Sound Post Production Tips...

This bit is golden sweet sauce, practice is frequently! Watch out though, start by turning the volume DOWN cause you might hurt your ears.. seriously..

Start by setting the Q as high as it goes, do the same to the amplitude. While previewing the sound (looping around the bit you want to fix), scrub the frequency until the sound becomes painfully really loud. Once you've identified the frequency this way, drop the amplitude as low as it goes and the sound should magically disappear. You may need to adjust the Q wider to cover the adjoining frequencies to fully remove the sound

Click to expand...

8:33am in the morning, and I'm wanting to read more. Bookmarked this thread.

Thanks, the next bits will be more sweetening, then onto building up a full on sound track and building a sound library.

cant wait!!

So last time, we talked about sound in your film as a single entity... Now we're going to concern ourselves with thinking larger. Isolating the actor's voices has hollowed out the background and even gone so far as to make some sounds go missing.

Let's look at what we've got. We've pulled in all our clips, we've edited them into a brilliant short film and we've filtered out all of those pesky background noise so we have pristine dialog. I'm going to have you go one step further now and actually cut out any audio that isn't dialog entirely... all of the bits between the actors talking needs to go away.

Each actor gets their own mono audio track. I would recommend exporting the whole film at this point and pulling the audio in an uncompressed format into a dedicated audio package. I'm using Soundtrack Pro, but the techniques will be nearly identical in any audio editing package out there as they all emulate old analog equipment techniques.

We'll be working with tools that may be new to you, I recommend you play with every knob and slider in each piece of the software you see to figure out what it does to the sound. In the matrix, we have undo - so there is no risk of completely horking your soundtrack just by twiddling knobs. Our editing should all be non-destructive!

Since our focus is on getting the highest possible production quality out of our soundtrack, I'll fall back on the same equation I've been using for years in all of the articles I've ever posted; Time = Money. Since I don't have money, I know I can spend time to get the same results that money would buy for me... I just have to be willing to work for it.

With the audio pulled in, separated (with the razor blade tool in most packages) into dialog and everything else, and even farther by cutting each actor's lines separately, which I will normally do by giving each actor their own clip in my video editor, then export each of their dialog separately as AIFF files which I then line up on separate tracks in Soundtrack Pro.

We now have the beginnings of a well rounded sound design. Since the actors are the only thing we are concerned with recording on set, the rest will now have to be added back in. This can be as artistic or realistic as the story calls for. I would even go so far as to say that other than dialog timing, everything else for your audio should be done in a program with stronger audio tools than your video editor (although most of what we cover will work just fine in there - but we want the highest quality results possible, and the tools are available).

So let's start by taking our freshly mown dialog and applying the high and low cuts from the first installment of this series, then EQing the background cruft out of it all. The high and low cuts can generally be applied track-wide separately from one another for each actor to make sure their voice is prominently separated form the background noises. Separate tracks allows us to be even more precise with the high and low cuts as different people's voices inhabit different frequency ranges.

Next, we'll balance the volumes of the individual actors to one another watching our levels to make sure they stay right around the -6db mark on the meter, never peaking above 0db - in fact safer yet would be to use the -6db as your peak level for the loudest bits. Here we can be a little creative as well and use the a limiter to make louder parts slightly less loud by "attenuating" them as their level increases. The compressor/limiter specifically applies more dampening to a sound clip as the volume increases, and we can control how much dampening gets applied and when. I won't go into specifics, but generally, you can select a highest level for the filter and it'll be set right... the change will be instantly noticeable in smoothing out the levels in your clip. I tend to apply one of these filters per dialog track after balancing the rest of the dialog to each other. This allows me to ignore screams and louder bits (high points in the waveform) and concentrate on the rest of the dialog as a whole.

Having pulled out everything but the voices, we now get to start piecing the sonic world back together. I like to start with easy to recognize things. Footsteps specifically. Many sound libraries have footsteps in them, the problem is that the foot falls don't always match the speed of your actor's gait. This is easily corrected by understanding our audio in a visual manner. If you look at the waveform, you'll notice thicker bits and thinner bits. This is a graph, left to right is time and up and down is volume. For things like footsteps, you'll tend to see regularly spaced spikes in the waveform that coincide with the foot contacting the ground.

My general work flow for these is to watch the video window in my audio package and use the arrow keys to nudge forward one frame at a time until I see the weight of my actor shift onto their foot. At this frame, I'll place the first wave spike in the footsteps audio clip. I'll then advance the footage a frame at a time until I see the weight shift onto the other foot. The razor blade cuts just before the next wave spike in the audio clip and I slide the footstep back to line it up. I don't worry about it overlapping the other footstep I just placed as the loudest sound at a specific frequency will overwhelm and hide the lower sounds at that frequency. Since the footsteps are all going to be roughly the same frequency, the audience will never hear that the old one got cut off as their ears will be hit at that same moment with a new sound... yay physics!

Lather, rinse, repeat! Then do the same thing for each actor with a new track for each of them, then same for the hands. Each time they touch something, there should be some kind of a sound, try to find something appropriate for the real world interaction you're showing on screen. Then sound effects to match the action outside the characters, cars passing, dogs being seen barking, children playing in the background. Each of these things builds a new layer into the world of the film.

Next bit we'll cover will be the environmental sounds and how to deal with room tone if we hear holes in our sound track.

As far as sound effects I have found a lot of good ones at www.sounddogs.com . Otherwise I record my own sounds.