From capturing dialogue on location to adding narration and music, Ben Pitt reveals the best ways to liven up your video project’s soundtrack
Sound is a critical part of video production. We’d argue that it’s even more important than the video. After all, recorded sound without accompanying pictures is common, but moving pictures without sound are virtually non-existent.
The soundtrack can be more complex than the picture, too. Most of the time the picture comprises a rectangular view of a single scene. The soundtrack may contain dialogue, background noises on location, music, sound effects and narration. All these elements need to slot together into a seamless whole.
Sound is also harder to control than light. If you point a camera’s lens in a particular direction it captures the view in that direction. Sound, on the other hand, goes round corners, passes through walls, bounces around and often takes a while to stop reverberating.
It’s easy to concentrate on the picture and completely forget about sound when shooting, especially as most cameras lack a headphone socket. However, give the soundtrack the attention it deserves and the benefits can be dramatic.
RECORDING ON LOCATION
There’s a basic problem with making videos of people talking: the best place for the lens is different to the best place for the microphone. You might position the camera on the other side of the room, perhaps three or four metres away, and zoom in to get the shot you want, but the ability to point a microphone in a specific direction is much more limited.
If you want to record more of the sound you want – such as dialogue – and less of everything else, the best way to do this is to position the microphone close to the sound source. The closer you are, the louder the direct sound, so you can afford to turn down the microphone to reduce the amount of background noise and reverberation. Physically separating the microphone from the camera also eliminates whirs from the lens, general handling noise and your own breathing – a common problem when the camera is held just in front of your face.
Using an external microphone brings its own complications, though. Few digital cameras include a microphone input and even fewer have a headphone output, level meters and a manual volume control to let you monitor and control the recording. Many external microphones are battery powered, so at the very least you need to be able to make sure it hasn’t run out of juice.
A manual volume control is useful to maintain an even volume throughout the recording. Automatic microphone gain means the volume rises and falls automatically depending on how loud the input is, but the downside is that it turns up unwanted background noise in the gaps when no-one is speaking. You’ll generally get better results by setting the volume manually. Just be careful not to overload the input.
If your camera has a microphone input, a lapel microphone, sometimes known as a lavalier microphone, can work well to capture one person speaking. The Audio Technica ATR3350 costs around £20 and has a minijack output ready to plug into a camera. If you’re used to the camera’s on-board microphone, we suspect you’ll be amazed at the difference this cheap microphone will make, simply because it can be positioned nearer to the subject. Pricier, higher-quality microphones are available, but most have XLR outputs, which won’t connect to minijack microphone inputs.
If your camera doesn’t have the necessary sockets or you want to record more than one person, it’s best to use a standalone recorder. Standalone recorder quality tends to be higher than recording directly to a camera. The ability to record 24-bit audio means you can set the level fairly low to ensure that peaks aren’t distorted, but still record with plenty of bits to maintain high-quality sound.
Using a standalone recorder means you’ll need to be careful to press record and stop on both video and audio devices. You’ll also need to sync them up later in your editing software. A hand clap or other clear cue at the start of recordings makes this fairly easy.
A standalone recorder is probably more trouble than it’s worth for casual family videos, but well worth the effort for wedding speeches, business presentations and dramatic productions. They’re available from the likes of Tascam, Olympus, Zoom and Yamaha, with prices starting at £65. Some recorders also include XLR inputs so you can connect professional microphones, but their integrated stereo microphones are usually more than adequate. If you want to record outdoors, look for a model that includes a foam wind shield to cover the microphones. Wind is a big problem for cameras’ integrated microphones, and digital wind noise suppressors are no match for a proper foam wind shield.
Regardless of which type of microphone you use, it’s worth capturing a few sound-only recordings. It’s often useful to edit the video and audio separately, and having a stock of sound recordings to draw on can get you out of a tight spot later. Thirty seconds of background ambience can be used to fill in any gaps, perhaps where the soundtrack for a video clip is spoiled by a random background noise. If there’s music playing where you’re shooting – perhaps at a wedding reception or a festival – it’s useful to have a continuous recording of one or two minutes to use as background music behind a montage of other clips.
EDITING TECHNIQUES
Most editing jobs start with footage, and the sound is tackled later. There are exceptions, such as pop videos or if you’re cutting a montage of clips to music, but as a rule it’s best to get the video into shape first.
When you’re ready to concentrate on the audio, one of the most useful editing techniques is to break the link between a video clip and its audio soundtrack. This is usually available as a right-click command and called Unlink, Break Apart or something similar. From then on you’ll need to be careful to move audio and video together if you want to maintain lip sync. The upside is that you’re free to edit the tracks independently.
One simple trick is to mute or delete the audio component entirely if it’s spoiled by background noise or wind noise, and replace it with another audio recording. This is where the clips you shot especially for sound can come in useful. Failing that, have a sift through your footage to find a clip with a suitable soundtrack, unlink and delete the video and use its soundtrack on a dedicated track on the timeline.
Overlapping and crossfading audio clips is useful to avoid abrupt changes. This technique is often used for videos too, and in most editors adding a video transition also applies a crossfade to audio clips. However, a simple cut often works best for video, while you might want a crossfade for the soundtrack.
