Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Alex from chorus. I'm an artist and a filmmaker, and I've been exploring the potential of sound in my work for over 10 years. This class will be about how to edit sound to make interesting soundscapes that are engaging and support What's happening visually in your films. So we'll be exploring Adobe Audition and go through some of the basics of how to get going with that program. And also some of the really cool presets and effects that are available with this class, you'll start to look at sound and a whole new way. It's really powerful part of film that often gets overlooked because you can't see it. You should take this class if you're interested in audio post-production. If you've got a little experience when that, that's great. If you don't have any, that's fine too. We're going to cover all the basics. If you're an intermediate and you just want to explore thinking about sound in a new way. This class would be great for you too.
2. Your Assignment: the project was Class is to create a 30 to 60 seconds soundscape for a video. Choosing this project will give you the opportunity to really build up your sound in new and interesting way. Instead of just throwing music over the top of a video track, you're gonna be building the sound from the ground up. Now the soundscape will utilize background middle ground and foreground sounds, so you'll be layering multiple sounds on top of one another in order to create a really engaging in complex soundscape. You're soundscape can be a really identifiable place, like a busy bus station or woods. Or it could be a more experimental exploration off space. So as you're considering what sound we should be in your soundscape, think about what sounds are there visually. Think about what sounds might be there but are visually there. Think about what kind of tone needs to be there. Think about how the sound means to be present to support your visuals. Sounds for your soundscape can be in sync with what's happening visually, or they can be out of sync course creative ways that you complain play with viewers expectations by using sounds that are out of sync, so a successful project will demonstrate awareness of the technical considerations that we go over in the class. But it will also demonstrate that you're thinking creatively and that your exploring sounds in any way.
3. Free Resources: So before we get started working with audition, I just wanted to point out some of the free audio resource is that are available to you. There's a really great website. It's free sound dot org's and it's consists of. I don't even know millions and millions of pounds of audio files that are all available for download, and a lot of them are available in the public domain, which means you can use them freely for whatever project you want in any way that you want . So it's a really amazing resource, so you just do a search. We'll just look for brain. And here all the different audio files that people have uploaded show up here on the left. In addition to that, you can you can filter things by whatever license is available. So my favorite option in the probably the most common, um, is the Creative Commons zero, which is basically just means it's in the public domain, and you can use it however you want, um, other options or attribution, which means the, you know, author wants attribution if used in a project attribution noncommercial. That means you can only use it for non commercial projects, etcetera. So I generally use Creative Commons. Oh, option for my work because then I know when I'm collecting the sounds. I know that it's pretty use, no matter what. Don't have to worry about thinking about who you know who made what. So that's generally what I used to the new show. This is a filter that showing up here when I do a search for rain. So now everything on the left here they're all in the public domain, so that's pretty awesome. And then it has this option here to preview your files. So you get a little sense of what's what here you can quickly scroll through. If one catches your eye, you can click on it, and then it gives You can see the way form. You can see information about it, and you gives you the option to down. Now, before we get into that, um, there are some other options for tags for filters that you can use. So if you want toe, you know if you want storm. If you want thunder, you know, maybe there's something more specific, and you want to do a search that includes rain and thunder and the specific license and you got, you know, options that that fall under those tags there. In addition to those tax, there's different types. So without getting into too much detail about the basics of audio, um, I will say that generally you'll see MP threes or wave files. Those are the most common MP threes air compressed there much, so much smaller. They're a lot easier to use. Specially online wave files are a lot bigger, but they run compressed, so they're really high quality. So if you have the opportunity to use away file for editing, that's really what you're gonna want to use. Also, there's options here to select things via sample rate 44 1 and 48 kilohertz. Those are the most common. As you can see here. It doesn't so much matter for us, and our purpose is what we're doing. Generally, I try to use one and stick with it, but Audition is able to transform one into the other pretty much no problem. So it's not so much concern. Same with bit depth. Um, it's all pretty standard and bit rate. One thing to consider channels, so one that means it's a mono channel and two means that stereo. I think stereos probably most common here, and these air packs that have different combos together. So that's free sound dot org's. Another really great resource is archive dot org's and Internet archive archive dot org's has lots of different kinds of media has text, video, audio, all kinds of things. So for our purposes, we're gonna focus on the audio. But if you're ever looking for other things in there in the public domain, this is a really great resource. So everything that's here is available to be used for whatever project you need. So if I click on audio, um, you get you all these different featured options. There's search options, etcetera, etcetera. Not gonna go into this as much because I think free sound dot org's is a little bit more functional for us. But this is also really great resource
