When you’re making video content, the audio is just as important as the visuals. This means that even once you get to the editing room, there is still a lot of work left to do with your sound.
If you’re new to video editing, or you’re just looking for advice to improve your audio mixing skills, here are some basic tips to get started.
Room Tone
One important step to audio recording and mixing, is making sure you have sound for the background. Almost no space that you can record in is completely silent, so it’s important to make sure you capture that room tone. Once you’ve recorded room tone, you can either use that to set a background for your audio, or you can try to identify the room tone and silence it as much as possible.
Leveling
Once you have your recorded audio, it’s important to start identifying which sounds are important in your mix. Especially if you have separate audio tracks for different sounds in your shots, you can make important sound tracks louder, and less important ones quieter.
What’s important in sound mixing is that you want to have a variety of volumes and sounds. The more variety you can create, the more interesting and dynamic your sound mix can be. However, you should make your edits with a specific intention, not just for variety's sake. For example, you could bring out the music in a scene and drown out the other audio if your scene was taking place at a concert. This would simulate how loud the music would be for your characters.
Panning
Another way to add variety to your sound mix, is to include panning. This step is less important for videos on social media that people will just listen to on their phones. However, for bigger projects that might be played in theaters, or through studio headphones, panning is an effective tool. Panning allows you to channel sounds more towards the left or right speaker in a stereo sound setup.
In real life we hear sounds from different directions. By placing sounds in different “locations” in the mix, you can create more of a “realistic” listening experience. If a character in your scene is running down the street for example, and a bus passes by them on the left, you can mix your sound of a bus more towards the left so that it sounds more accurate to what we would experience as that character.
Dynamic Editing (Keyframes)
When you’re focusing on the leveling and panning of the sounds in your video, it’s important to remember to edit those sounds over time, and not just change them uniformly for the whole video. When you’re editing almost any aspect of a video, most video editing softwares have “key frames”.
These key frames allow you to change any setting a different amount at different times. This means that if you adjust the volume of a music track, you can make it quieter at the beginning, make it louder for a few seconds, and then make it quieter again. You should take advantage of this dynamic editing ability to craft a sound mix that makes sense for your video.
No matter how simple or complex your video project is, these general tips should help you focus on making more of a dynamic mix for your future videos.
If you have more questions, or want help with your own video or audio project, reach out to our Windwood team here. We’d be happy to help you with your project, no matter what step of the process you’re at!