An introduction to Sound Design and Mixing films in Pro Tools

1. Intro: thanks for joining this class. My name is drunker seven, a sound designer, and I'm gonna take you through sane of my most recent project, Like Lambs. In this course, we're gonna look at analyzing insane the way the session is set up. Will also be looking at Foley and sound effects, as well as some basic editing techniques to sink on. Cross fade between audio regions will also be looking at dynamics on basic techniques in mixing e que and panning on finally recording the mix down. I've supplied this brutal session as part of this course place. Feel free to open it, remix it, reedited you Zeron sounds go as far as you like And bio mains, please upload it on hash tag like lambs so that I might be able to find it. And I'll leave a comment. Thank you so much. And I have to enjoy the course 2. Watching Scene: sir. Before we do anything, we should definitely watch the video together, get acquainted with the material. Be working with throughout these tutorials on, get a sense of the tops of sounds will unaided and just do a little bit of basic analysis on Do Start to think about things from a very, very creative perspective before we look into any of the technical. So without further ado, let's watch the clip for, like, Lambs. So here I can. One of the girls drops an item, A Golden item, which you can see here by 10 missing footsteps as well as the girls are running away, missing footsteps off the character as he approaches. And I think often the microphone on location just doesn't pick up a lot of details like footsteps, particularly if they walking slowly but dramatically. We may want to Adam um, and we'll discuss that a little bit later. The door opening was extremely quiet and quite probably reflective of what that door naturally sounds like. Not particularly cinematic. But let's keep moving. And there we heard him, this character over here screaming his lungs out, but relatively, he was quite quiet compared to um, probably what we would want him to sound and this character over here. He steps into the frame you a lot and speaks lines on what seems to bay the same audio track as the other guy screenings. That's little problem we need to look at a little bit later as well. Theo is the natural door sound that was recorded on the day theme, and there we have the quiet sound of him climbing up the stairs. The door makes almost no sound at all as it opens quiet footsteps. There's almost no money left, Charlie. Just the houses. Okay, so that clip is quite typical of what you might get from a picture editor. It's got the original sound that was recorded on set the dialogue and, you know, some little bits of effects, like the door closing, which were all captured by the microphone on set. Now, obviously the track is really naked. Um, we're going to be looking at ways to bring more life to all of that action, and I think the first thing that we start with really is fully and thinking about the types of sounds we would love to include in there and For those of you who are unfamiliar with Foley, Foley's any human movement sound Pan's fate, um, the sound. That fabric makes the sound that props make as we handle them. And Foley is recorded in a Foley studio, typically by a Foley artist whose job it is to watch the videos and perform the movements at the same time as the characters. And that basically gives the characters wait. Um, it creates a lot of texture on it, also, in a weird way, directs the I. If you use the sound of footsteps moving this way, the I will naturally travel with those speakers and see where that character is going and so on. And so, um, I don't do my own Foley. I would typically start this process by creating a list of things that we named. And so just watching back the video does the handling of the jewelry. There's the dropping of the jewelry on the ground. There's the girls storming away. There's the character walking towards the door. There's the handling of the door. There's the approach of the guy, the older guy that closes the door on him. There's although rustling and movement and chaos that's going on on the the hospital bed. Um, there's the sound of the running up the stairs walking in through the room, and the character by the window is smoking and seems pretty distressed now that we have an idea as to the type of Foley that we're going to need to fill the same the next areas to think about the backgrounds or atmospheres. What is happening in the atmosphere in the same? What do you want the audience to feel, and how can we get them there now? Of course, music is an option. You get the right kind of music that carries the right kind of emotion, and that carries the same, and it fills it out as a sound designer. Often the challenge is finding ways to convey musical ideas or emotional ideas in the sound design without revolt, resorting straight to music. And so a little later on in the tutorials will show you the solution that we had for that. But before we get onto that in this next lesson, we're going to be looking at setting up a session to make sure that all of our routing and all of our tracks air in order so that we can start getting creative and start exploring ways to really bring this scene alive. 