4. Adobe Audition Basics: So when you open up Adobe Audition, this is the program layout and you'll see here on the left is a media browser, and here it's it's accessing. My hard drives have shown me some files here that I'm gonna be working with. One thing you can do in the media browser, which is really nice, is you can preview files by hitting play. This audio clip will demonstrate some so you condone test things out before you actually import them. But that is what I want. So I'm gonna double click on it, and it's gonna open up here so you can see the files they'll be showing up here. We only have one so far, but it's here. And then you'll see here in the editor. This is the way form editor, and here is the way form of that clip. So in addition to the way form editor, there's another way to view your audio. And that's the spectral frequency display. So this shows you the frequency of the sounds that you're working with. So this shows just the amplitude of the volume, and this shows the frequencies. So here we've got really low bass sounds and up here. We've got really high trouble. Sounds to some of the controls that you will be dealing with are down here. This is looped playback. Just nice. If you're especially, if you're trying out effects and you're using a short clip, you've got some zoom options here. This zooms into your way form or out this zoom in to part of your clip. So as you can see up here, this is the zoo navigator. So we can navigate through our file. And if you zoom in, you'll see that this section, this highlighted section is what we're working with here. So you condone drag this out to you want to do Mt all the way, You could drag it in. You can drag it across. It's Zoom Navigator is pretty candy. This is the visual amplitude. Control just got here. You might find this in a different place. You can move it where we want. It gets in the way. Really. What it's doing is it's adjusting the volume for you, so you can. Right now, zero db zero decibels means it's just the original sounds. Original volume. If I If I scroll up, you'll see that the way forms getting larger. That means the sound is getting louder. When I do that, suddenly it's louder and resets it. So now we have louder audio. I'm gonna do control the on that. I don't necessarily want to do that, but that's an option for increasing the volume of your A track. You can also select certain sections of the track so you just want this section and make changes to it, such as changing the volume. One important note for using this program and specifically when you're working with the way former editor is that any changes that we make to this file that we've imported, they will be destructive edits. So essentially, if I if I changes, if I upped the volume, were added in effect or something like that and then saved it, then it's actually going to change the original file. That's an important thing. If you only have one copy of something, make sure that you have a backup. You you may change something that you're not pleased with, and then you're stuck with it, so make sure you've got a second copy somewhere. Those are the basics for the layout of Adobe Audition. In the next lesson will be working on cleaning up unwanted noise
5. Noise Reduction Techniques: So I have a few files here that wouldn't play around with to show you some of the noise reduction options. That audition has the 1st 1 I'm going to use this audio cleanup fan, so I'm in a double click and it will show up here in my files box. Then, as you see here on the right, we've got the wave form and the spectral frequency display. So this is a voice track that I have, and here you can see the peaks for the voice. And then back here, these moments of quote unquote silence are actually, as you can see in this spectral frequency, display your full of lots and lots of noise. So we don't want that. We want to clean up everything. All that noise that you can see going through the whole track. So to start off, I'm going to capture a noise print. So this is a nice section right here because there's nothing but the noise. So when I play it back, you hear that noise on its own. So then we'll go up to effects, noise reduction, restoration, capture, noise, print. So now the program has the information about what the noise is ill. De select that control. Ada slept the whole track. And then we'll go up to effects, noise reduction, restoration again. But this time down to noise reduction process. And here we have the noise reduction window. And here we have the noise floor, the lows and the highs. And then we have in green here the threshold for what's being cut out. So right now, quite a bit is being cut out. Causes up to 71%. And we're gonna play around with this a little bit to see what sounds right. So, down here, this is play to play the track. But then this year toggles the effect on and off. So green is on and black is off. So if I turn that off and hit play, so for this vocal track, there's a fan blowing behind me. We hear the original track, and I'll talk all this back on and then play around with the settings here so you can see what it's doing. So we'll be using the noise removal effect in order to clean up the audio and post. So for this vocal track, there's a fan blowing behind me so we'll be using the noise removal effect in order to clean up the audio and post. So for this vocal track, there's a fan blowing behind. So that sounds pretty good. It's not too bad of, ah file. Sometimes you get noise. That's really awful, and it's harder to deal with. But this this is not too bad up here in this range here. It sounds pretty good to me. Um, it didn't sound even too bad up a 100%. But sometimes that would be too much noise reduction, and you end up getting some weird artifact ing. And and so generally, when I'm adding this noise reduction and down here and kind of the 50 to 60 or 70 sometimes even up towards 82 keep it from getting too weird on this end, but also to have enough noise reduction that we're actually getting what we want. So that sounds pretty good to meet. So I'm gonna apply that effect. And now when we play this when we play this back. So for this vocal track, there's a fan blowing behind me. There is no fan, so that's a pretty simple and really useful tool another really great tool in the noise removal camp is using the spectral frequency