I get it! A sound mix is often the last thing that production managers are thinking of when producing a piece of digital video content. As budgets get increasingly squeezed, the thought of getting a specialist sound designer to add that final audio sheen can sometimes seem superfluous..
However, if you’re not getting a sound mix done, there’s certain audio mixing tricks that are very simple and an editor should be able to perform in their software of choice. Here’s a few things I commonly notice in un-mixed online content:
1. Panning
A key component of sound mixing 101 is to pan the dialogue to 0 i.e. In the centre of the stereo field. This means that the dialogue will come out of the left and right speakers at equal volumes.
I’m amazed by the number of online films I see that don’t pan the dialogue to the centre and it sounds very uneven, fatiguing and even slightly dizzying in extreme circumstances. This, to my ears, is really unforgivable as it can so easily be corrected by ensuring the dialogue is:
- In mono (as opposed to stereo)
- Panned to zero (dead centre / 12 o’clock)
- Reviewed before delivery with a mildly critical ear
Here’s a useful tutorial on panning in Final Cut Pro X.
The main exemption to this would of course be if you were panning the dialogue to create some sort of creative effect e.g. someone talking from another room.
2. Audio Artefacts
Untreated mouth clicks and pops can seem minor but can unwittingly give a film an amateur sound and feel. While some background noise may be burned into dialogue and be best left to a professional to clean up, noises such as pops between words, for example, are very simple to remove using audio restoration software.
The industry standard in audio-post is called Izotope RX (but there are many others available). The entry level RX tier (Elements) is always priced fairly accessibly (currently £59 on Plugin Boutique) and this will work in Premiere Pro.
There is a plugin within the package called ‘De-Click’ which gets great results and is very simple to use. Here’s a useful video on how to use it in Premiere (note this is technically using ‘Mouth de-click’ but the premise and application of the module is very similar).
3. Dialogue Edit
Okay, so by now we’re starting to get a little technical, and lots of picture editors do a decent job of tidying up dialogue edits with fades etc. However, I still often hear random breaths that have not been removed and clicking audio clips that haven’t had fades applied. Make sure your dialogue clips are kept tight!
I’m planning to do a dialogue editing blog post to go into more detail on this so more to follow.
4. Music Ducking
Although appearing simple, there is a bit of an art form to effective ducking. However you achieve this, it should always be smooooooth - and subtle.. While having a trained ear will help achieve this, it’s definitely still possible to hit the SAS (smooth and subtle) mark without being a pro.
The thing to really avoid is anything too jerky. In general, I would say any dialogue gap less than 2 seconds should be left flat. And give the fade a gentle curve to allow it time to ease off and come up again – just not too much time!
In some situations, the key to smooth ducking is to use a technique called sidechaining which sounds technical but is actually fairly simple. I’ll look at this in another blog post to follow.
It can be helpful to duck by using a fader. This is quite a cool little device I’d recommend to make the process more tactile.
5. Loudness
Loudness is becoming quite the fixture in my blog posts at the moment.. but It’s important! If you’re uploading to YouTube or Instagram, you need to make sure your audio is sitting at the right level.
We use a measurement called LUFS to determine the audio loudness of video content. In order to hit optimum levels you want your audio sitting at around -13 to -15LUFS. This will ensure:
- It is loud enough, or else it will be too quiet next to other pieces of content
- It is not too loud, otherwise it could be overly compressed or distorted
See my post here for more info.
Comentários