Sound Editing (And Sound Editing)

My personal editing journey has not yet come to an end, for the possibly most important part of editing is still missing:

Sound!

When I finished the edit, I again listened into the recordings to see what I could improve upon in the audio clips. The overall sound was extremely low, which was to be expected by the actual script. Also, the static background hiss was comparatively low to what I have already heard on other and previous productions.

So I thought correcting the sound and adding a soundtrack would pose a fairly easy task regarding the fact that I was hitherto able to find most answers to them in the online tutorials on AVID MC.

But alas! Unlike the rest, I was left to my own devices here.

I googled and looked up different video tutorials for two hours straight in order to find solutions or at least recommendations and explanations on how to improve the audio track. All I was given was advertisements for plugins.

So I decided to enter different forums and to look at how others addressed the same issue. Which brought me to the next insight that in these sound editing forums, tech speak is a real thing. I read another hour through threads, trying to find answers that were not requiring a lot of previous knowledge to understand what they meant.

After long, unfruitful and dissatisfying research, I decided to ask our institutional master of tech on how to approach this issue and gained a very helpful first instruction.

I learned how to access the quick access (or 'burger' menu) tile and how to enable waveforms, keyframes and effects and how to increase or decrease the individual clip gain. I also learned how to calibrate my headphones with the calibration tone and how to access the different equalisers on the audio effects menu.

So I started by individually increasing or decreasing the clip gain of my footage. But this also increased the volume of the background hiss and - in case of my film - the sound of rain that was not audible to me or anyone else of the group before.

Which is why I tried applying the Stereo EQ 3 7-Band to a relatively average clip to see what I could achieve with it.

As it turned out: Not much.

I sat for approx. one hour, systematically trying to change the different frequency levels to create an overall acceptable sound. But when I was able to cancel out the background hiss by adapting the high frequency level, other problems would turn up as soon as I changed one of the other frequencies.

The overall sound would either turn extremely base or tinned, sometimes it would sound like watching a film with earplugs or the volume of the rain would increase. Whatever I did, I did not achieve to block out the hiss AND the rain AND clearing up the sound of footsteps, writing, breathing or dialogue.

So I again turned to research in the internet forums in the hope of getting a more profound explanation on the actual equaliser when I was again met by tech speak and decided to downgrade to the next available equaliser which was the Stereo EQ 3 band. With this, I was able to take down the hiss quite a bit, even though I am still disappointed in the overall result. I decided then to let the things I learned sit and simmer in my mind.

MerkenMerkenMerken