display. So we're gonna try a different clip here. This this clip a little click and open it. This one has a microwave beeping in it about halfway through here. So I'll play this clip to show you what I'm talking about picking while this alarm goes off and you'll see what we do to really clean. Okay, so that's speech. But then you've got this horrible beeping going on. First of all, I'm going to expand this up because really working with the the spectral frequency display because it might have already noticed that when that beep happens, we've got this really mechanical looking sound that you see all the frequencies of that beep in these like weird lines. So manmade sounds like this are a lot easier to use this method of removal because they aren't as dynamic and as you know, the voice or other natural sounds. So we're gonna go up to the pain, press a paint brush option here, and we are literally going to paint a selection over thes sections, so use the bracket keys. The right bracket increased the size of your selection tool, and I'm going to click and drag. And then again, brackets the left makes a little smaller. And if I click shift the shift key, it will add to my selection. There's too shift again and and I'm gonna use the bracket key, make it a little smaller, starting get pretty small. But we're gonna keep going shift again. I kind of miss that one a little bit. Okay, Pretty good. Not perfect. But you'll get the idea. So now that I have this selection selecting those particular bands of frequencies, I'm going to go up two effects noise reduction and going to goto learn sound model. And this is telling me that next time the sound remover is used, it's going to use this model. That's what we want, something Look, OK, then I'll click off of that selection and go up to always reduction and go to sound remover process and a couple of things that are important here. What you notice probably is that we have a second set of spectral frequency display here, and this is actually the preview editor. So what happens here is everything that we're doing here in the this effect for the sound of little effect is showing up to preview it here. So this is our original clip, and this is the preview clip of the sound remover. So you may have also noticed Click back over to my time selectable that are bands of sound showing up in the original are magically not here. So let's listen. So what we've got Meanwhile, this alarm goes off and you'll see what we can do to really clean it up in post. It's pretty magical. So you may remember those beeps were there and now they're not. There is a little bit of a clicking. I think the vertical lines that correlate somewhat with the beep must be something in that realm. But if you want to get really finicky and picky, you can certainly work on getting those out and not going to for this dental, because I think you get the idea. It's magic, so that sounds really good. You can adjust things here if it's not. If this enhance for speeches not selected and you're working with speech, it can get really weird. So make sure that selected if you're doing about voiceover or some kind of speech, so I'm going to click apply, and now our sound is free of micro beeps
6. Optimizing Vocals -Equalizer: so there are plenty of ways to optimize your vocals in addition to removing noise. And one way that I use a lot is equalizer. So I've opened up the effects rack here, which is next to the media browser and in the effects rack is really a nice way to visually keep track of the effects that you've added to a clip and turn them on and off and adjust them later. So right now we don't have any, But we will in a second here, So I'm gonna go to this window and open up filter, Andy. Cute too. Graphic equaliser. 10 vans now. Right now this opens up on a preset that I made. But when you open it, you're probably open to default. Just no changes. And what I'm gonna do is get this over here so you can see what's happening to our away form. Each of these bands is representative of different sets of frequencies and of our sound. So down here we have the base sounds that are really low all the way up here. We have really high trouble. Sounds as I play through this. I'm gonna I'm gonna play the track and then mess around with these to show you what's happening. So go ahead and play. This audio clip will demonstrate some vocals that we're gonna clean up. I'm gonna be speaking while this alarm goes off and you'll see what we can do to really clean it up with Post its pretty magical it was only a quick will demonstrate some vocals that we're going to clean up. I'm gonna be speaking wall. This alarm goes off and you'll see what we can do to really clean it up with Post its pretty magical this audio clip will demonstrate some vocals that we're going to clean up. I'm gonna be speaking while this alarm. So I think you get the idea what's happening there. Here the lows. As I said, the highs up here, you can hear that the voice exists in a lot of these frequencies, mostly up through here. And so, you know, depending what you want to do, you can push certain sounds up. You can pull them down. I tend to like to cut down some of the really Basie sounds and maybe the really hides its troubles. Um, I made a preset for this particular track. Bitch, I think, works well for it. And again, kind of cutting out some of the muddiness that I had in this track and and bringing some of these higher frequencies up just a little to brighten the sound, So I'll show you before and after here, turn this off. To start this audio clip will demonstrate some and then on vocals that we're going to clean up. I'm going to be speaking while this alarm goes off and you'll see what we can do to really clean it up in post. It's pretty magical, so I hope you can tell if you're wearing headphones, you should be able to tell that sounds a lot brighter. It's not as muddy, it's a little more focused, and that's what I was going for. So I like that. I'm gonna go ahead and keep that on, and now you'll notice that the graphic equaliser that we just created is listed here as our first effect
