Sound editing tips for a beginner

B

blackfilm

Member
Hello,

I'm only starting to learn the ways of sound editing. Earlier what i did was find a track, place it in the timeline, and play it through the whole short film, or fade in and fade out some tracks. But now i want to go further with this. My first problem is how do i make a track sound as though it ends istead of fading out?

Secondly let's say i've got an ambient sound of a forest at night. But i want more sounds, like from birds, animals placed where i need them to be. How do i make them sound as though they come from the same environment? Right now what i have is separate sounds starting and ending, which sounds completely unconvincing.

I'm working with Premiere Pro and Audition. Are there any books, tutorials, so i can get a guide for a real beginner on sound editing for film? At the moment i don't have the means to record my own sounds, so i'm only using what i find on the net.

I apologise if something like this was posted already, i simply couldn't think of a phrase to search for the problems i'm trying to solve.
 
Audition is a multitrack editing tool so you can overlay multiple tracks. You'd have perhaps several tracks for your dialog (usually one per on-camera speaker), a narration track, a track with your forest ambiance, a track for the birds, tracks for the various animals, tracks for other sound FX, one or more tracks for the music, etc, all running in parallel and layered on top of each other. It's not unusual for professional productions to have dozens of tracks, or in the case of major budget feature films hundreds of tracks, all mixed down into the final output tracks. Look up the discussion of multitrack editing in Audition's help. Let's say you wanted your forest ambiance to run through the scene but at some point you want a lion's roar. You don't cut the ambiance and splice in the roar on the same track. You have the ambiance on one track and the roar on a parallel track, positioned in the timeline where you want to hear it. The tracks are mixed together so the resulting output is the combination of the two. Before and after the roar only the ambiance track will be audible, but at the desired point both tracks will be audible with the ambiance underneath the roar,
 
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First, there's a differencte between "fading out" and "having the sound sounds like as if it ends".

For example: you have 20 people exiting a room... if you do it with "fade out" it will sound "fade out". But if you record it by having 20 people (or 10 will work also) exiting the room it will sound
like 20 people are exiting the room.

And as steve said: sound has to continue. A mistake that people often do is: they have a scene, with a gunshot in it... at the place where the gunshot is audible they only put the gunshot.. Wrong...you also need to keep the other sounds (roomtone, breathing, footsteps, handling sounds...)
 
Thanks for your reply Steve. Well, i do understand how this works technically, but how do i make it sound as though it's the same track? The sounds were recorded differently, have different loudness and so on. I assume this is called sound mixing?
 
With sound, you have layering and you have stereo field placement. If you have a sound clip that is too short, like maybe crowd noise, or the sound of a waterfall or other sound, the secret is to put each one on a separate layer with an overlap, then crossfade them. In premiere, I tend to use keyframes a lot - so I'll rarely put sound clips on the same track and apply a crossfade from the effects, I'll simply add a keyframe a second or so from the end of the clip, and then another at the very end, and then drage the keyframe down to make a fade out. The track below then has the opposite it fades in as the one above fades out. Sometimes these crossovers might be 3 or 4 seconds long to disguise what is happening. If you have two separate tracks for left and right, make sure the keyframes are at exactly the same place, or there is an awkward shift in the stereo field as they crossfade. You can easily make a 20 second waterfall sound into two or three minutes worth by this technique, without even going into audition. Sometimes - these tracks can get very confusing - if so, I just export them as a sound file, and then re-import that back in.
 
About that "20sec"... take care here.

Always record at least 2 minutes and 3 is even better of wild sound /roomtone... it's more easy to cut 10sec out of 3min rather then having to make a 3min track out of 20sec...

and also, you can hear the "repeating" in the sound... if in that 20sec a dog is barking it will sound like "woof.....Woof....wooof...woof" in a rythmic way, so cut out the dog

ANd yes it's trial and error play with it, mix, EQ, pan,......be a kid....and play :-p
 
blackfilm said:
Thanks for your reply Steve. Well, i do understand how this works technically, but how do i make it sound as though it's the same track? The sounds were recorded differently, have different loudness and so on. I assume this is called sound mixing?
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Yes, it's called mixing. Audition has a software mixer where you can control the level, equalization, etc, of each track individually. All of your various input tracks are routed through the mixer to end up on the output tracks.
 
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Also, if you want to step up to a more full-featured digital audio workstation, Reaper is a fantastic program and they let you try it full-featured for free. Works on PC and Mac and is quite powerful. I switched from Cubase to Reaper a few years back and never looked back. The discounted license is $60 and includes upgrades.

http://www.reaper.fm/

They are constantly pumping out updates and there is tons of support for external devices and VSTs, etc.
 