Another common editing technique is B-roll cutaway shots. This refers to video shoots where two cameras are used – A and B. Camera A captures the main footage, perhaps of someone being interviewed. Camera B is for the interviewer. Normally the edited video shows whoever is talking, but sometimes the video cuts to the interviewer for a reaction shot. Here, the B-roll shot is often used to mask an edit in the A-roll footage, such as to remove a cough or a long pause. Whereas just chopping a section out of the A-roll footage would result in a disjointed appearance, it’s much easier to join the two soundtracks together seamlessly. Inserting a B-roll cutaway joins over the gap in the video. You probably don’t need the sound for the B-roll clip, so mute (or unlink and delete) its soundtrack element.
An L cut is where the audio and video edit points are a few frames out from each other. It’s sometimes done for practical reasons, such as to avoid cutting off dialogue mid-sentence. At other times it’s used for artistic reasons. Introducing the background sounds from a new scene a few frames before the video can help to transport the viewer smoothly from one scene to another. Similarly, you might start with a disembodied narration, then cut to the shot of the person speaking a couple of seconds later. That way, the viewer is hopefully already engaged in what the person is saying before they appear on camera.
If you need a voiceover without footage of the person speaking, it’s usually easier to record it in front of your editing software. Most editors include a narration function where you simply hit record and speak as you watch the video play back. Turn down your speakers or use headphones to avoid the original soundtrack being recorded at the same time. This won’t be a disaster, but a clean recording means you can shift the narration track around the timeline if necessary. USB headsets give great results, and remove many of the headaches involved in microphone connection and placement.
SETTING THE MOOD
Music can make a huge difference to a video production. The same footage can seem uplifting, melancholic, scary or funny simply through the choice of music, and it can fall flat without any.
In the days of burning home videos to DVDs it was a simple matter of picking something from your CD collection and adding it to the timeline. It’s not so easy now videos are shared online. YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and other video-sharing services use algorithms to identify the music. When a match is found, depending on the licence between the video-hosting site and the music publisher, the video will be blocked, muted or shown with adverts overlaid across it.
The best way to avoid this is to use royalty-free music, which is produced specifically for use in productions. It’s often bundled with consumer editors in the form of SmartSound tracks that are automatically adjusted to fit the length you require. However, there’s usually only a handful to choose from, so it’s rare to find something that’s a great fit for a production.
There’s a world more choice online, however; just search for ‘royalty free’ in music download stores such as iTunes, Amazon and Google Play Music. Throw in some additional search terms such as ‘blues’, ‘uplifting’, ‘Turkish’ or ‘bagpipes’ and you should be able to home in on something suitable.
One handy thing about royalty-free music is that it rarely includes vocals. This helps the music sit in the background and not compete with dialogue. Licences for these libraries are usually for non-commercial use only, although these online music stores aren’t always clear about what’s allowed.
Audio Network (www.audionetwork.com) specialises in royalty-free music, its licences are clearer than those of the sites above and quality is consistently excellent. There’s detailed metadata so you can search for specific things such as ‘sinister slow cello’, ‘angry baby’ or ‘African pet party’. Compositions often include variations so you can use the main track for an introduction and then a stripped-back version – known as a musical bed – elsewhere. Business use (including monetised YouTube videos) costs £120 plus VAT, but a non-commercial licence is just under £1 a track.
Music can help to paint a scene, and so too can sound effects. Some gentle birdsong or the sound of an open fire can be extremely evocative, and they needn’t be loud in the mix to have an effect. In professional productions virtually every sound you hear apart from dialogue is taken from sound libraries or recorded by a dedicated team of Foley artists. There’s no need to go to such extremes for home videos, but for dramatic productions and business videos it can bring a scene to life.
IN THE MIX
As the soundtrack builds up with multiple simultaneous elements, you’ll need to balance their levels carefully. The first step in this process is to reduce the level of each element. Camera soundtracks with automatic gain, as well as music, tend to be recorded at full volume, so combining two or more quickly leads to distortion of the editing software’s audio output. This distortion will appear in exported files, too.
Some editors such as Sony Movie Studio show an audio level meter by default, but in others you’ll need to locate an audio-editing mode to access the full set of audio features. It may be enough to set the volume for each track or audio object, but at other times it can be useful to draw audio envelopes so the volume changes over time. This technique is used to reduce the volume of other sounds when there’s dialogue – a technique known as audio ducking. Corel VideoStudio X8 includes the ability to apply this automatically, but it’s not hard to draw in envelopes manually. It’s best to avoid making the volume jump up and down too enthusiastically. Reduce the volume quickly just before dialogue, but use slower changes when bringing the volume back up again.
Once you’ve got a pleasing balance of the various audio elements, try adding a compressor effect to the master audio output, if your editor allows this. In Sony Movie Studio, you can do this by clicking the Master FX button near the top of the master level meter. Compression smoothes out changes in volume and can help the various elements to gel together. It can also help you achieve a healthy overall volume without going into distortion. The settings can be tricky to get your head around, but these effects come with presets to help you get started.
As with any creative task, video soundtracks can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be. Sometimes simplicity is best, but carefully selecting, placing and mixing elements can make a big difference. If you’ve spent a few hours on the video, it’s worth spending at least an hour raising the soundtrack to the same standard.