7. Optimizing Vocals -Compressor: Another effect that I use a lot is compression. Still, go ahead and click on the second track that we have here and go to amplitude and compression is a few different cripple compressor options. I'm gonna go with single band compressor. And what compression does is it brings these moments that peak really high, and it kind of pulls them back to be more in line with the rest the track. So you'll see with this track in particular, When I started to speak, my voice was a bit higher, and then it kind of fell and kind of stayed low throughout. So I don't really want that big peak. And I wanted to be kind of more in sync with the rest of it. So the compressor will help with that. The threshold indicates what volume? The compression starts to work, if that makes it so. Here we are. Um, negative nine. Give 10 somewhere in here if I drag this down to negative 10 that means that anything higher, anything louder than that point is gonna be affected by this compressor and everything below that threshold down here. All of these sounds won't be affected at all. so this you're just gonna just depending What? What is your working on? But today, we'll just try negative 20 or so, just to get to see, just see what that looks like. The ratio is how much that how much that section is affected and brought back down. So wonder one's not going to do anything. So if we bring this up to four, then that's gonna affect that peak a whole lot more. It's gonna take what would be four decibels and bring it down to one. So I'm gonna turn on the preview editor so that you can see what's happening visually. So here we've got our are compressed sound, and here we have the original so you can see right away this peak is way down. It's been pulled way back, and we can even listen to see what that sounds like. This audio clip will demonstrate some, so it's subtle. If I turn this off, I'll play. This is the original before this audio clip will demonstrate, but you you hear how that starts strong and pretty much drops pretty quickly with the compressor on this audio clip will demonstrate some vocals that we're going to clean up. It's much more in line with the rest of the clip. And this may not be perfect. You know, you definitely play with it. Um, maybe you don't want it to be affecting quite as much there. Maybe you, you know, play with it there. Maybe this should be more like two or three. Something in that range tends to work. The attack is how quickly it approaches the compression. And their release is how quickly it drops down from the compression. I don't really mess with these, but it doesn't sound right. You can mess with the attack on the release. I just keep it the same. Usually one thing you might notice is that we've lost a lot of the volume, so we used to have a bit more volume. So what happened? What tends to happen is when you're doing this, you're losing a little bit of the sound. So there's an option here for output gain. So I'm just gonna bring that up a couple decibels and see how that looks. This audio clip will demonstrate some vocals that we're going to clean up. I'm gonna so that looks pretty good. It's about comparable to our original in its amplitude, but now it's It's got those peaks toned down a little bit, so it's a little more in sync with the rest of the clip, so I'm gonna close that effect. And as you can see now, we have our graphic equaliser and are single band compressor. If we go and turn these both off, we can play before this audio clip will demonstrate some vocals that we're gonna clean up. And then, after this audio clip will demonstrate some vocals. So as you can hear, it's it's tighter, it's brighter. It's not as muddy, so these a really subtle changes. But they really do make a big difference in terms of just really good sounding vocals. In addition to some of those changes that I made, there are presets, which I should probably go over us. Let's open these, um, up of the top. This was accustomed setting. There are plenty of presets to play with, so I have one present that I may. That's kind of the basics when I just did. There's all kinds of there's a voiceover option, which isn't too far off from what I had butts, but different. Maybe it would sound better. Looks like they up to the gained a bit more. It's four decibels and send it to so it's a bit louder. Um, we can take a listen to that. This audio clip will demonstrate some that sounds pretty good. I might even use that and said And then also the graphic equaliser that first effect. This also has lots of presets, So those air to really, really valuable tools for optimizing vocals.
8. Multi-track Editing: So far, we've been working exclusively with this way form editor with single tracks. Now we're going to switch gears here and start working with the multi track option. So I click on multi track. It's going to prompt me to create a new multi track session, So well, Spoolname it, um, multi track test. And she's where I wanted to go. That's what I wanted. Um, that asks if you want to use a different template. I'm just going to say none. Sample rate. 4800. That's great. Um, all this looks great. Then my click. OK, and now we're looking at something different set up here we have We still have our files over here, but now we've got a multi track session that's been started and this is it over on the right. So there are multiple tracks here, and we're basically going to be editing sounds together instead of Singley on their own. So if I take that file we were just working with, I can drag it over and you see it pops up. I can put it in whatever track I want. I was put in track one to start, and if you're familiar at all with any other, um, editing software programs like premier. Hi. Movie here. Anything like that. You're probably familiar with multiple tracks. It's the same thing here with audio. So why don't we get some more audio in here? I'm gonna go back to my media browser and start to pick up a couple of We'll pick out some . How about this? Double click on that? Doing that actually opened it up on the way form editor toe edit on its own. Just not really what I want. But it's in my file been here. So what I'm gonna do is click back on a multi track this multi track session by clicking multi track and here I have the wind. So I'm going to drag this over and you see, it shows up here. Um, one thing you also will notice when I'm dragging it over is that big X There is actually a cross fade between the two file, so it's automatically, uh, created if you overlapped the files, which is pretty cool. Otherwise, I'm just playing, putting it under the other track, and then it's gonna tell me that doesn't match, and