3. Session: So let's take a closer look at the session. This'll next part assumes some rudimentary knowledge in pro tools already. Ah, basic understanding of how to create tracks, how to rap tracks and understanding of busing. There are a number of tutorials that you could look up these fundamentals if these concepts in new tube. But hopefully by the end of this explanation and also when you say the supplied files things session will be supplied as part of this class, you'll be able to go in there and have a look and see how the things have been set out. And so, without further ado, let's take a look at the session. Over here we have the video track, and beneath it we have a guide track, which was set to mute. Now Guide Track is typically supplied with the videos from the editor gives you a good indication as to what the director and the editor were thinking about when they set up the , um, basic tone in the mood of the sane. But we've got that set to mute because we've got all of our lovely tracks down here, which we will go through in just a moment because this is a stereo session. We've got everything routing through a stereo master bus, which has a limiter on it. And I just dipped the limited down Teoh minus 0.8, you know, keep the track allowed, but it will catch any loud sounds from peeking out our master recording, um, and causing the track to clip now beneath that, we have our dialog tracks. Here we have a d r, which is any recordings that we did after the fact to either enhance a line or to replace the line that wasn't recorded clearly, or to add lines to increase the drama of the ST Onda. We'll take a closer look at those a little later on. Beneath that, we have our dialog tracks which were recorded on set. Um, and those have bean routed into a dialogue stereo bus which we have down here. These are our Sebastian trucks, and Sebastian is the character who's screaming on the bed, and I've just gone through and created some additional river. Be tracks are to enhance the sound that we have, and those are routed into the Sebastian bus down here, which gives us a little bit of separate control off the volume of those embellishments music tracks which are also routed into a music bus. And as you can see, these are left blank because we did not use any music in the same bio mains. Add your own music and fill these tracks in any way that you like. I've just got them there because you typically have those tracks in, um, accession. Here we have our sink effects, which are also routed into their own sink. Bus and sink effects are any sound effects which were recorded on the day with the dialogue , and we separate them from the dialogue because when you delivered to, say, foreign markets, if they want to replace the English dialogue with whatever native language off that country , you typically just want to be able to delete the dialog tracks and still have. You know, all of your main sand effects in place, and that's why we separate those now beneath those we have our mono sound effects tracks and these a different sound effects that we've used to embellish the same and will take a closer look at those in a moment and a stereo track over here. These have all been routed into a stereo bus code effects. Ondas. You can say we've done a slight bit of volume ing there which affect all of these globally . Beneath that, we have our Foley tracks and here we have cloth movements, footsteps, spots which are any like smaller details like the door handling in the hands and the body in the bed. Another little embellishments which are all routed into this Foley bus over here and then beneath that we have our background sounds. We have some winds and some room tone which were recorded on the day, and some other little bits of howling winds which have all been rounded into this. Atmos, BG's track and BG, of course, are stones four backgrounds. We have a sub bass track here where we have a 50 hertz tone, which is just a flat sine wave of it. Very deep rumble, which we feature throughout this film to build tension, and that's also routed into its own sub bus. And then a Z could see over here. There are no background tracks for the first half of the same, and this is because as part of the concept for this particular film, but we used a lot of the recordings that NASA made off different planet sounds. We wanted to give each individual character their own Zodiac signature and using the planets and the sounds that they make basically guide, build and dissipate tension where required. And you we have these space jam tracks over here which have been routed into the space bus over here. And, as you could say with given this a little bit of a volume graph movement which basically builds and declines depending on the tension that we want to experience. If we go up here to the I o, we can take a closer look at how the buses have been set up. So we have dialogue, suggestion, music fix. We have a wall. A track is while Waller is typically like background talking and like crowd effects and things which we didn't use in this sequence. But that bus exists just in case we want to dial it up, and then we've got the master output. So now that we've taken a close look at the session and the number of tracks and the rounding in that session, let's have a look at the tracks themselves and see the type of content that we recorded and designed to build the same 4. Tracks: Now that we've had an overview of the entire session and the layup in the routing, let's take a closer look at the tracks themselves and learn about some basic editing techniques. So to start one way solo, just the dialog tracks and that's permanently soloed there on the bus in the way we done that is by clicking command Click, which guarantees that we'll get signal flow coming through there from these tracks. Over here are eight er tracks. We've had two idea. Quite a few lines. Let's have a listen to those, but you can't quick, quick grab his arm. Jesus Christ, quick, get the needles. There's almost no money left, Charlie. Just the houses. Okay, So as a creative preference, we chose not to use a recording studio to do. Our 80 are but rather looked for domestic environments, which had a similar sort of tonal quality. Of course, it's a preference up. Some people prefer to record their tracks clean and affect them afterwards with reverb or what have you. But we went for very naturalistic sounds, so they're not the cleanest recordings, but tonally we felt that they were more appropriate and they fit a lot better within those spaces. Beneath