Sound Editing

Earlier in this book, we mentioned that sound is commonly considered to be 50 percent of a film. This may sound like an exaggeration to you, but once you start editing audio for your film, you’ll quickly see that it’s not. Sound can add emotional depth to a scene,

clarify elements of the story, and make special effects and cheated shots pass the viewer’s eye without raising any questions. Whether your project is a narrative feature film, a documentary, a corporate video, a commercial, or an animated short, sound editing is one of the most creative parts of the process of finishing a project.

In the course of editing your video, you’ve already done a lot of sound and dialogue editing, but as you probably discovered, things don’t always go as planned when shooting. You might have encountered problem areas such as inaudible dialogue, unwanted extra sounds, dropouts, or inconsistent audio quality. And, of course, you probably didn’t add any sound effects, unless they were essential to your picture editing (for example, matching action to a particular piece of music or sound effect).

Sound editing is the process of cleaning up all the mistakes and problems in the sound track, adding music, sound effects, and any re-recorded dialogue, and mixing and equalizing the whole thing so that it sounds as good as it possibly can.

Your editing software probably has pretty good sound editing tools, multi-track mixing capabilities, equalization, and a selection of special effects filters for altering the sound of your audio. These features often take the place of what once required huge rooms full of equipment and engineers. However, as with video editing, there are times when you still might need to use a professional audio suite to get higher fidelity sound, output a high-end master, or to enlist the services of a trained professional.

Sounding Off

If your video image is greatly degraded, it’s possible that you can pass off such a flaw as an intentional style, but bad-sounding audio will quickly result in a frustrated, bored audience that most likely won’t be able to follow your story.

Good sound editing strengthens the effect of each video edit. A few simple sound effects can ease the transition between pieces of audio shot at different times or at different locations.

Sound—whether sound effects, music, or sometimes silence—can add to, or completely create, the emotional impact in a scene. Can you imagine the shower scene in Psycho without the screeching violins? Or the shark in Jaws without the rumbling bass notes? And, of course, just try to imagine a sad scene of emotional confession without a sweet, heart-tugging swell of strings beneath it.

Music is often the most obvious sound effect, and we’re all familiar with the experience of music providing important pieces of information. For example, a car drives up, a person we’ve never seen gets out, and the music suddenly becomes very ominous. Cut circus music into the same scene, and the audience will know this is a very different type of story.

318 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

Music is also used to set tone or atmosphere. If you had the opportunity to see one of the early director’s cuts of Blade Runner, you saw a movie with an orchestral score, rather than Vangelis’s synthesized score. As compelling as the visuals in Blade Runner are, laying orchestral music beneath them created an atmosphere that was not as effective.

Sometimes, the musical score carries all of the dramatic pacing in a scene. Try watching the last few minutes of Jurassic Park with the sound turned down. (This works especially well if you’ve never seen the movie.) You might be very surprised to realize the movie doesn’t really have a strong ending without the musical score. If you don’t remember the movie, the ending goes something like this: chased by a giant T-rex, the heroes race to get inside a building. The character played by Sam Neil tosses off a one-liner as they run inside, and the film cuts to a sweeping shot of the island as they escape by helicopter across the ocean. There’s no giant explosion or climactic death of the T-rex—the actors simply run into a building and close the door. However, at the exact moment that they reach the door, the music swells to a crescendo, making it feel like a satisfying conclusion, and Sam Neil’s little joke as icing on the cake.

When you think of sound effects, you often think of special effect types of sounds such as laser blasts or explosions. However, most of the time, your sound effects will be incredibly normal, everyday sounds. As with music, sound effects can often be used to increase the emotional intensity of a scene. Imagine a scene you’ve probably watched dozens of times: our hero is preoccupied as a villain sneaks into the room, slowly raises a gun, cocks the trigger, and prepares to fire. Next time you watch such a scene, pay attention to just how loud that triggercocking sound is. Would the scene carry as much impact without the help of this sound effect?

These types of augmented sounds can add a tremendous amount of drama to a scene, and they’re a great way to guide the audience through a quieter, dialogue-free scene.

Finally, good sound editing can often be used to “dress” a set to make it more believable. If you cut to a shot like the one shown in Figure 5.11 and throw in echoing ambient sounds of Arabic crowd noise, a faraway steamship horn, and some Middle-Eastern music, your audience will believe that your location really is somewhere in the Middle East.

Like picture editing, the full importance of sound editing can be something that’s very easy to overlook. In the rest of this chapter, we’ll cover the types of equipment and software you’ll need for good sound editing, provide tips for editing sound effects, ambience, dialogue, and music, and cover the basics of filters, equalization, and temporary mixes.

Setting Up

Before you begin any sound editing, you need to determine what types of sounds you’ll need. Your sound editing process should begin with a screening of the final locked cut of your project. Ideally, you’ll want to have your director, editor, sound editor, and music supervisor present at the screening. Your goal is to determine just what sound edits and effects will need to be created or acquired.

For every scene, you’ll need to identify problems, necessary sound effects, and how and where your musical track (if any) will be edited into the scene. This process of watching, assessing, and listing your sound requirements is called spotting.

Next, your editor or sound editor will need to prepare your project file—the file you’ve been editing using your editing software—for sound editing. Presumably, you already have a few tracks from your original camera audio. You might have some additional tracks if you performed any preliminary audio editing or special effects work when you were editing for picture. You’ll want an additional stereo pair for your music, and another track for special effects. Finally, you might want still another track for ambient rumble tracks that will be used to smooth the transitions between different sounds and locations. Typically, you’ll have a minimum of eight tracks. For projects with simpler audio editing needs, such as those that rely heavily on narration, it’s best to stick with eight tracks (or less). This is an easy number to manage and most editing applications are capable of real-time playback of eight tracks so you can avoid needless rendering.

By the time you’re finished, you might have created many, many more tracks. Depending on how you will output your final project, these tracks will be mixed down to just a few tracks, a process we will detail in Chapter 18, “Finishing.”

After the spotting session, you should have a better idea of what type of work lies ahead, and you can start thinking about what type of equipment and software you’ll need to perform your audio edit.

Temp Mixes

It used to be that the “mix” was one of the last steps in the postproduction process, but nowadays mixing is something that starts during the editing of the video, gets built on during the editing of the sound, and then gets polished at the end in the final mix. The final mix is specific to the type of product you are creating—feature film, TV spot, Blu-ray release, and so on—and we discuss the varieties of final mixes in Chapter 18. But long before you get to that stage, you’ll need to do a temp mix.

Mixing simply means setting the levels of the various sounds in your edited sequence and adding fades and equalization if necessary. Back when films were edited on film, the corresponding sound was edited on synchronized magnetic audiotape, or “mag.” Film editing flatbeds typically only had room for two mag tracks and the volume could be controlled separately. Usually, one was used for dialogue and the other for music and effects. The sounds that accompanied many rough cuts prior to the late 1980s were very limited as a result.

Today, things are very different. Picture editors are expected to do a rough mix using their editing software in order to make their rough cuts better for screening purposes. They typically arrange the sounds across eight tracks and set the levels, add fades, and even basic equalization if needed. This process is called a “temp mix.” By the time the sound editor gets to work on it, the mix should be decent. Since setting the levels for all of the sounds in your piece takes a long time, this saves the sound editor a lot of time. The sound editor continues to adjust levels to new sounds added to the piece as he works so that the mix continues to sound good. The goal of a temp mix is that at any time the project can be screened or output as a work-in-progress. By the time you get to the final mix, the mixer usually doesn’t need to remix the entire project from scratch—instead, he will use the temp mix as a starting point and adjust levels on an as-needed basis.