that's okay. And it's asking me if they if the program can make a copy of the file that will be conformed to the same board. And I do want that. So I'm gonna click, OK? And I don't need to know that every time somebody just gonna say OK, and now it's all set. And as you can see, we've got our vocal track here and we've got this new background wind track. If you look up here in a resume navigation, you'll see that if I drag this over, this truck is a lot longer than our vocals. And since I'm not working on anything in particular here, I'm just gonna zoom out so we can see all of it. And now I can start manipulating these files with these tools up here, or even just manipulating them here in tracks. So what I'm gonna do to start is I'm gonna wait till this red arrow shows up, and I'm going to drag the trim to trim the file all the way down so that it's the same length as our as our vocals because I don't need all the other junk. Now, one thing to keep in mind when you're doing that is there are a few different options that pop up as you hover over this. So this option is for expanding or trimming the track. Just click and drag. But another option that shows up that does the same that looks like it might do the same thing is the stretch. And this actually is changing. It's like a time remapping tool, so it's going to lengthen the audio. So it's taking what used to take up this duration, and it's making it longer for short, so that's not necessarily what I want to do. I just wanted to trim off the end here, so that's an important distinction. Just make sure you know what your which era you've got. So you got some tools up in this upper section here in this toolbar, this first option that selected already even move tool Um, you can just drag and drop as you saw. Um, Then there's me razor tool, which actually will cut edits in your files. So then you could switch over to the move tool and move them around independently. This is a slip tool. So what you can do with a slip tool as you can drag, and you can kind of see that it's it's slipping. It's like it's pulling. No, I can't I can't slip this way because that's the beginning of the track on this side. But I can slip to the left and drag drag this part of the clip over into the part that's actually playing, so that's an option. This is the select trim selection tool, so you can select you know, different parts of your clips that way. Also, there's some important information over here in your tracks. There's your volume, your gain. There's your stereo left, right balance. Generally, I don't mess with that, but you might want to. There's also some personalization options, so if you right click onto this track, you can change the track color, whatever you want and that it's helpful for organizing things. Sometimes. Also, there's this mute, so this mutes the track and it will just play your other tracks. Also, there's the option to solo, so you can so anyone tracks that's helpful when you're editing. If you've got multiple tracks, you just want to hear what this one is sounding like you can solo it. Another option up the top here is snapping. So this is the toggle for snapping, turning it on or off Now. Snapping is when you have a clip and you notice that when I'm dragging this said, it kind of jumps, it'll jump to the play head or it'll jump to the next clip. That's snapping. It's kind of like it had a little gets magnetic and it's clicking up. You can turn that off if you want. It can get irritating with certain edits. Generally, I keep it on because it's helpful. Another important option here that's really easy. These gray boxes, these air actually for fades so you could do a fade in and you can do it linear. You could do a straight. You do a straight fade, or you can kind of pull it up higher to ramp it up where you can slowly ramp up. You know kind of whatever you want, and that's gonna fade the audio up. So, um, I can I'll play this from beginning so you can get a sense what it's doing. This audio clip will demonstrate some vocals so you can hear that stereo wind sound kind of slowly ramping up. That's that fate, and you also could do the same thing for Fade out. You know, however you want to ramp it, that's a pretty cool option. There's also some opportunities to adjust some things here on the track itself. So this is the volume line, so you'll notice that there's a little plus sign that comes up with my Pointer. When I click, it creates a key frame. So that's what that little plus sign is indicating that that's gonna create a key frame if I click on it. So these key frames, if I make a few, then I can drag them up and make adjustments to the audio volume so you'll hear what I'm talking about. Some vocals that we're going to clean up. Let's make it more dramatic, sick near it. But it's be speaking while this alarm goes off and you'll see what we could do to really clean it up in post. So that's just adjusting the volume via key frames so controls you to get rid of those, um, additionally and very similarly, that Pan option is here. So you can pan COMESA wrong with panning from left to right. Um, that's a right pan and left is up, and you can create key frames on that as well. So if you wanted to do a crazy pan from left to right, you could make people dizzy. You can call oops, and you can see when I when I'm rolling over that that it changes to where you can. You can see the little dot that's That means the key frame is selected versus the plus sign , which means it's going to create a new key frame. So that's that's why I just messed up. So creating more. I will do a cookie panning thing. You're wearing your headphones, right? Some vocals that we're gonna clean up. I'm gonna be speaking wall. So that's panning the sound. I don't know if you could even hear it. We should make it more dramatic. Are that probably here? Some vocals that we're going to clean up. I'm gonna be speaking, so that's going to give somebody a headache if you want, but it can be useful, all right? I'm scared them all that stuff. So one last thing that's really important as you're starting to work with this multi track option is that any changes made in the multi track editor are non destructive. So, as I was saying before, we were working with these individual clips that any changes you you saved would be destructive to the original file. That is not the case for the multi track editor.