this, we have our dialog tracks that were recorded on the day. Now real technical challenge that was posed in this scene is where we see a teacher come to the door and tell the the star that he, you know, he is not allowed in here now, unfortunately out, that was recorded at the same time that the character in the background was screaming. And so we have them both coming out at the same time. Let's have a listen to just that track that that section of the track And so rather than you know what I guess we looked at 80 hiring that moment, but decided against 80 are because ultimately the performance waas so strong, I think from both of them that it would compromise one or the other. And because the screaming was basically done in this one take, we really didn't want to cut away from it on dso you know, obviously wherever possible, you would go for intelligibility. But we felt that in this saying the intention was being conveyed strong enough in his face , you know, from whatever words you caught of his in that moment the fact that he closes the door on the character that that's appearing into a room where he clearly shouldn't be. And so because the message off the moment was communicated, we compromise a little bit on the intelligibility. You could make these choices. I think you know, there's a lot of debate as to, you know, intelligibility vs like you know the emotion you're trying to convey with the sane and and how to get about that, um, Immediately following that, we have a second track. There were several microphones that we used to record. Um, this character's screaming Sebastian screaming. And so we took a different perspective of the microphone and added it immediately under that so that they would play together to create a new space. You know, we tried to create a number of perspective shifts of the screaming here with the girls speaking the perspective of approaching a sound, and I think, like, objectively speaking, perhaps that sound would be quite similar. But because you're guiding an audience through an experience, you can really start to play with what they hear and how much they here. Then there was this moment over here, which really the focus should be on this dialogue and then the close up, where we start to enter the head space of the character that screaming. And obviously this will be the most present part off the track. Um, which carries us through to the end of that sane as he runs up the stairs for this section . We created some special Sebastian Effect tracks, and these obviously have been routed into their own bus and into the dialogue and the reason why we're keeping this all together in the dialogues. Because when I say that foreign market does purchase the film, having those additional effects tracks will ultimately be redundant. Because the actor they will have to play say, the Japanese suggestion will be of a different voice characteristic than the actor that we have in this scene. And so we've kept those tracks together so that they could be removed together. Now let's just have a listen to these Sebastian Effect tracks, and then again, they start over here. Okay, so this first lot of tracks we used Teoh create a texture also, Teoh, we've added a big fat reverb which makes the sound come out of a dream. space a bit more. It sort of takes into account the physicality and the distance from the character. And so, as we approach way cut to a much cleaner signal, um, so that he becomes way more present. He's not a distant idea, a memory, something that's like seeping into a subconscious, but rather a very, very riel event with a very, very real source sound and playing with this idea. As Charlie runs up the stairs, we can continue to hear him River now. I mean, there is no real physical explanation for this. I mean, you can say that maybe the sound is in the distance and, you know, echoing up the holes. But really, we were more interested in this idea off the sound remaining with him that that he is saying this very, very traumatic thing with the sink effects, as described earlier. These are the sounds which we cut out of the recording. These include things like the doors, which we could listen to buy soloing. Over here, I try and find sounds from the location. And so, if ever possible, you know, try and gain access to wherever they recorded the film and grab as many of those sounds as possible, or if you're brought lucky to be brought on before they start shooting it. Be great to talk to the sound recordist who will be there on the day toe. Ask for any old sound assets, light switches, door handling. They become extremely useful, particularly if they're recorded in the same space where they're depicted in the film. And then over here we have the jewelry dropping sound, which we took straight from the dialogue track. So moving on from the sink effects, we have our mono effects over here. Let's have a little listen to these, and then this has obviously been sent. Okay, here we go. And so, as you can see, these are just a Siris of wood creaks there. The wood creaks appear throughout the film basically gives the building a bit of personality, gives the track a bit of movement on a bit of detail. As you can see, we didn't use any sound effects in this first part of the same. And the reason for that is is that Foley played a very, very big role in the creation off the sound design where we have so many different details . And so I'm gonna play this track with just the Foley to give you a sense off the level of detail and coverage that we would typically give to this. Let's have a listen, - okay ? And so beneath that, let's take a look at these Beiji tracks. Now, these are for the second sane where we go into the room, I think on a more emotional level what the wind sound captures particularly howling wind is loneliness and the feeling off. Being in a desolate situation on Dhere is a boy that's just lost all of