Amped FIVE Supports Audio Track Viewing and Redaction

Table of Contents

Reading time: 5 min

Welcome back, dear Tip Tuesday mates! Today I will be showing an Amped FIVE feature that I’m pretty sure most of you have never tried before… because it’s so new! Since the latest release, Amped FIVE integrates audio track viewing and redaction capabilities. Why don’t you take your first walk through this functionality with this tip? Ready? Let’s go, then!

How to Enable and View Audio Tracks in Amped FIVE

If you have already updated to Rev 16112, when you drag a video in Amped FIVE, you should see this new bar appearing in the Player panel:

Screenshot of Amped FIVE software interface showing a loaded video file titled

If you don’t see that empty bar at the bottom, simply click on the View menu in the top bar and make sure the Audio entry is enabled:

Screenshot of the

Okay, now you have it but… it’s empty! Why is that? Because the video was loaded with the FFMS video engine, while you want to choose the FFMS with Audio if audio is of interest for your task. So, just double click on the Video Loader filter and change the Video Engine accordingly, then click Apply.

Screenshot of the Amped FIVE

Now we like it better!

Screenshot of Amped FIVE software displaying a loaded video file titled

Zooming and Navigating Audio Waveforms

You may notice the audio waveform is a bit “compressed” vertically. This simply means the volume is quite low. You can zoom in vertically to make the waveform more visible. The best way to do so is to hold the SHIFT key and move the mouse wheel up. If you’re not familiar with the wheel, you can hold SHIFT and left-click on the plot to zoom in vertically.

Close-up screenshot of the audio waveform in the Player panel of Amped FIVE software, displaying the timeline of the file “AudioExample.mp4”. The waveform shows varying amplitude, indicating dynamic audio content, with the current frame set at 125 and a timestamp of 00:00:04.456. The timeline spans up to frame 868, with visible markers and playback controls above.

Much nicer, isn’t it? As you may have guessed already, holding SHIFT and moving the wheel down (or pressing the right mouse button) will allow you to zoom out.

All of the above was about vertical zoom (i.e., seeing a “taller” waveform). But of course, you can also zoom horizontally, which means, zooming in time. It works just as before, but you’ll be pressing the CTRL button on the keyboard. Take a look at this zoomed area, where we see the waveform for frames between 310 and 390:

Annotated screenshot of the Player panel in Amped FIVE showing the audio waveform of a video file, with blue callouts labeling the “Current position of player” set at frame 339 and the “Frame number” set at frame 350. The waveform envelope visually represents audio intensity over time, with a timestamp of 00:00:30.945 at the last frame, 868.

Unless you zoom a lot, what you see in the plot is the Waveform Envelope (as stated on the right side of the plot). The envelope is basically the outer shape of the real signal plot, which provides a measure of the power of the signal.

Illustration of a signal waveform in blue with red and green lines representing the upper and lower envelopes respectively. The red
By Brews Ohare – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

In case you need to inspect the actual signal for precision seeking or redaction, just keep zooming in and you’ll eventually be presented with the Actual Waveform:

Audio waveform display in a video analysis software showing a detailed view of the actual waveform with frame numbers marked along the timeline. A red arrow points to the right side of the waveform, labeled

You can use the audio plot to navigate the video: just click on the plot or drag to move the current player position. You may also use the mouse wheel to achieve the same. We strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the keyboard shortcuts presented above: this will make your interaction with the Audio panel much more comfortable and fast! And remember that, just like any other panel in Amped FIVE’s interface, you can enlarge or even detach the Player panel and its audio plot to make more room for it.

Screenshot of Amped FIVE software showing a waveform envelope of an audio track within the Player panel. The interface includes detailed amplitude visualization, frame numbers, and a blue playhead at frame 319 (timestamp 00:00:11.373). The waveform represents the audio signal of the video “AudioExample.mp4” loaded in the Video Loader panel, using the “FFMS with Audio” engine.

Redaction and Playback of Multichannel Audio

A special mention is needed for videos with multichannel audio tracks. For example, if you load a video captured with a reasonably recent smartphone, you’ll likely see two signals plotted because the audio is stereophonic:

Waveform visualization in Amped FIVE’s Player panel showing stereo audio channels: red waveform for the left channel and blue waveform for the right channel. The player is at frame 494 (timestamp 00:00:16.433) out of 1120 total frames, with waveform amplitude plotted over time for detailed audio signal analysis.

And if you happen to work on 5.1 channels audio, you’ll get a very colorful audio bar!

Audio waveform display in Amped FIVE showing stereo signal analysis with enhanced visualization. Red and blue waveforms represent left and right audio channels, respectively, while green indicates the envelope and yellow highlights the center channel mix. The player is positioned at frame 7219 (timestamp 00:05:01.092) out of 226341 frames (02:37:20.306), with waveform amplitude spread over time and playback speed set to 0.5x for detailed audio review.

You’ll see that, if you increase or lower the player speed, the audio track will be processed accordingly and you’ll hear slowed or accelerated audio. We’re using a tempo modification algorithm, which compensates for the pitch drift, so you won’t hear those funny “cartoon-like” voices when speeding up the playback or “disguised-killer-voice” effect when slowing down.

Continuing to talk about speed, there’s an important fact to mention: when you work with high-resolution videos, depending on your computer performance and on the filters you applied, it may happen that Amped FIVE cannot playback the video at its real speed. In these cases, you’ll see different behaviors depending on the video engine you’re using.

  • If you’re using FFMS, you will see the video playing “smoothly, but slower”, meaning that Amped FIVE attempts to show all frames, but since this cannot be done in real-time, you get a slow-motion effect and your video playback will last longer than its real length (e.g., it may take 1m30s to play a 1m10s video);
  • If you’re using FFMS with Audio, instead, Amped FIVE will prioritize time fidelity, so frames will be skipped to keep the pace. Your 1m30s video will be played in roughly 1m30s, but you may notice that frames get skipped.

A short note is needed here: remember that Amped FIVE is not just “a player”, there’s a lot of things we do to provide the most faithful representation of the video stream. This pushes us to avoid some tricks or optimizations that would speed up processing at the cost of forensic soundness, which is not acceptable for us.

Before coming to the conclusion, remember that you can easily access most of the information provided in this tip by simply clicking on the “Help” button on the left side of the waveform!

Screenshot of the

Final Word

We’re sure Amped FIVE support for audio track viewing and redaction will boost your productivity even more! After you’ve played a bit with that, you will realize how quick and easy it is. And of course, this is just the beginning: we have lots of ideas to work on. Make sure your SMS plan is still active and don’t miss the next updates!

Table of Contents

Share on

Subscribe to our Blog

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Subscribe to our Blog

Related posts