9. Setting a Tone with Background Sounds: as a filmmaker, I am really thinking about sound and its relationship to image a lot of the time. So my approach to this this program is is to work with video and audio together. So what we're gonna do is import a video. So I'm gonna select this and you'll notice that when I import that video, we get that it contains only video, and it cannot be edited. So this is just a editor here, and so we need to start a new multi track session. So I'm going to right click on that video and to insert into multi track new multi track session, we'll put in my title backgrounds, make sure it's gonna be where I wanted to be. It is, and then click. OK, so now we've got a new multi track session. But instead of just audio tracks, we're looking here. We've got a video clip now you can't see it and and might be used to seeing it in video editing programs. But since we're focusing on the audio, it's really not the focus here, but you'll notice up the top here. There's a few different workspace templates, and if I click, edit audio to video. It offers me a little video preview box that's really helpful for editing any audio to your video, though this demonstration is really all about making sound a character on that. I like to think about sound and its role in what's going on video and not just think about it as an afterthought. So we're gonna think of it as a character as something that needs to be treated as importantly at the subject or something that's going on visually. So I'll play the clip that we have here. It's just a simple, long take of the sky walking, and it really could be a lot of different things. It could be for boating. It could be quiet. It could be, really just focus on the space and what, you know, amplifying what this particular workspace. Maybe it's mechanical in nature. Maybe it's office, like in nature. I don't know. It could be a lot of things. It's really open ended. Why is there smoke and light at the end? There's lots of question marks, and when you don't have any sound, there's a lot of possibility for that video to take shape with sound. So What we're gonna do is we're gonna place different background sounds over this video, and it's going to really simple just we're just talking about a background sound. I'm gonna worry about what his footsteps are or what vocals there might be. It's really just gonna focus in the background. So I'm gonna go to my media browser here, and I'm gonna go through ambience. This is a pretty basic sort of poor champions, kind of not much of anything, but we're gonna start there. So if I go back to my multi track session, not the mixer, the multi track session, I'm gonna take that ambience that I just that file I just imported from the dragon over here and place it under the video. So again, it's a lot longer than my video. So I'm just going to trim the send because we don't need to deal with it. Okay, so now suddenly our video has a location. This is a really subtle change. We go from absolute silence to now there's a presence, says room presence. So room presence is just the basic sound of the room without anything going on. So if you stop by stop talking. The room that I'm sitting in has a certain presence to it. Big room sound ahead of echoey and big little rooms found little. So, you know, it really could do a lot just the room presence to affect what's happening. That would be one example of part of this this project that you're going to do now. I want to try something a little more dynamic. So here I have a sound of an alarm clock ticking. So we'll bring that in, and I'm gonna solo this one and we'll play that and see how that sounds. So that's a little maybe more urgent, still really subtle. But it has a little bit of an urgency to it, since its sound of a clock ticking. You're aware of the time passing, so that's setting a certain tone. Let's see what else we can do here. Let's try stereo wind and I'm gonna solo this track. So that has much more on, uh, David Lynch. She and kind of freaky. Something bad is about to happen. Sense to it. Let's try 1/4 option. Have got the sound of a thunderstorm I can bring in again. I'm going solo this one. So again kind of dark? Um, they'll have. I guess I'm picking up on the kind of darkness of the tone of the imagery here in the color . But each of these options has very different tone, so they all make it really big difference. And this is just one background sound, but it really points everything in the direction of where you want to go.
10. Audio FX to Enhance Mood: Once you've decided the mood or the tone of the project and how the sound needs to facilitate that tone, you have a kind of, Ah, a road map, if you will, where you could go. So since I'm using this clip, that's kind of moody. I'm just going to go with that. And so I've chosen a few different, um, sound options to go with it anywhere from ambience to the alarm clock to some wind and a thunderstorm. And what I'm gonna do now is show you some basic audio effects that can that you can use to manipulate your sounds to kind of push or pull whatever that tone is that you have for your project. I'm gonna solo this alarm clock track and let's listen to that again. It's pretty quiet. So I'm gonna turn up the amplitude a little. That's better. And I'm gonna play around with some effects. So one thing right now I have the track, the entire track selected, which at this point, the entire track is just this clip. If I go up to the effects rack, there's two options here. Now that we're working with this multi track editor, there's clip effects for specific clips, and there's track effects that affect entire tracts. So in this instance, attract effect and clip clip effect would be essentially same thing because I only have one clip in each track. But once you start to have bigger edits, this becomes really important distinction. So this point, we'll just keep it with clip effects because I'm just gonna be using them on individual clips. I'm gonna bring in one more option here for a background sound. That's the sound of this woman's voice. So I'll drag it into this last track here, and I'm gonna solo it so you can hear what it sounds like. No, that's not me humming, but it's somebody humming a creepy tune. So this will be a good one to demonstrate some of the effects that work better with vocals . So I'm gonna click over here on the effects rack again. My clip effects is selected for this clip, and I'm gonna click here to expand and select Echo, and I will go ahead and play that mm, so just gives it kind of haunting feeling, so I'll go ahead and keep that to know that track that specific clip in that track. Rather