his money, Um, and is experiencing a certain level off emotional hollowness. And by choosing these types of holler sounds, um, you know, even if not physically accurate emotionally, I think it speaks to what the character is feeling and how they're reacting. And over here we've also got to room tone tracks we have, uh, which we recorded from Set A room. Tone is a really good way to ground a space, um, end to keep it nice and domestic. And it's that for those reasons, the reasons why we use it there now moving on from that we have our big fat bass track, and I'm not sure if you could hear this through your laptop speakers, but it sounds a little something like this base is typically the hardest frequency range after your lower frequencies that your hardest range to control in any mixing environment, they're typically going to be the sound that gets cut from a lot of smaller domestic speakers or embellished in living rooms that have absurdly overpowered subwoofers or whatever. And so, you know, some restraint is required when using any kind of bass tone, and particularly when you use a sine wave like this, you have the added problems off standing waves. And you know, when certain frequencies in a room collide with one another, they subtract each other, and then you get a big hole in the sound frequency. A good trick when dealing with frequencies like this is to put them through your left and right channels, because I think a lot of what a lot of people don't realize is at the front of the theater of three full range speakers, Um, and so there's this temptation to put everything in the subwoofer, but without really guaranteeing or having any idea how that subwoofer, not knowing how that subwoofer has been calibrated, it's much less riskier to channel those into the left and right speaker and for the majority of this film. And this is exactly what we did and indeed working with the stereo session for the purposes of this class, it's not really that much of a concern because we're rounding those into our left and right anyway. Um, then we have the space tracks. Let's have a listen to these on their own and get a sense of the types of sounds with used and how we've used them. - Way used the sounds to basically ride the tension. You can have a look at these sounds separately in the supplied session to get a even closer look at the session. But let's just talk about things in terms of the emotional built the same. So here way have devastation, and so we just have a big, big turn as the girls Gar this curiosity wants through that door. We have a reveal, and so we crescendo back up with more pressure level, and then, as we go in for the screen because the screaming is so loud and taking up so much of the frequency band. A lot of these space sounds were pulled out of the way to create a bed. And then over here you can see that that emotional line has also been graft in Thea output of the bus starting out strong, dipping down drastically for the big scream and then tapering out, taking us to the end of the same. Okay, so they are all of our tracks in more detail in the next class, we're going to look at some basic editing techniques to get you started. 5. Film Sound Editing: for this next class, we're gonna have a closer look at some of the cool foundations behind sound editing, specifically sinking audio, using cross fades and other fades and layering. As you can see, our affects treks a quite minimal. This is for two reasons. The first is because I guess they weren't that many sound effects events in the same. That would be in a typical off a much larger session. And also because I'm a big believer in specificity. What separates often a good sound design from a not so good one is that every sound has its place and that every sound punches. And early on in my career, you know, I tried to make my sound bigger by adding more and more sounds. But ultimately what that does is it clutters up a track. It removes focus from any defining sound. It creates a bit of a mixing nightmare because now you have lots of sounds or vying for limited frequency bandwidth, and more often than not, you lose a lot of the focus and a lot of the punch. When you layer on sound too thickly, clarity is everything, and every sound you use must have a very, very specific reason why you've used that sound toe ultimately help the story. And here to do that we have our basic sink effects, which we had a look at earlier, which are the door closes and the drop of the jewelry. And then over here we have all about wood creaks beneath that in the Foley tracks. Obviously, the layering becomes a little more intense. But even then you could see that each of these man holding down nurse nurse, too sounds which specifically linked to different events or people in the frame and giving us the freedom to Aziz. They were recorded separate tracks to mix between them and choose where to place the focus . And for this scene all focuses on Sebastian and his screaming. And so, even though a lot of tracks were recorded the way that they were used ultimately to create movement and detail around the course sound. But the focus, the very focus of the same is the sound off Sebastian screaming and therefore everything else sort of took a backseat to that. With regards to sinking audio again, there are many techniques to do this. It's my preference to dropping to greed mode, which when you zoom into a track, which we do by pressing option and using the scroll wheel on your mouse, you see every individual frame off the film. And, sir, in the event of the door close we can by going frame by frame. So that's the frame where the door is closed. I put in a marker by using the enter button on the Apple K board and enter, and then we see the transient off the sound, which is a little bit off, and we move that over until it snaps to give you more freedom, you could move into slip mode, which means the