then click back the audio you want to reverse
  • Properties is showing, do “reverse”

so only the audio is reversed in this way. It’s tricky but it worked :slight_smile:

1 Like

I think so too. Audio and video without the need to re-encode the source material. This function is available in almost any video editor, but for some unknown reason it is missing here.

It seems to me that this should not be a filter, but a new checkbox in the “properties” tab, somewhere next to the speed setting line.

In the new official version of Shotcut 24.02.29

  • Stop automatically grouping audio/video clips when Detach Audio (changed in v24.01).

You can reverse audio with the Time Remap filter (swap the 2 default keyframes’ Time values), but your clip must have B frames and preferably all I frames (i.e. edit-friendly), which often requires conversion. Properties > Reverse basically automates all of that (conversion + reversal) in a single button click.

Your advice works, but I want to understand why it’s difficult to make one single checkbox in the “properties” tab, which would simply force the desired segment to be played in the reverse direction without the need for re-encoding? Shotcut has always strived to be a lightweight video editor for the user, but when it comes to reverse playback, I need to do so many unnecessary steps that are not always necessary. A particular pain occurs when the source material has a high duration and resolution, and I need a small fragment from it in the opposite direction, shotcut forces me to re-encode it completely, this takes up a lot of space on the drive and time to re-encode it into a convenient video editor. But at the same time, kdenlive (and not only it) allows you to do this by clicking one checkbox without the need to recode anything. Is this technically difficult to implement?

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I think it MUST be re-encoded anyway. The checkbox will be very helpful in saving time and would improve the UX a lot. IDK if it’s possible to do it and I’m sure the developer(s) are full of things to implement / do / fix so we must not press them.

Mine was just a suggestion :slight_smile:

In no case do I want to say anything bad, much less stand my ground. I have a lot of respect for the developers of this app, they did a great job. Shotcut remains my favorite video editor because it’s the most user-friendly and stable of all the free ones. I’m just wondering what is the reason for the lack of such banal functionality. But even if this magic check mark never appears, for me this is not a global problem. It’s pretty rare that I need to rotate a video backwards.

I guess the simple answer to the question you keep asking is this: It is simple to imagine the concept of such a check box. But the underlying video frameworks that we use (FFMpeg/MLT) do not support it. So it is a lot of work for us to implement the functionality of the checkbox you want.

Most people use a beep or a sound effect to censor audio. This is the first time I remember someone on this forum requesting reversed audio for censoring. Maybe you want to create a new topic in the “Suggestion” category and see if anyone else supports the suggestion

2 Likes

Thank you for the answer! Now I realized that not everything is as simple as I thought. I won’t bother you with this question anymore.

1 Like

@dimadjdocent

Is your aim to make the sound unintelligible without making it obvious that it is being beeped out?

If so, the main problem with this idea is that the reversed track does not sound like the original.

For example, if we reverse 3-4 audio tracks, we cannot tell which track is the reversed version of which track.

That’s why it may not be worth having a UI feature to mask a specific stretch of an audio track.

Adding a beep tone or a noise will serve the same purpose. The existing UI can already do this.

You probably confused me with the author of the topic. It was he who wanted to change only the sound, in places of censorship. I wanted shotcut to give me the ability to flip a video or a cut portion of it without having to re-encode, but for other creative purposes.