has this echo effect. Another effect that I think is pretty cool is the chorus effect. So first I'm gonna turn this one off, and I'm gonna go ahead and find the chorus. It's under modulation and then chorus and again go ahead and play that right now, it says, it's two voices. That's like 10. So now it sounds like we have a group of people humming or one person humming kind of over that, their own recordings. So go ahead to keep. That's kind of fun. And then I have this echo in here to know. Not sure all that's going to sound, but we'll turn that on their both on, and we'll play it from the beginning. Strange might not be my first choice. One more effect that I like a lot is reverb. So go ahead and turn those two off select reverb, and we'll just do studio re herb. So go ahead and play. Um, this this that little subtler. It just gives you a sense that there's a little more room presence that's almost like it has a little more warmth. So if I increase the room size mm that richness. Okay, That kind of gives me the sort of distant, far off feeling that I want. So I'm gonna go ahead and keep that and again, we'll see what it sounds like with all three. I'm not even sure how that's gonna work. And if I just start with the echo and add the others or to start with zero nothing and will add model one of the time so you can hear how each of those effects is slightly changing what we're working with. And it's definitely upping the creepy factor. Another effect is shifting the pitch. So I'm gonna go ahead and and de select that solo and switch back to the alarm clock and so low that so when I click on that clip, then under clip effects, you see that we don't have any effects on that one yet. I'm gonna go ahead and select pitch shifter, and I'll go ahead and play the clip as it is, and then if we lower the pitch, it's a heavier click even more, and you can shift the pitch up. But that's a nice option. It also works well for well, depending what you want to do for vocals. There are some presets here as well. Um, you might angry, durable. That's really, really fast or high pitched. Rather. And the Dark Lord, as you might example, might imagine is the preset for the lowest setting. So that'll turn. Your vocals do pretty demonic pretty fast. This one other effect that I want to show you that's using the equalizer again. So we'll go ahead and turn these three off for our humming clip and go ahead and add We're gonna go back to the e que that the equalizer that we were using before. And instead of vocal clarity, I'm gonna play around with some other presets that I have. So I have a preset for underwater sounds, so I'll turn this off so you can play here it. Then we'll add this so it muffles. You know pretty much is just expanding these lower frequencies and cutting all the higher frequencies. And I have another preset for kind of outer space or telephone, and this one is cutting out. You know, all those deep bases, and it's just keeping some of these higher frequencies so you can really play around with that. This doesn't just have to be for optimizing your vocals. This could also be for adding cool effects
11. Exporting to/from Premier Pro: One thing that's really handy about working with creative cloud applications is how streamlined they are. So here I am in Premiere Pro, and I have a sequence that I'd like to work on an adobe audition. So what I'm going to do in order to do that is go up to edit, edited in Adobe Audition, and it gives me two options. Right now, I can only select sequence because I have the whole sequence selected as opposed to a single clip. But you can at its single clips if you prefer. But I'm gonna select sequence and it brings up this dialog box for a title location asked you if you want to send the entire sequence, which I do and then an option for video. So it might be said to none. If it is switching to send through dynamic link that will you be able to reference your video as you're doing your audio at its an audition? One last consideration here is this check box open an audition. So this is gonna open our new sequence up in the program. We want that. So I'm going to click. OK, so as you can see, it's processing, and it brings us right over to audition and opens up for us. So here is our sequence that we just had in Premiere. As you can see, this is V one. This is our video track. There's no cuts or anything. It's just just one video track, because we're gonna be focusing on the audio. And as you can see, all of the edits that I made in Premier are still intact in the audio here. So it's a really streamlined process and very, very handy to edit your audio in a more robust program, then, premier, once you have made your changes to your file, this process of sending it back to premier is equally easy. All you do to do that is go up to multi track export to Adobe premiere again. File name, location, sample rate. The options that really matter here are export each track as stem or mixed down session, too, a mono stereo or 5.1 surround file. So for export, each track is stem. It's going to export each of our tracks separately, so you'd still be able to move them around independently. So in this case, there's two audio tracks or three all your tax. Rather, each of them would be exported separately if you select export track as stem. If you select mixed down session, too. In this case, I would like to stereo file, because that's when I'm usually use. That means that all three of these tracks that we have will be mixed down to one track. Everything will be, since we've already mixed it till levels that we want. In theory, they'll all shock as one master track, and that's what I want to do. At this point, when you're working on your video clip with three separate backgrounds, you'll probably want to export each track its stem and then solo each of track separately as you export your video. But for your final project for your soundscape. Once you've decided exactly what you want, you want to mix the session down to a stereo file to export it. So we'll do that now and you'll see how quickly it is. It jumps open and premier almost instantly, and then this dialog box shows up, asking if we want to copy it to a new audio track. You can select different tracks if you prefer I'm just gonna keep it on new audio track and click OK, it's going to throw the track into whatever sequence that's open, so make sure it's the right sequence that you're working with. Now. If I scroll down here, you can see our new master track That just shows up there. So all you have to now is so low it and all of the old information won't be present, and you'll just have your nice, new mastered track.