movements off the regions are not dictated by the frames themselves. And so if we sink that up, let's have a little listen a little bit way looking at the types of cross fades and fades that we've used now, each fade serves a specific purpose, and let's take a look at those now. So you out of fade by selecting the area that you would like to fade up or down from and then pressing. Command F brings up this window over here with the fades now if you select standard equal gain, you get these fade options over here and without going into too much detail. The more the incline, the more rapidly the sound goes down. This being the quickest tail down, this being the most gradual. There is the equal power where we can start to use s curves, which start the sound louder and then quickly taper it down. Now there are no rules at all. When using fades, I think a lot of people will tell you that there are role that will give preferences as to certain fades. That is true of certain things. In reality, it's experimentation, which will ultimately dictate the choices you make with feigns. Sometimes you want something to come up really quickly and loudly. Other times you want them to tape it down in either. Which way. It's very good sound practice, even if you're not using an over fade that cuts through a sound to fade all of your regions up and down. And the reason for this is to avoid clipping. Sometimes if you cut a sound off mid sound wave, it can cause a distracting click. And so to avoid that at its best to top and tail all of your effects with a fade, even if it's a tiny one. Okay, so another area of this sound design which demonstrates the use of fades quite well, is down here in all of the space recordings. As you can see, we've got very long fe downs happening there. Which basically is my way of saying that I'd still like to basically here the essence of this sound over here, but without before impact where we leave this totally open. Other sounds just cut slam short because the door close with such a loud sound, it created the perfect opportunity to ditch other sounds beyond a certain point. And that's why that one's been cuts are assured. Here we have an s curve where we want it to be loud because this sound over here was picking up in intensity. That sound goes down and again with specificity. Even though there are so many tracks CEO, you can say that these tracks over here are filling up a whole left behind by these tracks which have all been faded down or stopped. This is a track that filled out like a middle region which is part of the transition between the tracks that we've stopped here on the ones that continue out. And then, as far as what happens by the time we get to the end of the same, there are only really this track remaining at full volume and then these other ones which are fading down. And in this way, so much of the mixing happens in the edit just by choosing what sounds appear when and that so you create is many holes and opportunities for other sounds to be heard. If we were to just play all of these sounds across the entire sane, it would definitely cloud things up, causing the track to be muddy. So let's take a closer look at mixing in the next class, where we will look at Dynamics e que and panning. 6. Film Sound Mixing: So now that we have all of our dialogue and Foley and all of our sound effects lay it up and presented nicely, we now need to start thinking about mixing or the varying volumes, dynamics and spatial relationships of each of those sounds. Dialogue is always king. You always want to have your dialogue loud, intelligible and present and as clean as possible. Fully the human body movements a really good for grounding your character and really emphasizing certain movements. For example, gentle pat on the shoulder in real life may make very little sound. But in a film, if that pat on the shoulder means everything to that character in that moment that will play out as one of the loudest sounds in the film fully allows us to direct the audiences attention it allows us to think about. Like West. Certain sounds coming from gives characters white. That's not to say that we play all the Foley loud all the time or quietly all the time, but there's a lot off mixing potential dynamics potential as to how loud we make those sounds in any given event. In the case of background sounds again, there are very little rules because the same is so intense. We're going to drive a pretty hot Andi, really build, build, build. But then, when we move into the next room, which is a desolate environment where somebody confesses have lost all my money, we take all those sounds away and bring it into a very quiet scene. By doing that, you create intimacy so that every word and every bit of Foley in that space is felt. And therefore we are more connected with our characters. So let's take a little bit of a look at the session again and look at some of the mixing options that we have. Andi, I'll give you guys some basic guides to getting the most study attract through mainly e que and panning sound. Mixing is really all about dynamics, both in terms of the dynamics of the quietest sounds to the loudest sounds, but also in terms of the frequencies you're using and trying to think about sound in terms off low frequencies, your base sounds, your mid frequencies and then your high frequencies, your trouble sounds and ways that we could use a Zeman of that range as possible without cluttering or heavily loading any one area off the our frequency bandwidth. Now, with any mix with dialogue in a dialogue is always king. You really want your dialogue to bay heard up front and present. And so let's just take a look at our dialog tracks again, including the Sebastian tracks. And we'll just solo all of those and listen to how it plays out on its own without effect. My dance. - There's almost no money left, Charlie. Just the houses. Okay, so there