Audio Advice: Traveling Sounds

You know the game: name five things you would take if stranded on a desert island. Now, before you name a cell phone, matches, and a case of your favorite beverage, let's twist the game a bit and decide on five audio tools that no video editor can be without, whether you're stranded on a desert island or a Dallas airport. The premise may sound a bit silly, but think about it. You won't always edit in your nice, cushy edit suite. In fact, one day you may find yourself frantically slashing video on an airplane or in the back seat of a car. You won't have all your fancy plug-ins or decent speakers to monitor your audio with. Should you find yourself in such a situation, you'll be glad you mastered these five essential tools.

Normalization

Probably the most important audio tool in your kit, normalizing analyzes the audio in a video clip and boosts the volume so the peaks are at maximum volume. This indispensable process ensures all your audio clips will play back at their full potential. Every video platform is different, but the procedure usually involves selecting the clip, and then choosing the Normalize option. Unless your original audio was pretty loud during recording, the Normalize process will apply some boost -- sometimes quite a bit -- resulting in a nice, loud clip that can compete with other audio elements in your project. Tip: when normalizing interview audio, import longer clips and apply normalization to the entire clip before slicing it into smaller chunks. Since the normalization will stay with each edit, you can do it once instead of dozens of times. Regardless of the audio you're normalizing, you may have to manually tweak the settings to get things just right.