So you just finished shooting your video, and everything looks perfect but when you’re in the edit room pulling the story together, you inconveniently find out your audio sounds scratchy, noisy and just flat out sucks. Yikes. What’s worse than doing nothing about it? Not knowing how to address it.
We know lots of editors use programs like Adobe Audition, Audacity and the built in audio features inside of Adobe Premiere, so we decided to put together a list of tips together for you that just might take your edit one step closer to pro.
Tip #1: Volume Match
That’s right. Go through shot by shot and match everything with your ears, instead of your eyes. Why? Because your ears won’t lie to you. In most cases, even if you can’t do anything about the actual source, you can still keep it consistent. Doing this one simple trick puts you a step ahead of some editors who might just make one track louder and ends up making the entire video sound distorted. Who wants that? Even if you don’t have all the right software you need to take out that room echo or noise devastating the mic, you can still go through and listen for consistency between voices
Take this example: Subject 1 is outside and the ambient noise is louder than his voice, but in the next shot Subject 2 is indoors and has a louder voice than the room he’s in. Rather than try and bring 2’s volume down to match the ambient noise in 1’s shot, try and bring 1’s volume up to where there is virtually no difference in the level of both voices back to back.
Rinse and repeat this little trick for all other subjects and clips throughout the edit, and you’ll be surprised how this little trick will go a long way.
Tip #2: EQ Match
One thing about mics? They’re not all created equal. Some have a different tone than others, especially when you have a boom and a lav. Booms are more directional, but sound crisp and clear, whereas lavs can still pick up the subject but might sound a little boom-ier (no pun intended) than the boom. Just like volume matching, go through shot by shot and listen to the difference, but this time listen for tone instead of volume.
Doing this trick by ear requires lots of practice and ear training, but some editing suites feature advanced functions that come with a built in EQ Match plug-in. If you can take advantage of that, your workflow will become much faster, but just don’t let the final result lie to you - your ears need to be the judge, so you may want to mess around and tweak the bands and settings on your EQ until you’re happy with how the two sources sound together in context with the edit.
Because noise is distracting, you have to be careful with this trick, so you might want to stay away from adding too much, and focus more on carving out rather than boosting. Sometimes, it really just depends on the source and subject, but you know what sounds good to you as a listener, so go with your gut, but mainly your ears.
Tip #3: Add a Noise Gate
What’s a “noise gate”? It’s a plug-in or tool that automatically brings down the volume of an audio source when it reaches a certain level or threshold. Noise gates can be very finicky and sometimes very extreme on first use, but use it subtly and your video will look even better.
Start by adding the plug-in to your source or track. Then, start adjusting the threshold until you hear the background noise completely eliminated from the dialogue. It should almost sound like someone hitting the “mute” button on and off when the subject speaks in between phrases. Depending on the edit, you might be happy with that and stop there, or you can take it one step further. You should be able to adjust the range at which the gate “ducks” or lowers the volume in between phrases. In some cases, this might be set at its highest setting, but try adjusting this until you hear the ambience slowly start to match the dialogue. Already sounding better right? If you have the option to adjust “attack” (how fast the gate starts working) and “release” (how fast the gate begins to lower or let go of the volume), start adjusting those parameters to smoothen the levels between phrases. Congratulations, you’re one step closer to a pro edit.
When you run into a source not sounding clear due to lots of sounds in the background, sometimes you can’t bring the source up to match the ambience. Other times, you can bring the ambience down to match the source even if it can’t fully be eliminated. Use this little trick to bring some added clarity and consistency to the overall volume level of your edit.
Tip #4: Run Spectral De-Noise Processing
Spectral De-noising is the process of removing stationary or slowly changing tonal noise and/or hiss by learning a frequency profile of the offending noise and then subtracting it from the signal. Basically, it takes a snapshot of the source’s signal, and finds where inconsistencies are coming from and attenuates or eliminates the offending noise.
While this is a more advanced technique, similar to noise gating, this tool is incredibly handy for using on entire audio clips, or in-between phrases of dialogue. There is one major downside to this method if not set correctly, however, and that is an unpleasant effect called “swimming” which leaves artifacts in the audio source that sounds like the audio is moving in and out of water, hence the sound feels like it’s swimming in and out of water. We recommend either outsourcing to an audio professional or tread lightly when using this trick.
At The Audio Planet, we use Spectral De-noising on a consistent basis and using smart algorithms to fine tune the audio within our audio suite, we can apply this process directly to a clip, and only on certain noises, frequencies or phrases of dialogue, without affecting or destructing the original signal if necessary. We sometimes combine affected and unaffected clips together to create a mixture of sources that sound and appear seamless to the listener, while reducing noise artifacts at the same time.
Tip #5: Go Micro
If you want to really get deep in the weeds and have maximum control over your edit, go micro and use keyframes, nodes or selection points to manually attenuate or eliminate extraneous noise in your shots. This is a technique that we recommend only for experienced and professional editors, as well as those who want to get the most out of their edit.
Inside Adobe Premiere, you can manually set keyframes at which the volume of a source adjusts, as well as other parameters such as EQ, compression and more. The downside? If you set your keyframes for each parameter too far apart from each other, and don’t refine when they start or end at each point, the parameters will be noticeable in the final edit and make it very difficult to go back and refine with audio. This is usually a 12-step process to make sure the effect isn’t “noticeable enough”. Plus, Adobe Premiere can only do a handful of moves in one go, which can be very time consuming, and take away creativity during the editing process.
In Pro Tools, we don’t have nearly as many issues with this because the program was designed in mind for going as granular as we choose to, up to the point of re-drawing the waveform of an audio source entirely. When we work on a project, we adjust not only volume of certain clips, but also words, phrases, syllables, consonants, plosives, and clicks, before running any other processing on the clip. This allows us to get as precise and close to what we as listeners want to hear and what you as a filmmaker intend to communicate.
Tip #6: Ambience Match
You would imagine taking away sound might fix “noisy dialogue”. If you can’t eliminate the noise without all the crazy artifacts and the brain power to handle or eliminate the artifacts, the next best step is to create a noise profile that allows you to match the background noise of your sources seamlessly. Enter, Ambience Match.
Ambience Matching is something you can do using Premiere or any audio editing suite, or use by purchasing an advanced audio plug-in or bundle. If you don’t have a plug-in to learn the noise profile, here’s how you can do it manually inside of premiere. Create a new audio track. Find a section where there is noise without dialogue (you may have to get right in between phrases or sentences for the best results). Copy and paste the audio noise for the duration of the shot or clip. Finally, adjust the volume (and go micro if you can) to match the ambience in the original shot.
This can be daunting if you’re not very familiar with this concept. On our day-to-day basis, Ambience Matching is a crucial part of audio-post and is used to help mask a lot of inconsistencies when used sparingly. Think of it like a band-aid, just for two clips or more joined together. We’ve used this a number of times to help eliminate the gap between phrases, as well as create custom background ambiences for scenes that are missing natural sound and/or foley.
Still stuck?
Here at The Audio Planet, we work with a lot of different advanced tools and functions that meet and exceed these pointers and have a lot of experience in making your projects sound professional, cinematic and even life-like. We don’t go by algorithms, we go by our instincts, so if our instincts tell us that something sounds off, we don’t question it - we address it. Sometimes, there are things that we may not even notice that need to be addressed, in a process we call “sweetening”, which allows us to increase the emotional impact of your project by adding more depth and clarity to each moment.
To find out more about us and how to start your next project, visit our website at www.theaudioplanet.com.