Close up of audio editing
sjnt
Here's an image of how I usually shorten music. It's a verse taken from the middle. You can see there's no visuals on the timeline, just a couple of attempts at shortening the song. I tend to keep the edits I don't use, in case I decide to vid longer after all. Also, some edits just work better than others, so I can compare them this way, or even export and listen to them a few times and then pick the best. I use the edited and exported version for the vid. The grayed out tracks are turned off, so I can't hear them. The song is Bonfire Heart, and the vid I made is here if you want to hear what it turned out like.
When I match up the sound peaks, I stretch the tracks so they look really big on the screen, so it's easy to see the detail -- even bigger than in this screencap.
Click for bigness -- you might need to scroll to see the notes on the side.
(Bonfire Heart, basic edit, different length fade in/out on each track)
Below is the section of the Venom vid soundtrack where Eddie says, "what are you?" The main track, Suit, has been cut. The bit of Suit where the speech happens has the volume lowered, and each end has a crossfade to ease the transition into the new volume level. The dialogue track from the movie just has a few fades/crossfades, nothing special, except it took time to line it up with the visuals, as I exported the sound and visuals separately. I picked this bit of Suit because it's an instrumental section of the song, so the dialogue isn't fighting with lyrics -- that's mostly what I try to do with added dialogue.
(Venom vid, Suit, with voiceover)
The bit where Venom talks about "eyes, lungs, pancreas" etc, is very similar, but instead of the cut of Suit still being on the track, I shuffled the whole song up the timeline. In other words, there's a gap in the timeline on the main audio track, and there's just the dialogue track in that bit of the vid. The reason that worked so well is because there was a natural break in the song at that point, with a beat of silence, so it was really easy to stop it there and re-start with no issues.
Finally, here's the end of the elevator sequence. This was the hardest audio section of the vid.
(Venom vid, Suit, elevator sequence)
There's a lot going on here. First, the main track, Suit, didn't have a natural pause here, just a break in the lyrics. It's just a cut with a short fade-out. It was okay to be a bit abrupt in the cut that begins this sequence, because that's part of the joke, but ending it was a different matter. Just starting the song up again sounded weird. It needed something to work as a transition. I don't think I was entirely successful in how I did this, by the way, but I basically layered on stuff to make the re-start of the song more dramatic.
I haven't shown the start of this sequence, just the end in the screencap above.
So, under the main track is the excerpt from The Girl From Ipanema. Nothing special with that, just some fading in and out, and picking a bit that sounded like typical elevator music as the first bit that played.
Then there's an elevator sound effect. This is just a free one from my sound files. It's the sound of a door clunking, in that elevator way, and the hum of a motor. There's a fairly strong fade in and volume lowering on this sound effect, so it comes across as fairly mild, even subliminal in the vid. It's meant as an audio cue to help the viewer get that something is going on -- I added this very near the end, because my beta advised me this bit was still somewhat confusing. Yay for betas!
Right after the elevator sound effect, on the same track, is Venom's roar. This was added soundscape to make the re-start of Suit more dramatic and mask that there wasn't a natural break in the song at this point.
The track underneath the elevator sound effect has the "ding" of the door opening. This is from the movie. The track has the volume amped up so that it sounds louder. This was because the ding was quite soft. Everything on this audio track is amplified, and I used it for excerpts from the movie.
Finally, I thought the re-start of the song still sounded weird and needed something more. So I copied a bit of drums from earlier in the song, and pasted it here as a kind of short re-introduction -- "Remember that song you were listening to before? Let me sock you in the ear with it so you remember quickly". Venom's roar helps the drums segue with the re-start of the actual next part of the song.
I'm still learning about effective sound editing, so what I did here was me deliberately pushing myself to see what I could do. What I've taken from all this is that editing audio is actually a lot like editing visuals -- layering helps a lot to achieve the effects you want, and the way you fade things in and out and align sounds on the different tracks can help cue the viewer so they understand what's happening better. This entry was originally posted at https://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/445712.html.