12. Soundscape Demo: for this lesson. I'll be walking you through how I approached my soundscape and how I used audition to manipulate and enhance my sounds. First of all, I've imported my sequence from Premier Pro. So let's watch the initial edits from before working on it in audition. And I'll go through my thought processes regarding the sound choice and the placement. So the video starts with that shot of the cassette tape, and I thought it would be funny to include some digital sounds that sound almost like a tape rewinding. Then I repeated the sound and the video of this light going to make it look like it was flickering. And it's almost as if the light somebody turned the light on and this guy walked into the room. So then so these mechanical sounds that I found I found on free sound dot org's and I just thought they were kind of interesting, and the space just felt kind of strange and industrial, So I ended up choosing this sound. Don't even know what it was initially, but I love doing that. I love choosing sounds that are strange and and unusual and putting them in places you wouldn't expect so another mechanical sound here, and I don't even know what this was. But it comes in right at that moment when the light hits him as he's walking through the doorway. That's always really satisfying for me, really using the sound to build to something that's happening visually, even though it's not even something that really matters. I mean, we've basically taken a clip of a guy walking through a room, and we've turned it into an epic event. And then here the light bleaches out the image, and it light bulb kind of fades out. So as I'm approaching a project like this, I don't think specifically about background middle ground and foreground, as if I have to have three sounds at any one time. But I think it is a valuable way to approach more generally how you're producing. You're sound What what sounds can you combine to make them more dynamic and more interesting? So here at the end of the video, we have, um, we have this mechanical build and then we have the lightbulb sound. Oops. They end up sounding like they're one sound. If you don't really think about it when you pick it apart, you realize there's a lot of layers there, and those layers give death. So that's why your project is to include background, middle ground and foreground sounds, because it really wants you to be thinking about how the layer things and to draw out meaning from the sound. In another sequence here I have the edited sequence that I edited in Audition. So since the same video clip and the same source files, but you can see now the little effects icon has shown up on some of these clips because I have applied effects all so low each of these clips and do a before and after, so you can hear the changes that I made to them. So to begin, uh, let's so low this track and I'll go upto are effects rack and you can see that I've adds, added some amplification to this track. It's track if X is selected, and I didn't go over amplification yet, but really, all it is is if you go to if extract amplitude and compression amplify and all that is an option to increase or decrease the volume, so that's I just increase the volume on that those first couple of clips, So I'll play the before in the after. So really just brought the volume up in the next clip here. I don't have a track effect, but I have a clip effect. I have added amplification to this one as well and as well as the graphic Equaliser. So let me play before turn those effects off and after. That's pretty significant shift. If I open up the graphic equalizer, you can see all these bass sounds. All these based frequencies have really been pushed up, and all the trouble has been pretty much knocked out. So that brings a lot of depth to that sound. This sound here. I'll play before and after amplification and the graphic equalizer. So for this one, the graphic equaliser a little bit different. Um, I really focus on the mid range frequencies and finally I added an echo, uh, just gives a little something to hang onto for that sound, which I think is nice. And for this clip again, I added some amplification and some graphic equaliser. I'll turn those both off and cabinet again, adding a lot of death here. It's all over the place, but I just really was playing sliders until I got a sound that I liked. I do that a lot. That's it's a fun way to approach sounds cause you you'll find things that you didn't expect when you do that. So let's watch the video with the new sounds. - So by editing these files an audition I was able to adjust the levels but also bring out a richer, more dynamic sound. Another tool that might be helpful for you as your mixing. Your sound is the mixer, which we haven't covered yet, so the mixer shows all of your tracks separately, and it you can adjust the volume of each each of your tracks. So here we've got 1234 tracks, and here they show up 1234 So it's a slightly different layout, but it's a really handy way to see where your audio is coming from in terms of volume, and I'll show you what I'm talking about here. As I said, these are the tracks. And then over here, this is your master track. So this is going to show the volume for all of your tracks put together so That's track one trying to three. So it's a really great visual guy to show you kind of where your levels are at and what you might need to tweak and just a note about audio levels. If it isn't already obvious, the levels as they approached zero start to break down. So if you're levels peak at zero, you're you're going to start having some distortion, and it's going to sound really awful. So as one final step in your post production process, it's a wise idea to use a limiter. So if I go back to our sequence, this track here is our master track. So as you were as I pointed out, here are master shows the volume. It's sort of collects all the information on the other tracks and displays it here. So that's what your master track is. So anytime I add an effect to the master track, it's going to be affecting everything here. So if I go to the effects rack and go to the master track, you'll see that I have so make sure you on track effects. You'll see that I have a hard limiter on the master and if I open that up. You'll see that this window comes up for the hard limiter, and what I've done is I've listed the maximum amplitude to minus three DB because I don't want it to approach zero. I don't want it to go beyond minus three. And there are. There's not really a standard for the Internet. There are different production standards. DVDs limit to minus six. I tend to just do minus three. Sometimes people will limited minus 0.1. There's not really standard for the Internet, but it's a good idea to least avoid maxing out and zero.
13. Closing Thoughts: So now that I've shown you my workflow and a lot of the effects that I use for my projects , I hope you have a better sense of how to use the program and what possibilities air out there for using sound in a more complex and interesting way than just throwing music over your tracks. Now it's your turn. I look forward to seeing what you come up with for your final projects, and I look forward to checking out all the audio links that you find to share with the community. I've really enjoyed teaching this class, and I hope you've enjoyed learning how to build an immersive soundscape in Adobe Audition Creative Cloud.
L. Ashwyn Corris, Artist and Filmmaker