are a number of issues which popped up while we just listen to that. Firstly, let's talk about levels. Generally speaking, um, we kind of want the volume to be at the very top off the grain and moving into the yellow. That is a that's on the louder end of a comfortable listening level. The moment your dialogue is hitting up here in the upper oranges or even into the Reds, you're pushing dialogue way too hot, and it will play very, very loudly. So right from the onset, we have a peek straight away. And so let's just audition that sound on its own. This'll speak over here is the sound of her cry and then it's the sound of Sebastian yelling immediate after that, so it by pressing option and minus, we get to see our graph volume graph. So if we zoom in a little bit, we can pull that down by creating a break point on the line and then pulling the volume of that event down a little bit. Let's hear that again. It's a little better. Still a little hot. Maybe. Let's bring it down just a fraction more Well, so I'm pretty happy with that. You could still hear her cry, but it's not, You know, the loudest sound in the entire film. Um, moving right. You can see over here the screaming is pushing our master right to the top. I mean, if the limiter wasn't there, we would probably be eating red. That's a deliberate decision, because this is such a climactic, intense part of the film. And because the next same place so quietly we felt that there was an opportunity there to basically break a couple of rules and just slammed the volume to the roof. You have to be careful when ever doing anything like that to make sure you're not clipping and old and sometimes you know you might be clipping your dialogue bus line. Let's just have a little look. It is hitting all the way up there. So by the time it's crowded back into the master, you're getting a clipped channel that's coming into your master, which we're now bringing down. Now, of course, you know, classic rules would dictate that you would want to prevent that from happening before hitting the master. But for this track, we really embraced distortion. And there are a number of times when we use distortion as a creative tool. Because there is something so repellent about distortion that really pulls us into our states and has us going for I e. Is covering them. And so to highlight that horror in this same particularly decided to embrace the distortion . Not typically, hitting red is okay, provided it's not going to end up on your final track, which will basically be stopped. Tech check for inner being too loud. And the way that we prevent that, of course, is by placing a limit on the track. Now that dialogue is roughly where we want it to bay, we could then go and build the rest of the same and the rest of the sounds of the same around the dialogue. And so again there are no real rules, and different scenes require you to address things differently. You know, if something is music driven, you'll have a very different sound approach to the mix than you know if it was more atmosphere driven or more Foley driven. So let's cut forward and have a look at how we've used busing for mixing. So I've gone through, and I've mixed all of the sink effects effects and foley to roughly accommodate and sit in and around the lines. You'll see where lines are spoken, sound effects dipped down and aware there are other opportunities, such as, uh, when he's running up the stairs. Yeah, where we can play out the sounds, everything in place. You could then grab all of those sounds and reduce their final output. And here we made the decision to lower all of the Foley as he goes into the room. Every element of Foley that you add to a sane is going to give a movement to a track, and we really wanted all of the movement in this same to come from the wind. Which is why, if we go to our wind tracks over here, even though it looks like they're playing quite quietly because they come from a much louder source, they fill up this entire place, which is left wide open for them by bringing our other tracks down and again with the space tracks. Once we went through and decided on the basic volumes of everything, making sure we did down for moments where other sounds and need to feature, such as here at the peak of the door close. We pulled everything out just to give that door close a bit of extra punch because a lot of the sound frequencies from this track, for example, which we just play them. It's a very thick, heavy sound which would have dominated and taken up way too much of the frequency bandwidth for the door, which we really just want to cut through everything and slam because it's a major story point at that point in the sound design and again over here, where you're mixing against the fade, no rules at all. This was cut this way because we kind of wondered to take her away and then in the mix. We then mixed it differently again and then coming out finally, through the final effects bucks. Once we got the basic relationships of all of these volumes to sound a certain way, once we had the instrument tuned the way we wanted it, we then take that instrument and dip it in an out, depending on how we require it both for the story, the different sound events that we want to punch, and also just to carry the emotional line that those tracks take. So once we have all the volumes in roughly where we want them to bay in the track is starting to sound okay. The next thing to consider is panning. That is, whether the track is coming from the left or from the right, or if it's dead center. Now, the general rule panning dialogue is to keep it dead center, in this example, being a stereo track that mains when you pan center, it will come out of both speakers and just to take a look at the pens, you can click over here and select pan, and it gives you align the middle being the centre and then off center on either ways left and right. The