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Editing: Editing from Start to Finish, Part 4 of 4

We've made it to the home stretch! This is the last installment of our four-part overview of the steps needed to complete a typical editing project. This month, we'll finalize our audio track and get our program ready for public viewing. We'll also talk about what you can do when you finish one project to make your next project easier.

Our family tribute video example is almost finished. We've logged, captured, edited and built the video portion of our timeline, including everything from transitions to titles. So what's left?

We'll make one final pass to add a little extra something to our project, something that can take a good program and make it great. We call this audio sweetening. We'll tweak and adjust, adding little sonic touches that can make your soundtrack stand out and really sparkle. Sweetening includes applying effects such as compression, normalization or possibly reverb to your existing soundtracks as well as the addition of sound effects and other audio enhancements. In most video projects, dialog is critically important to the story or message. So first up, let's take a look at some techniques that can help clarify dialog and speech.

Unless all your footage comes from the same source and the same setup, the audio levels you've recorded will probably vary greatly from clip to clip. If you want the audience to hear these clips clearly, spending some time adjusting the audio levels of your clips so that they're more or less consistent is a good first step in sweetening. You can manually do this using your ears and the audio meter in your software or you can use a filter to process your entire audio stream so that it sounds more consistent.

Compression and normalization are two of the most common software processes used on spoken content and indeed much of modern popular music. Compression is a process where we lower or reduce the dynamic range of the audio, which is the difference between the softest and loudest parts of track. Essentially, it makes the softer sounds louder, while making louder sounds softer. This leaves you with a more consistent track. We'd recommend being cautious about using too much compression, however, as you'll sometimes want your actors to whisper their lines and at other times shout, but for parts like the voice-over narration, compression is almost a required process.

Normalization is a variant of compression, where the dynamic range is not only compressed, but after compression is applied, the volume is turned up to a maximum. Applied to a well-recorded track with a solid signal-to-noise ratio and no unwanted background sounds, normalization can yield an excellent result for helping sonic elements like narration stand out in your videos.

The problem is that if your initial track isn't clean, the normalization process will take your noisy background and normalize it along with the speech you're trying to enhance. The result can be an even noisier track than one without normalization. If the recording is good, a modest amount of compression will often make it sound better. But if you discover, after applying compression, that you've managed to enhance elements of your soundtrack that are annoying, you can back off.

There are two other digital enhancements that are commonly used by professionals to sweeten the mix. The first is equalization or EQ. This is where you bring up the bass a bit to warm the audio up or perhaps bring down the high trebles to get rid of a nasty hiss. EQ is technically easy to use, but it takes a real artist to get it right. The second tweak is reverb. This filter effect can add space to your mix and even give a sense of stereo separation to a monophonic recording. In both cases, but especially with reverb, use restraint and concentrate on consistency first. Applying reverb to one clip and not another can make them sound as if they were recorded in two different locations.