OK... First off forget the comment about 20 sec. being enough to loop. With few exceptions that will not work. The "waterfall" mentioned might work since it's a pretty constant background but VERY few sounds will loop at 20 sec and sound OK. The general rule in the feature world is to have at least a minute and a half, preferable tow to three minutes, of any background sound.

"Mixing", well kind of. These days a lot of that "mixing" is done in the editing. As other have said you need to layer the sounds on multiple tracks. If Audition makes you use a lot of "key frames" to work then you should be looking for something better to do sound.

I was going to say that Reaper didn't support video, but that seems to be a recent addition so Reaper is a viable option. It has had generally positive reports. I only looked at it because with out video (at the time I looked) it was not of much use to me.

Making sounds fit in is the core of sound FX editing. The keys are the right sounds, a cheesy sound library from the record store is not going to help much. You will need some clean sounds that are singular and not premixed SFX. You can buy them $$ - $$$$$ or you can record them and trade with others etc. The second big thing is picking the right sounds. If your scene is in the country then city birds are never going to fit. Close up sounds that need to be distant are also generally not going to work. Once your in the ballpark then adjusting levels will help a lot. Also EQ may help make sounds "fit in".

Read some of the post stickies and you should find answers to a lot of questions.
 
Forget about the 20s waterfall? - these kind of sounds can work perfectly well as they're a continuous sound - plenty of natural sounds of this kind can be looped if they're carefully blended - audiences talking - can be extended nicely as long as somebody doesn't cough or something makes an impulse noise. Streams gently passing on a riverbank. Factory backgrounds, burbling engines ticking over.

Building soundscapes from assorted natural and man made sounds is a combination of events, and it's only those things that give the game away that are essentials for long loops. Try some and see. Of course long clips are the best, but having the ability to create longer clips from editing short ones is a handy skill to learn. So I'll suggest that when needs must, a 20 second clip can get you out of trouble. I used the waterfall example to show the kinds of clips that do work. Please don't ever dismiss a technique because the 'few exceptions' are in practice quite common ones. Being able to disguise created material produced from loops is a nice skill to have. Many people give up too easily. If you want some practice - try creating what I call pub noises. Just get a couple of friends to talk rubbish for a short time. Use yourself too. Cut up their phrases, pan them across a stereo field, and then layer this over the top of another and another - and very soon you can have a sound very like a noisy pub. Add a few clink tracks, bottles being opened and glasses chinking together, maybe the odd laugh that you don't use again - and you will see how realistic these things can become.
 
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Well it probably depends on where and what you are working on. It won't fly 90% of the time on a feature with a budget in the US.

Your right it's all good to know. My problem is that all too many new comers pick up on advice like that and only record short clips and the looping is obvious. My years of experience is that very few things loop acceptably with short loops. Crickets work well, water generally not so well, city BG's not at all, house BG's rarely, outdoor ambiences not enough to speak of, wind never, rain sometimes but really only if it's indoor perspective so very muted, industrial ambience never ,birds never or close to never, car interior never.

You can sometimes get "acceptable" loops from the above but at best they become very boring and lifeless. The brain is wired to pick up on repetition and is very good at identifying it. Once identified it either "notices" it, not good, or it ignores it, leading to a lifeless track. Since the whole point of layering up backgrounds is to create a textured "living" world for the action to take place in, using a bunch of short loops just shoots yourself in the foot.

How much that matters does have something to do with the show. Certainly in an action chase gun battle nobody is likely to notice a loop in the background unless it's really bad. And I am coming from a big budget sound aesthetic which may not be universal. But it does apply well to other levels of films. And there is a difference in what you can get away with and best practices. Even when you have a big budget and a big library there are times you need to do something that gets you by. So indeed I have looped very small sections in a pinch, I wouldn't recommend it as a practice.

I'm always amazed at the lengths people will go to to avoid just recording some decent sounds. You can spend a long time creating a pub BG, or you can just go down and record some better ones. And have a pint or two while you at it.

If you start with better material then adding little bits gets you a really living world. As I mentioned I have done it both ways, and there are times when what you need you have no way of getting by the time you need it. But that should be what you are trying to avoid not your standard practice.
IMHO
 
Noiz2 said:
Well it probably depends on where and what you are working on. ...

I'm always amazed at the lengths people will go to to avoid just recording some decent sounds. You can spend a long time creating a pub BG, or you can just go down and record some better ones. And have a pint or two while you at it.
...
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Reminds me of an early experience many years ago. We were shooting a front-of-house staff, basics of customer service training tape for a restaurant chain. We did the live action of the waiter interacting with his customers, doing the wine service ritual, etc, using actors in a closed restaurant. Then to create the ambiance we went back to the restaurant during the dinner service, grabbed a table in the middle of the floor, set an omni mic and a recorder on the table and quietly enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine while letting it roll for a half hour or so. No looping required.
 
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