only Tommy really penned any of the dialogue was over here as the girls walked to the right of the screen. We also sent their dialogue with Um, This is also true to the Foley off their footsteps, which also followers a very similar path to the left side of the screen. Um, dynamically. How this works is it allows us to move them and their sounds out of the way so that when Charlie approaches and let's have a look at his pan over here, when he approaches from the left of the screen as they are exiting toe one side of the frame than the balance of the shot, the balance of the sound design is picked up on the other side. Let's have a listen to that solid. If you have access to a control surface or a mixing desk, you could also automate your pans or your volume moves by first arming a track setting it to touch um under the way form window over here and then finding the corresponding track on your surface, playing the section that you want to effect on. Then making your moves both with the volume on the hand with Now that we've had a little bit of a look at the basic fundamentals off mixing and panning, I encourage you guys to definitely just experiment with those. I mean, there's no right or wrong answer when it comes to this stuff. Um, it all just depends on the level of realism you're trying to achieve and how you're trying to connect your audience and where. So, lastly, let's take a look at e que. Now the two main reasons to use a que is to correct a problem in a sound. In this way, we take away frequencies that we don't want to hear or, alternatively, to think about the general bandwidth of a sound and what it is that we're taking from a sound. For example, if you only want the rumble from a sound, you get rid of everything else so that you're just left with the frequencies that you want by being selective about the frequencies of H sound. By interrogating every sound and go, why you here? Oh, you're here to create a little bit of glistening or a little bit more base or a bit more mid range than by removing all of the unwanted frequencies from that sound, gives your track more room to breathe and allows you to add more for the purpose of this exercise. We're going to have a look at this line over here, which I think needs little bit of a que help. There's almost no money left, Charlie. Just the houses there now to my ear houses has way too much of what we call civil. It's on DSO. I want to take away some of the frequencies that are creating that problem in the audio. So one way to do this is to select the region and copy and paste it immediately below by pressing control, option, click and drag, and we're going to mute that track. We go to the audio sweet e que And so for this example, we will be using the cue to monitor Plug in. There's almost no money. Let's have a listen. Just the houses. There's almost no money left, Charlie. Just the houses. There's almost no money left, Charlie. Just the three offending frequencies, almost no money left trust, role and just the houses. There's almost no money left Charlie, and that was the Houses. There's almost no money. If you got we click Rendah remembering that are old track is still there if we needed and then we play the same. It's no money left, Charlie just the houses. And that sounds much better to my ear. Of course, you can spend a lot more time on it and get pride into the frequencies and listening to every aspect of it. But is this a rough guide to seek you? That's the basic principle. So now that we've mixed, the tracker were happy with how it sounds. Let's have a look at how to record it back down into a stereo audio file so we could put it back on to the video. Now the easiest way to do this let's just move this out of the way, is to set your in and out points up here by dragging and selecting, um, and that it's just about right. Um, all you can just click on the source video, which will automatically give you your in and out points to be flush with that in the event where you have sounds trailing longer than picture for whatever reason we can just press shift and then extend the out point. Um, all you could just grab it and drag it. Once we've worked out, out, in and out points, we go Teoh file bounce to disk here, we can choose it. File type. Let's go with a for this. Our format whether we want it to be a mono track or multiple monitor, which is two separate audio files left and right or inte leaved, which is one stereo track. The bit depth the sample. Right? Um, I tend to convert during bounce. Um, you can import after bounce, which will bring the track that we're about to bounce out straight into this session are We won't do that here, and then we click bounce. I've set up a folder called Bounced Tracks where we will put all of our recordings. And let's call this like lands sound with the date just so that you can track your progress . Or if you need to go back, you can know which one is the latest from the date that's printed into the track and save. This will commence bouncing. Uh, from this can. Yeah, when you export this way you'll hear the track playing, which will give you the opportunity to hear your mixed down to make sure it's all good while it's bouncing. 7. Final: thank you so much for joining me on this course. There are additional educational resources. I'd love to tell you about designing sound. Dot org's and SoundWorks collection are both brilliant online resources for further learning in film sound for sound effects free sound dot org's offer Our royalty free sound effects to your heart's contentious. Make sure you check the licensing before using it on any are commercial project on? I'm also encourage you to check out soundly, which is a wonderful bit of software which interfaces with other libraries and helps you archive your own. And he's also connected to free sounds Dog. Um, thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to hearing your remixes.